Overwatch 2 Season 13 is nearly here, bringing map reworks, systems updates, the enchanting Mythic Spellbinder Widowmaker skin, and all of the tricks, tre
Blizzard has revealed the changes that are being made to Competitive Play and matchmaking with the launch of Overwatch 2 Season 13, with multiple multiplayer tweaks, the annual Halloween Terror event, and more. Overwatch 2 Season 13: Spellbinder launches on October 15, featuring a new Battle Pass, new game modes and events, and a collaboration with the popular anime series My Hero Academia.
Once Overwatch 2 Season 13 is live, players will be able to jump right into the new Halloween Terror event, which will run through to November 4, with a bunch of improvements, tweaks, and adjustments made to Overwatch 2's various game modes which you can deep dive into here.
Overwatch 2 Competitive Play gets a huge change to matchmaking with Season 13, which should help players who are grouped with friends according to Blizzard. Matchmaking for the wide pool has been tuned to focus on reduced queue times (they can be so annoying at times) with the Overwatch 2 development team upgrading the Role Delta tech to prioritize matching Tank players against each other that are equally as skilled. This change pushes for an even playing field for Competitive Play starting with Season 13 for players opting in to play Tank.
Overwatch 2 Season 13 changes:
- Competitive Play + matchmaking: Okay, let's change the subject and talk about Competitive Play and matchmaking. We still want to encourage you to group up with your friends even when playing Competitive, so we have several changes to matchmaking which should help. Matchmaking for the Wide pool has been tuned to focus on shorter queue times. We think having evenly matched players on the Tank role is really important, so we've also upgraded our Role Delta tech to prioritize matching Tank players against each other even more closely than the other roles.
- Competitive Play + matchmaking (continued): Playing in pre-made groups is a great way to play Overwatch, especially in Competitive, but at the highest ranks we think the advantage of grouping becomes pretty overwhelming. Higher-rank matches will now take into account the benefit of grouping when constructing a match. We've also tuned down multiple Modifiers related to MMR decay. This will make it more difficult for new accounts to unfairly climb higher into Top 500 than they might deserve without punishing more seasoned accounts.
- Top 500 tweaks: Finally, at Top 500, you'll now be required to complete the Seasoned Competitor lifetime challenge, which requires the player to win 750 games in Competitive Play in Overwatch 2 before you can appear on any season's Top 500 leaderboard. With this change, we are confident in lowering the individual season threshold for games played on a role to 25 per season. This will allow our veteran and seasoned players to not feel pressured to play as much throughout each season. There will be some other changes to matchmaking, so be sure to read up on our patch notes when the new Season goes live next Tuesday
- Ramattra: while in Nemesis form is getting an adjustment that will better give opponents a chance to take cover without really impacting the lethality of the attack. The attacks from Ramattra's punches will no longer pierce barriers, but instead will deal 2.5 times the damage on them. This gives Ramattra more strategy to decide whether to focus on breaking a barrier which can leave opponents vulnerable to attacks from your teammates, or instead focus on individual targets. Heroes like Reinhardt also now have more of a choice to make-using their barrier's health or eating the punch themselves. We hope this change can make for a more interesting engagement while Ramattra is in his Nemesis form.
- Mauga: Mauga's getting a buff to Gunny, his Incendiary Chaingun, where ignite damage over time will now last four seconds. Combined with the burst potential of Cha-cha, his Volatile Chaingun, Mauga will have more reason to stay focused on smaller targets without making him stronger against other Tanks.
- Support tweaks: You're going to see a notable change for Juno, who has performed really well. She remains popular, and we expect that to continue well into Season 13, but we want to bring in her healing potential a bit and encourage players to rely on her mobility more. First off, her fall-off range is reduced, which will require her to be closer to allies to heal or enemies to attack effectively. The Mediblaster also has a small nerf to the healing amount. You can also expect some changes for Brigitte and Baptiste this next patch as well.
- DPS tweaks: We have quite a few big changes to a couple of our Damage heroes. Sojourn has changes to her Railgun and Disruptor shot that will better give more skill to her playstyle. Energy no longer holds a minimum of 25 but will now deteriorate much slower. We're also powering up Disruptor shot to be stronger-damage per second is increased to 80 and will generate a small amount of energy for the Railgun for any damage dealt. We're looking to make the ability feel less ignorable for opponents and reward anyone playing Sojourn with well-placed Disruptor Shots. These changes are focused on getting more power into her kit outside of the Railgun shot itself and make her neutral gameplay feel better.