Overwatch 2 players certainly got a sugar rush today, as Blizzard announced all the sweet goodies that are coming alongside lucky number Season 13. Changes include map reworks, a new Mythic Spellbinder Widowmaker Skin, system updates, and Junkenstein’s Labratory – an new Halloween Terror mode that puts a new twist on an Overwatch classic.
Junkenstien’s Labratory introduces a mechanic called mutations, which allows players to enhance their abilities, changing their overall gameplay style significantly based on your choices. Orisa has one that lets her javelin spin her off the ground to give her a higher position or you can use a buff on Genji that upgrades the damage he deals out from deflecting.
Map wise, Dorado, Numbani, Circuit Royale and Havana all got reworks to adjust for spawn camping and to make movement more accessible. According to Overwatch Game Director Aaron Keller, the overall goal of these changes is to make things more balanced.
For operator changes, you can check out a brief summary for each down below:
- Ramattra – Pummel now give opponents a chance to take cover without really impacting the lethality of the attack and punches no longer piece barriers but deal 2.5 times the damage on them.
- Mauga – Gunny’s Incendiary Chaingun ignite damage over time will now last four seconds.
- Juno – Fall-off range is reduced and Mediblaster has a small nerf to the healing amount.
- Sojourn – Energy no longer holds a minimum of 25 but will now deteriorate much slower and Disruptor shot to be stronger and dps is increased to 80 while generating a small amount of energy for the Railgun for any damage dealt.
- Sombra – Stealth activates on its own to instantly triggering every time you use Translocator, she also gets her Opportunist passive back; Sombra is revealed briefly when she takes damage, her hack and Translocator also has a longer cooldown.
Competitive play is also changing a bit. Matchmaking for wide pool will have shorter queue times and matchmaking for Tank players has been tuned to be more even for each team.
Higher-rank matches also take into account the benefit of grouping when constructing a match to make matches more fair and multiple Modifiers related to MMR decay have been lowered to. This will make it more difficult for new accounts to unfairly climb higher into Top 500.
To make the Top 500, you’ll also need to win 750 games in Competitive Play in Overwatch 2 before you can appear on any season’s Top 500 leaderboard. There will be some more changes coming to matchmaking soon, and you can check out all the other quality of life adjustments coming in Overwatch 2 Season 13 by checking out the official blog post and video posted above.