Summary
Overwatch 2made an unexpected change to Zarya not mentioned in the patch notes that serves as a significant buff for the Tank hero.Overwatch 2recently dropped its big mid-season update, which included the brand-new single-player Hero Mastery game mode as well as balance changes for various characters on the roster.
One character that received quite a bit of attention in the latestOverwatch 2update was Tank hero Zarya, who received a buff to her Projected Barrier.Zarya’s Projected Barrierallows her to shield allies with a bubble. If enemies hit the bubble, it builds up Zarya’s charge, in turn allowing her to do significantly more damage with her laser. TheOverwatch 2developers felt not enough players were utilizing Zarya’s Projected Barrier and instead saving her bubbles for themselves, so they decided to give the ability a buff by increasing its health to 225, reducing the cooldown from 10 to 8 seconds, and increasing the size of the bubble by 15%. However, there was another change made to Zarya’s Projected Barrier that wasn’t even mentioned in the patch notes.
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AsOverwatch 2players have downloaded the mid-season updateand have had the chance to try out the balance changes for themselves, it was discovered that Zarya’s Projected Barrier can now build up to 45 charge. Previously, Zarya was only able to get 40 charge. While this may not seem significant on paper, it can have a big impact. It will effectively allow Zarya to get charged up faster, which makes her extremely dangerous. It’s unclear if this part of the buff was intentional by Blizzard since it wasn’t mentioned in the patch notes, but it will be interesting to see if Blizzard makes any further adjustments.
Hero balance changes weren’t the only thing that came out of theOverwatch 2mid-season update. After downloading the update, fans of the hero shooter can also check out thenew Hero Mastery mode. For the uninitiated, Hero Mastery is a set of challenges that task players with using the abilities of specific heroes as efficiently as possible. Only a handful ofOverwatch 2heroes can be used in Hero Mastery Mode right now, but more will be added in future updates.
Looking ahead, fans also have theOverwatch 2Anniversary event to look forward to, which will see the return oflimited-time game modes like Battle for Olympusand Starwatch. The updates that bring these limited-time modes back toOverwatch 2could very well be bundled with some additional balance changes, perhaps one that reels Zarya in a bit, but plans to that effect have not been announced at the time of this writing.
Overwatch 2is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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