Overwatch's Roadhog, Winston Receive Balance Changes on PTR

In a new update on the Blizzard Forums, the principal designer of Overwatch Geoff Goodman has revealed a number of upcoming balance changes for Roadhog and Winston.

Not long ago, Blizzard has released the latest Overwatch build on the PTR for testing, in which many changes were made to Bastion and Mercy. Despite actively releasing improvements and patches ever since the online shooter was released last May, it looks like the studio is not resting just yet as the team is already working on a series of new character balance changes. In a new Overwatch PTR update at the Blizzard Forums, principal designer Geoff Goodman revealed that the development team is now working on a new build which will bring new changes to Roadhog and Winston.

Regardless of the recent tweak of Roadhog's hook, the Overwatch team felt that the ability is still too strong and have made a couple of new changes. The hook of Roadhog will now have its cooldown increased from 6 seconds to 8 seconds, and targets are now pulled to a distance of 3.5 meters away instead of 2 meters. To balance out Roadhog's nerfed hook ability, the character's Scrap Gun will now have 20% less spread and will hopefully be more effective when not using the hook.

In response to a player suggestion that Winston needs to be buffed, the Overwatch team has noted that the character's head hit volume was "extremely big", which means that the armored gorilla was "taking more damage than he otherwise should." To fix this issue, the upcoming update will reduce the critical hit volume of Winston by 15%, a figure Goodman thinks will hopefully bring it "more in line with other heroes."

With the latest PTR patch having been released very recently, it is unknown as to when these new Roadhog and Winston changes will be implemented. Considering that the Year of the Rooster event is coming to an end in just few days and Season 3 of Competitive Play soon to follow after, it is likely that players won't have to wait too long in order to test out these new changes.

Overwatch is currently available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.