Overwatch 2 Beta Finishes Its First Week With Highlights To Share Including Symmetra, Mercy, And Junker Queen Changes

While still in beta, Overwatch 2 is moving forward, squashing bugs, listening to player feedback, and getting ready for the mid-cycle patch. The main focus today, however, will be on Mercy and Symmetra changes and thoughts on Junker Queen, so without further adieu, let’s jump into it.

Mercy has been around since the beginning of Overwatch, a Guardian Angel dealing out heals and resurrections to protect her team. Some players discovered a “super jump” ability in Mercy that is, while helpful, completely unintentional and was actually a part of a bug that players used to their advantage. Now, don’t worry, the feature isn't going anywhere. Instead Overwatch 2 has made changes to Mercy to make this super jump feature more reliable and consistent. In the next patch--after seeing a few issues with the original implementation of this latest version--the ability will be changed to once again give more control over Guardian Angel while also increasing flexibility.

After the next patch, Guardian Angel will not automatically launch Mercy into the air, but instead will have a meter that charges while the ability is active. Now, when players cancel Guardian Angel with Jump, Mercy will now be launched into the direction she is facing. Also, the more charge she gets during this ability, the more momentum there will be behind her launch when she cancels it with a jump.

Now, onto Symmetra. Symmetra is also an original character that wasn't the most popular right out the gate but once people realized the true potential behind her, especially on certain maps, she became a very sought after character. So on par with how Symmetra was originally introduced, it seems it is happening once more. During the first beta, Symmetra didn’t fit into the faster play style that included more engagements and less barriers. While making changes to Symmetra, she was sadly perhaps nerfed one too many times. Currently the team is testing her Secondary Fire projectile size and increasing it from .4 back to .5 as well as reducing the Secondary Fire charge time from 1.2 seconds back to 1 second, and finally a substantial change is being made that would reduce the teleporter cooldown from 16 seconds to 12.

Okay, enough with our seasoned characters, let’s talk a little about Junker Queen. While she has had a lot of work done, and bug fixes have been made, she is still early on in the testing period. In addition, tank queues have been surging due to the high number of players who want to try out the newest queen. Hopefully as more people can test her out these queue times will go down considerably. Lastly, Some other characters are being watched and may get nerfed in the patches to come, Zenyatta and Sojourn just to name a few.