Much has been said about balance in Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch, whether it’s requesting more frequent balance patches or hero bans. Director Jeff Kaplan addressed all of this in a new dev update by introducing Hero Pools and the Experimental Card. Check it out below.
Hero Pools are essentially a pool of heroes that become unavailable in Competitive Mode for a week. These are essentially hero bans but decided by Blizzard instead of the players and will keep the meta from ever feeling too stale for too long. The Experimental Card is arguably more interesting – it’s essentially the Public Test Realm server but as a playlist and for all platforms.
Blizzard will use this playlist to test out balance changes to heroes and maybe even changes to modes like Assault. Though these changes aren’t guaranteed to hit live servers, they will offer a wider audience to try out any balance changes. Even better is the fact that wins will count as progress for earning loot boxes, completing challenges and so on.
Other upcoming features include improved anti-cheat, the ability to pin and share replays, a revamp of the Stats page (which is coming further down the line) and much more. Hero Bans and the Experimental Card are slated to arrive in the coming months so stay tuned for more details.