Overwatch

Just in time for April Fools' Day: googly eyes!

Including on Reinhardt's shield, Torbjorn's turret, B.O.B., and probably several other things. (Although, disappointingly, the eyes on Torb's turret don't show up in highlight intros since they use the old turret design.)

Hanzo's dragons - knew I forgot something. I'm not sure if the googly eyes make them more or less scary.

Edited by mlsmithca on Apr 2nd 2020 at 3:01:27 PM

Nothing quite like seeing Hanzo's giant twin spirit dragons coming at you sporting two of the googliest pairs of eyes you ever did see.

Looking at Echo in some gameplay videos, it does look like she's not the OP monster I feared she would be. Her damage abilities seem like they'll only be decent at close range, and with her being in the air, she's a hitscan target ala Pharah. Her ultimate only seems like it'll be good with Tank characters, and those characters are mainly about setting up other ults or stopping pushes.

I don't mind that she's Damage, but that means there's only 7 supports now...maybe room for Symmetra to go back to her old role?

I still think giving Symmetra's turrets the ability to heal would have made her a true and unique support class. Would fill a similar role to dispensers in TF2, and there'd be a lot of potential for creative strategies with them.

Edited by FGHIK on Apr 1st 2020 at 12:10:34 PM

The boat has long sailed and Symmetra will remain a DPS and you have to deal with that.

The philophy for support is you heal and bring something to the table or you are Brigitte and you are just a stun that heals like crap.

They said they tried the healing turret thing and it didn't work out well. I had an idea to rework Shield Generator to work like a Spawn point with slower healing with shield gen.

They could easily rework her old ability Photon Shield like Brigette's Armor Pack to add some healing on top of shield gen. And back when she was a support, the turret hit the enemy with a slow debuff.

The turrets still slow their targets.

Seems like Echo will be dropping on the 14th

Guess I won't be queueing DPS in Quick Play for a while after the 14th, then. (Or playing as Pharah if I do.) Ah well, I keep meaning to try some of the Tanks I've not yet tried anyway (D.Va, Sigma, Winston, Wrecking Ball).

Echo is finally out.

I know they’re being careful especially with her ult, but she seems kinda underpowered. The ult seems super situational and only great with a tank so you’re not immediately killed. I’m not shocked that she was conceived as a support originally, she seems like she’s more of a helper than anything.

I haven't actually played any games myself since this past weekend, but I have been watching some Overwatch streamers this evening. Obviously Echo has been ubiquitous in their games, as is ever the case for new characters, but more interesting to me is that they've added some new dialogue between characters during setup. I haven't heard many exchanges, but I presume a lot of them revolve around the newer characters - not just Echo, but also Sigma, Baptiste, and possibly Ashe with characters other than McCree.

For example, if you have Mercy and Baptiste as your supports, Baptiste says he's happy to be working with her again, and Mercy says that it's under better circumstances this time, finally providing some sort of in-game payoff for the tail end of "What You Left Behind" when Baptiste (with Sombra's help) tracks down Mercy in the hope of joining forces with her.

On that topic, here are all the new interactions in this patch

Gotta say, wasn't expecting Roadhog and Sombra to have an interaction.

So it's the Overwatch anniversary again. Anyone else notice that Blizzard had a massive brain fart and called Wrecking Ball's new skin "Submarine" instead of the obviously superior "Bathysphere"?

That seems like a pretty obvious missed opportunity.

I must say, even though I haven't played Overwatch in months, I really like the Anniversary Skins. I don't think there's ever been an event where I've thought to myself "I have to get that skin" about every legendary skin. The epics are not bad either.

Same here, although I'm especially partial to the Dragoon Mercy skin and the Red Riding Hood Ashe skin (I'm definitely not alone in the latter, nearly every Ashe I've played either alongside or against in the last few days has been using that skin). And to my amazement and delight, I got the Mercy skin in my "free Legendary" loot box at the beginning of the event, and the Wrecking Ball skin not long after. I have enough credits saved up at this point that I can probably just buy the ones I don't get out of loot boxes by 9 June.

I'm so glad we got the new communication-wheel options. Now pubbies can ignore me saying "Fall Back" AND "Group Up" instead of just "Group Up" as they trickle in and get slaughtered like animals.

Oh, thank God, I thought it was just the teams I got matched into that did that.

First rule of any PVP game: Your team will always suck.

Found a pretty good mini LEGO Bastion. It's not quite minifig scale, but it's a lot closer than any of the official sets.

By now I'm convinced that I've given both a curse and a blessing.

The curse is that I am overwhelmingly likely to never get into Offense maps.

The blessing is that I get to be the only person in my team who can fucking see Wrecking Ball circling around the objective. No, really. It's almost as if he's completely invisible to anyone else in my goddamn team.

I guess to revive this thread a bit new comic series featuring Tracer

Overall, a pretty neat comic.