Blizzard are going to make changes to Overwatch’s Bastion and Torbjörn soon

When Blizzard announced that Overwatch would be taking a break over the festive season toward the end of last year, Alessandro and I shed many manly tears. We both adore the shooter, and having it taken from our grasp was pretty traumatic.

We now realise that it was with good intent. Blizzard used that downtime to great effect, and brought their FPS back online last week for a second round of beta testing, in greater shape than it’s ever been. They added player progression, loot boxes, and did some good general balancing to the game’s vast roster of heroes.

Two of those heroes however, Bastion and Torbjörn, are not in a good place. There’s a general consensus among players that both the turret heroes are in dire need of some changes.

Thankfully, Blizzard are fully aware of the situation. One player raised his concerns in a forum post aptly called ‘Turret Watch’, to which Overwatch’s Game Director, Jeff Kaplan, replied the following:

We appreciate your patience with helping us test the balance of the game. We’re actively making changes to Bastion and Torbjorn right now. We will push these changes live sometime this week (hopefully).

Our goal was to make these Heroes more viable in high end play and less of a threat in low end play. We obviously failed on the latter and are going to try a few changes over the next few weeks.

So yeah, games consisting of millions of Bastions and Torbjörns at any given time should hopefully be a thing of the past, and soon. I don’t know how exactly Blizzard plan on balancing the two, but I suspect it’ll take a few patches before a sweet spot is found.

In fact, it’s going to take a long time before a great overall balance is found for the game as a whole. I’m sure Blizzard will be paying close attention over the coming months, and applying whatever changes they feel are necessary to make their shooter something truly spectacular.

Last Updated: February 18, 2016