Overwatch patch notes with Widowmaker and McCree nerfs

The next Overwatch patch will be arriving soon and the planned Widowmaker and McCree nerfs are included in the update along with fixes.

The patch is not yet live on the servers, and we’re not sure when it will go live,  but have now been posted on Blizzard’s Taiwanese community forums and then translated.

Overwatch Patch Notes

McCree

• Peacekeeper
  • Alternate Fire
    • Recovery time (i.e. the amount of time before McCree starts reloading) decreased from 0.75 seconds to 0.3 seconds
    • Bullet damage decreased from 70 to 45

Developer Comments: McCree was performing too well against all targets, making him feel like a must-pick in many situations. By reducing the damage of his alternate fire, McCree is now significantly weaker against tanks like Roadhog and Reinhardt, but still maintains his lethality against smaller targets like Tracer and Genji.

Widowmaker

• Widow’s Kiss
  • Alternate Fire (Scoped Shot)
    • Base damage decreased from 15 to 12
      • Note: Scoped shot damage multiplier remains unchanged
    • Headshot damage multiplier increased from 2x to 2.5x
    • Players must now wait for the unscoping animation to completely finish before scoping

• Infra-Sight
  • Ultimate cost increased by 10%

Developer Comments: In the right hands, Widowmaker can often feel unstoppable—even when just landing body shots instead of critical heads shots. The changes to her alternate fire weaken body shot damage while leaving her headshot damage unchanged. Additionally, we felt her Ultimate ability, Infra-Sight, was coming up a little too frequently, especially considering its impact on the game.

BUG FIXES

General

• Improved stability of the High Bandwidth option in Custom Games

Heroes

• Fixed a bug that allowed Mercy to gain Ultimate charge whenever damage boosting an ally who was attacking a barrier or Ice Wall
• Fixed a bug that allowed Reaper to Shadow Step to unintended locations on certain maps

Maps 

• Fixed an issue with collision on certain areas of Dorado not blocking line of sight

With regards to other updates, Jeff Kaplan recently posted:

We haven’t patched content or balance because we are trying to have a stable launch window, with as few variables as possible.

With that said, new content is coming at the end of June — Competitive Play mode. We should also have a minor balance patch (hopefully) this week.

As those who were in the beta can attest to, we patched quite frequently and liberally during beta. Now that the game is live, we want to be careful to not overly disrupt the game balance too frequently.

In general, you can expect content patches, balance patches and minor bug fix patches to happen regularly now that we’re clearing the launch window. But don’t expect balance to change each week… we don’t feel like that would be healthy for the game.