Overwatch 2 mid-season 7 patch aims to solve major issues with support heroes

Support mains won't be happy when this patch drops.

Ana healing Orisa, and Zarya from a rooftop on Paraíso in Overwatch 2
Image via Blizzard Entertainment

Overwatch 2’s upcoming season seven mid-cycle patch might be a couple of weeks away, but the game’s developers already have a decent idea of what changes they plan on making to some heroes.

Recommended Videos

If you’ve spent much time looking at Overwatch players posting on social media lately, you’ve likely seen at least a handful of complaints about the state of support heroes. With their power seeming to slowly creep over time, many support heroes have started to exhibit utility and survivability that makes them frustrating to play against, to say the least.

But that’s all going to change, or at least that’s what Blizzard seems to hope, with the next mid-season patch that is likely to come out in early November.

“We have seen a lot of talk around supports and their rising power level in the meta,” a post from Blizzard reads. “We’re making a series of changes to many of the support heroes in the game for the midseason patch with the intent of targeting their utility and opening up windows of vulnerability. We want to be careful here in order to avoid some of the feelings of helplessness that Supports had at launch, but we want to lower some of the overall sustain and survivability that’s present in the game currently.”

Blizzard didn’t disclose which heroes will be updated with the coming changes, but it seems clear these changes will largely be nerfs to survivability and perhaps damage. Fans might anticipate that some of the heroes poised for a nerf include Ana, Baptiste, Illari, and/or Mercy. It would be a bit surprising if we saw any significant nerfs to support heroes like Lucio, Zenyatta, or Brigitte, though, based on their current viability and status in the meta.

Author
Image of Max Miceli
Max Miceli
Senior Staff Writer. Max graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a journalism and political science degree in 2015. He previously worked for The Esports Observer covering the streaming industry before joining Dot where he now helps with Overwatch 2 coverage.