‘Overwatch’ PTR new build brings significant changes to Lúcio; New tracking system to mitigate draws in Competitive Play

A new build on the “Overwatch” Public Test Realm has gone live and fans are expecting certain changes for the support hero Lúcio. Game director James Kaplan had also mentioned earlier this week about these changes Blizzard is bringing.

Lúcio has the power to provide a speed bonus to the entire team and is known for his raw healing output. The new changes aim at making these powers harder to apply to everyone on team and at all times. Lúcio's Crossfade ability will witness the maximum changes. The song's area-of-effect radius has been decreased from 30 to 10 meters. In order to illustrate the radius, a temporary in-game visual only visible to Lúcio and his team members has been added. The Heal Song’s healing-per-second has been increased 50 percent to compensate this decrease in radius.

This holds true for both regular and Amp It Up circumstances. As per the developer comments, Lúcio's large passive auras resulted in much of his powers getting tied-up. This in turn led to other elements of his kit getting weakened over time to balance him. Due to the changes coming to “Overwatch,” his auras will now be more focused and this will allow Lúcio to be much stronger and active in his role. The radius of his Sound Barrier has been reduced from 30 to 20 metres, writes PC Gamer.

However, the changes have increased his movement speed by 30 percent, when wall-riding. He will also get a small burst of speed when leaping off a wall. The Sonic Amplifier’s projectile speed has also increased to 50. Alternate fire “boop” now considers vertical orientation while knocking back targets. Players have long criticised about the draws in the game and Blizzard is now implementing a system to mitigate such draws. Now the winner will be determined on basis of who captured the largest proportion.

“To mitigate draws in Competitive Play, we're implementing a system that tracks each team's progress on the objective. This will work similarly to the system that's already in place for Escort and Assault/Escort maps, which grants a win to the team that pushes the payload the furthest. Now, even if neither team successfully captures the objective, a winner can be determined based on which team captured the largest portion,” Blizzard explains in Play Overwatch.

All these changes are now available for testing on the “Overwatch” PTR though there will be changes in the final version. However, big changes are surely coming for the Brazilian DJ Hero. Even the Eichenwalde map has received a small change, wherein a new route has been added that connects an attacking team’s spawn area to the capture point.