New Overwatch tank hero Orisa goes live today
UPDATE: Significant Lucio changes revealed.
UPDATE 21 MARCH: Today's the day new tank hero Orisa goes live on all three Overwatch platforms: PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Patches usually arrive late afternoon/early evening, around 6pm GMT.
Note: Blizzard has disabled Orisa from Competitive Play for a week while she beds in, which makes sense. Orisa is the first hero Blizzard has added mid-season.
A slight nerf for Bastion will go live with the patch too. His turret damage reduction is being weakened from 35 per cent down to 20 per cent.
Looking ahead, Lucio is next for significant changes. His healing power is being ramped up but his song range dramatically reduced. To cope, he's being made more mobile. In other words, it's time to learn to wall-ride.
The Lucio changes are part of the next Overwatch patch, numbered 1.10, which is in testing on PTR now.
Specific Lucio changes:
- Sonic Amplifier: Projectile speed increased from 40 to 50; Alternate fire now considers vertical orientation when knocking targets back.
- Crossfade: Song's area-of-effect radius decreased from 30 meters to 10 meters (a temporary in-game visual has been added to illustrate this radius, only visible to Lúcio and his teammates).
- Heal Song: Healing-per-second has been increased by 50 per cent (also applies to Lúcio's Amp It Up ability).
- Sound Barrier: Radius decreased from 30 meters to 20 meters.
- Wall Ride: Movement speed increased by 30 per cent when wall riding; Lúcio now receives a burst of speed when leaping off a wall.
ORIGINAL STORY 14 MARCH: New Overwatch hero Orisa will go live Tuesday, 21st March, Blizzard has announced. Otherwise known as this time next week.
Orisa has been playable on the Public Test Realm since 2nd March. She - it - is the robotic centaur-like creation made by girl genius Efi Oladele to protect Numbani following an attack by Doomfist.
Orisa is a tank with some interesting new abilities. First off, she tanks from mid-range rather than on the front line, projecting barriers at locations while laying down considerable holding fire with her huge-clip automatic weapon.
She also has potential for some great environmental kills with her gravity ball, which she fires and which pulls enemies towards it when detonated. You could fire it into the well-space on the Ilios Well map, for instance, then detonate, pulling nearby enemies in.
On top of that she can nullify Reinhardt charges, as well as other knockback abilities, with her Fortify ability.
Her ultimate ability is an odd one too: she drops a kind of oversized magical drum that boosts nearby allies' damage - but they have to be in its line of sight. The drum can also be destroyed.
It'll be interesting to see how she mixes things up!