Blizzard has heard Overwatch players' pleas at last, Junkrat is getting an explosive buff
Overwatch will soon be more explosive than ever.
Overwatch players have been asking for - well, they ask for a lot of things, don't they, and you can usually summarise it as "buff my main and nerf everyone else". But it's true that would-be Junkrat mains in particular have been calling for a little work on their favourite Australian demolitions expert for a very long time now.
The good enws is: it's happening. Responding to a suggested Junkrat buff on the Overwatch forums, principal designer Geoff Goodman said we'll "likely" see something similar during the very next PTR phase.
"Currently on our internal builds Junkrat has two charges of his Concussion Mine. This allows you to do all kinds of cool stuff like launch yourself into a fight and still have a charge to escape with [it], or launch yourself up into a Pharah and still have a charge to try and kill her with [it]," Goodman wrote.
"Previously this was possible before but you had to plant one on the ground and then wait for the cooldown to come back before doing this. That is still possible, which allows for a triple jump now if you want/need that, but now it is a lot more reliable to do with 2. It has been a ton of fun to play with so far."
In addition to this change to concussion mines, Junkrat's ultimate may be boosted - although the details aren't locked in yet.
"We're experimenting with a movement speed increase or a health increase on the tire. We wouldn't do both things but in either case it should be more reliable to use in more situations," Goodman noted.
Junkrat's partner in crime (or maybe more) Roadhog is also in for a bit of a tweak, since that didn't happen during the recent PTR session. The last batch of public testing was all about Doomfist, although it also resulted in buffs to McCree and Zarya and adjustments to Reaper and Reinhardt. Which is all very funny indeed as Jeff Kaplan said not long ago that Overwatch is balanced and players just need to learn how to combat the current meta.
Anyway, we're on board the idea of more Junkrat. Looking forward to it.