Junkertown and character tweaks come to Overwatch

The newest update to Blizzard’s Overwatch brings about some of the most anticipated changes, along with a whole new map, Junkertown!

Junkertown was introduced during Gamescom last month and has been available on the PTR (Public Test Realm) servers to play since late August. An Australian themed map, Junkertowm is an escort objective that is home to the Australian characters Junkrat and Roadhog. It is important to remember that in the Overwatch world, Australia is essentially set in the world of Mad Max, an extreme apocalyptic wasteland.

Here is the official description from Blizzard themselves;

“Junkertown is located in the harsh and unforgiving Australian Outback. Constructed from the remains of a destroyed omnium, it’s now the home to a band of lawless scavengers known as the Junkers, led by their cutthroat Queen. When they aren’t pillaging the omnium’s skeleton for anything of value, the Junkers blow off steam in the Scrapyard — a massive gladiatorial arena whose combatants fight for glory, riches… and to survive.”

Other changes from today’s update include significant alterations to the characters D.Va and Mercy.

Mercy is being balanced for combat situations, addressing the problems where her entire gameplay was based around her ultimate ability (Resurrect) but was lacking on her own beyond this.  To combat this Blizzard has taken her ultimate and set it to a cooldown ability that can resurrect one team mate at a time, instead of up to five at a time. Her new ultimate ability is called Valkyrie which allows her to temporarily fly, have unlimited ammo and reduce the cooldowns on her abilities.  This is consistent with her changes in the PTR, excluding the extended damage boost she also sported.

D.Va’s changes are far less extreme, instead focusing on one aspect of her Mecha suit – the Defense Matrix. Blizzard felt that it was too strong but were hesitant to nerf it without balancing her out in some other way. To rectify this D.Va has an all new ability, Micro Missiles, which allows her to fire some small rockets at any time. Another change now allows D.Va to fire her primary attack while boosting.

In smaller news, Reinhardt players can now rotate their camera while using his shield and deceased characters are now represented by character portraits instead of skulls. More information can be found on the full patch notes, including all bug fixes.