Overwatch: Year of the Rooster – What to Expect

Overwatch‘s Year of the Rooster is here to celebrate the Chinese New Year, and with the event comes a slew of new skins, emotes, sprays, and balance changes.

First, let’s take a look at what heroes have been changed this patch and how this will affect them.

Ana
Ana saw her biotic grenade ability get nerfed heavily this patch. The duration of the healing buff and debuff it applies has been reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds, and the extra healing that allies received while under its effects has been reduced by 50%.

Ana has been seen as a “must-pick” hero since her last round of buffs, and these changes are likely to bring her more in line with the other healers without making her useless. The reduced duration means she will need to be more selective in when she uses her grenade. The utility it offers is still very strong, but it won’t make the tanks on her team nearly un-killable for 5 seconds anymore.

D.Va
D.Va’s armor amount has been changed from 400 to 200 this patch, and her damage got a very slight decrease from 24 to 22.

D.Va has been a difficult hero for Blizzard to find the sweet spot for, and after her most recent buffs she seemed to become far too strong. Her massive armor total meant that even characters who could damage her through her defense matrix had a very hard time destroying her mech completely. Half of this armor total being replaced with flat HP means that characters like Zarya can shred through her mech again. Her job as a disruptor is still very possible for her, though now it will require her to think more positionally than before. She will need to properly gauge if she can effectively take on backline targets before they get help from their teams, and if she can’t, what her escape options are.

Lucio
Lucio got a small quality of life change in this patch via a new “backwards wall ride” option than can be disabled or enabled for him in the options menu.

As the name suggests, this allows him to skate along walls in the opposite direction of where he is looking, adding even more mobility options to one of the most mobile characters in the game.

Roadhog
Roadhog finally got the promised changes that are aimed at making his hook unable to pull people that he can’t see. Upon landing a hook, the game now checks to see if the target is still in Roadhog’s line of sight, and if not, the hook breaks. In addition to this, however, Roadhog got a quality of life change that makes the targets he has hooked land directly in front of him with consistency. This makes it much easier for him to consistently kill small targets like Ana and mobile targets like Genji.

Sombra
The cooldown on Sombra’s hacking ability was reduced from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, and the time it takes her to hack a target was reduced from 1 second to 0.8 seconds.

These changes seems small on paper, but have the potential to expand her already niche role in Overwatch. The faster hack time means less time for her targets to break line of sight or get behind a Reinhardt shield. This can be potentially valuable on maps with singular chokepoints, as a Sombra hack can disable the enemy Reinhardt shield and allow Sombra’s team to pick off enemy DPS or Healers.

The game also saw a few general changes. The kill feed has been updated to display how enemies are killed including headshots and abilities, crouching now has a very small internal cooldown to prevent crouch spamming, and each hero may now equip up to four sprays, emotes, and voice lines.

As with all Overwatch events, this one came with all manner of new content for players to enjoy and obtain. A new, temporary, capture the flag game mode has been added with a free event loot box as incentive to play.

With these event loot boxes, all heroes have received new sprays and a voice line, and many of them got skins, emotes, victory poses, or highlight intros. Below is a fully list of what each hero received:

Epic Skins: Ana, Bastion, Junkrat, Mercy, Symmetra, Tracer

Legendary Skins: D.Va, Mei, Reinhardt, Roadhog,Winston, Zenyatta

Emotes: D.Va, Junkrat, Mei

Victory Poses: Ana, Bastion, D.Va, Junkrat, Mei, Roadhog, Sombra

Highlight Intros: Mercy, Roadhog, Tracer

Players who hope to get their hands on any of these items will need to do so soon, as the event ends on February 13th. Best of loot box luck to you all!