Your Favorite Overwatch Character May Be About To Get Nerfed

Blizzard Entertainment has tirelessly balanced, rebalanced and modified every character in the first-person shooter Overwatch to ensure that every character is fair, fairly used, and not too overpowered. Well, after recently getting a major buff, Zenyatta is now getting a major nerf.

The news comes from over on the Battle.net forums where users made a post titled "Don't nerf Zenyatta" begging Blizzard not to touch the character after he was recently made significantly more playable in Overwatch. Principal designer Geoff Goodman explained that Zenyatta has become too strong and needs some tweaking (nerfing)...

Zenyatta isn't the only one getting tweaked in an upcoming patch for Overwatch. Another fan-favorite, Mei, is also getting some balancing as well, but as opposed to Zenyatta, the Eskimo-themed marksman will be getting a buff.

IGN summarized who was getting what in the upcoming Overwatch patch where they point to Geoff Goodman's statements about Mei having her ultimate special ramped up so that it will work better against things like Reinhardt's shield. Apparently, they've had some trouble with balancing out Mei and her ultimate, trying to find a more adequate middle ground for her abilities.

Mercy also came back into the discussion, as they attempt to continue to buff the support healer for better playability on the battlefield. The reality is that there's always going to be that unfortunate realization that a support healer is just never going to be as effective on the battlefield as the highest DPS dealer. That's just how competitive PvP works unless they try to turn Mercy into Ana, who is literally a mix of support heals and sniping DPS.

One of the major problems, when you have a character classed around support heals in a shooter game, is that usually, they have strong team support to balance out their lack of firepower. In games like Battlefield, your healers stick close to the squads and offer lots of health packs while only engaging in combat when necessary. Given the limited amount of players on the field in Overwatch, a character like Mercy has to focus more heavily on a combat role if there's no one nearby to cover for her, so it's easy to see how she becomes a difficult character to play within the confines of the game's rules. I'm sure if it was a 32 vs 32 setup then she would be far more effective. That, or they need more vehicles for Mercy to hide behind while offering team heals.

Goodman, however, doesn't say when this new patch will be made available, so if you're playing as Zenyatta and racking up a lot of kills right now, keep at it while you can. There's no telling how effective the zen-master will be after Blizzard rolls out the Overwatch patch to nerf his abilities.