Overwatch‘s Bastion is about to receive a drastic overhaul to his abilities on the shooter’s Public Test Realm in an upcoming update, Blizzard has confirmed.
As he outlined last week in a post on the Battle.net forums, principle designer Geoff Goodman today followed up on the promise of attempting to make Bastion great again by providing a rundown of what to expect when the tweaks to everyone’s favorite ‘bot go live. While fans of the character aren’t going to be seeing a remodel on the same level as, say, Symmetra’s improvements last year, they’re likely to result in a surge of popularity for the Hero when (and if) they make it into the live game.
In his forum post, Goodman details the proposed fixes to not only Bastion’s Recon Mode – which is largely seen to be his weaker form – but his turret transformation, too. The former mode will see a reduction in the spread of his machine gun, as well as an increased magazine size which, Goodman says, will hopefully help with Bastion’s “general viability in this mode.”
As for Sentry Mode, Goodman says Blizzard wants to repurpose its power into being more of a “tank-buster and barrier-buster mode,” while also making changing into the turret mid-battle a “less suicidal” act. Increased spread and the removal of headshots are two such tweaks proposed, although they may not necessarily make it in. The trade-off for those apparent nerfs would be less damage while in Sentry Mode.
Likely to be the most noticeable in an already long list of revamps are the proposed changes to Bastion’s Self-Repair ability. Goodman says the dev team has been toying around with the idea of enabling Bastion to move while also using the ability, with the implementation of a resource system similar to D.Va’s Defence Matrix to balance out the Hero’s newfound mobility.
Of course, none of this is guaranteed to make it to the PTR or the live Overwatch servers, but Blizzard certainly appears to be on the right track in its attempts to breath new life into Bastion. Expect the changes to roll out over the coming weeks.