Season 9: Champions
Event begins on
...
Season 9 of Overwatch 2 completely overhauls Competitive, rebalances all health pools across all heroes, and to top it all off, introduces two new game modes: Hero Mastery: Gauntlet, a 3-player co-op tower defense experience, and a limited-time horror-themed event mode: Cosmic Crisis.
Reworked Competitive
Rank update card removal revealed at Blizzcon 2023 | Courtesy: Blizzard Entertainment
As revealed during Blizzcon 2023, Competitive is being completely overhauled. Instead of requiring a certain number of wins or losses before revealing updates to rank, rank will now be updated after every match. To alleviate player frustration and lack of understanding as to why their rank is changing the way it does, each rank update will also include modifiers which contributed significantly to the amount of rank earned or lost.
Rank Modifier information | Courtesy: Blizzard Entertainment
Players can also look forward to grinding for a new rank: Champion, which is an entirely new rank above the previously highest rank, Grandmaster. Before grinding for this new rank, however, players will have their ranks soft-reset as part of a (presumably annual) rank reset and will need to complete ten Placement Matches to earn their new rank.
Core Gameplay Changes
In Season 9, the Overwatch development aims to address long-standing issues with the game, including making weapons and abilities more consistent to land on opponents, lowering the impact of burst damage to allow for counterplay, and rebalancing healing and damage to lessen the frequency and duration of stalemated team fights.
To address the first goal of making it more consistent to land weapon shots and abilities, projectiles (including hitscan) are increasing in size in Season 9. Exact details can be found in the summary image below, and the developers intend to include compensatory balance changes for heroes who do not benefit from this projectile size change.
Regarding burst damage, the development team intend to address this issue by increasing the base health of all heroes. Specifically, heroes below 200 HP will gain 25 HP in Season 9, heroes with 200 to 300 HP will gain 50 HP, and tanks will gain 75-100 HP, depending on the hero. The net result is that most heroes will need to land more of their weapon shots or abilities to eliminate an opponent.
Finally, the support passive of out-of-combat healing is being shifted to a global passive for all heroes, and the support passive will be updated to simply reduce the time out-of-combat until self-healing begins. In conjunction with this new global passive, Damage heroes will now reduce the healing received by targets of their fire by 20% to reduce the effectiveness of healing in-combat and clarify the role of Damage heroes in a teamfight.
More information: