Jeff Kaplan teased fans of Blizzard’s team-based shooter Overwatch with an upcoming Experimental Card that caused quite a stir, with a focus on nerfing the crowd control into the ground, just to see how the game plays out. The Experimental Card feature was crafted with the idea of introducing massive shifts to how the title is played out with them and allows for relatively spicy gameplay that would otherwise not be possible. The first Experimental Card brought triple DPS to matches, with one tank and two support members rounding out the team composition.
It began well enough, although in the latter part of the Experimental Card saw DPS queue’s once again skyrocket, as tanks and support didn’t necessarily receive a large enough buff to deal with three DPS’s.
The second Experimental Card has just been revealed, and it’s focusing entirely on crowd control, colloquially known as CC. This EC was an exciting idea, as CC in Overwatch is absolutely brutal in the eyes of many; it’s not entirely uncommon to simply have all agency taken away from you as you’re chain-stunned by enemy heroes
The official card rules have been released, and expectant players are suddenly finding themselves to be a bit less excited for the Experimental Card. The majority of the nerfs are little more than reducing CC times for a fraction of a second, typically around 15% of the total time. Rather than walking you through precisely what every change actually is in the upcoming Experimental Card, here’s a quick YouTube video that does all of the work for me, under two minutes long.
We’re seeing a total of six different mild CC nerfs, that ultimately won’t change the name of the game too drastically. Many are claiming that Blizzard wildly missed the boat with this EC, to the point that it’s being pondered if Blizzard is actually playing the same game as everyone else.
The problem isn’t with how long the CC abilities last on impact, the problem is that a ton of heroes has the ability to stop you from playing entirely for a duration of time. What once had the fans excited, has fallen flat on release; this isn’t the first time that Blizzard has pulled off such an interesting trick. The changes are all generally inconsequential, to the point that even if they introduced the patch to Overwatch as it stands, very little would change in terms of match-to-match gameplay. Unfortunate.
Jeff Kaplan has stated that the release of Overwatch‘s EC has been temporarily delayed while Blizzard sorts through a bug with the launch. He did not offer any additional information other than that it is unlikely to release today, when it was planned.
