On July 12, 2020, the Toronto Defiant’s flex DPS player, Lane “Surefour” Roberts, commented on the state of effective HP in Overwatch. While an interesting insight into the game, it also offered perspective on him as a player.
Surefour’s thoughts on Overwatch effective HP
Surefour described Overwatch effective HP as “basically how much HP someone can have without their health actually being that value.” This means that if a hero is healed, they will effectively have more than health than their health pool indicates.
Surefour went on to discuss how, in the past, there weren’t as many area of effect (AOE) healers, so supporters had to choose who to target. Now that healers like Moira, Brigitte, Baptiste, and Lucio exist and can heal their entire team without having to choose one person, every hero has higher effective HP.
Then Surefour explained why this is a bad thing. With every character having higher effective HP, players need to do more burst damage to deal with it. This means that heroes like Widowmaker and Genji, who do high burst damage, become superior characters. In Surefour’s opinion, this makes the game feel very one-dimensional and restricts players from playing as other heroes without putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Surefour said he believes that to fix this problem, Blizzard needs to put a cap on AOE healing or give heroes more burst damage.
Effective HP in OW
Read: https://t.co/qaI4W7DRUY
— Lane (@Surefour) July 13, 2020
It will be interesting to see if Blizzard addresses these comments and makes changes to the healing process. With the number of professional Overwatch players leaving the game to go pro in other esports titles, it may be worth looking into. Of course, the developer might just wait until Overwatch 2 to make major changes.
