More Brigitte and Doomfist changes are coming to the Overwatch PTR

There are more changes coming to the Overwatch PTR, with a small update to Brigitte and Doomfist. Brigitte’s Shield Bash was set to no longer go through barriers, which was meant to be a nerf but ended up being a bit of a buff due to her play patterns and the added incentive to keep her shield up in extended fights. Doomfist also needed a little more tweaking. The following changes should be hitting the PTR shortly, where they’ll be subject to further testing.

Brigitte

Shield Bash

Damage reduced from 50 to 5

Inspire Passive

Cooldown reduced from 1.5s to 1.0s

Duration increased from 5s to 6s

Total healing increased from 80 to 100

Dev Notes: Reduces Shield Bash’s damage reduces her total stun combo damage potential while still allowing Whip Shot and her basic melee attacks to retain their full strength. Brigitte is a hybrid tank/healer, and lately we’ve been reducing her effectiveness by reducing the power of her non-healing functionality, but we want to make sure she is still a viable pick so we’re increasing the uptime of her Inspire passive to help increase her overall healing output.

Brigitte’s tankiness is getting hit overall, with a massive reduction to her Shield Bash damage. She can still stun just fine, and her healing is getting a boost to compensate, but these changes are meant to reduce Brigitte’s effectiveness at shutting down characters like Genji and Tracer. Since Brigitte’s been such a controversial character since her addition to the game, we’ll have to wait to see if these changes are the final shifts to Brigitte’s power.

Doomfist

Seismic Slam

Victims no longer lose air control while being pulled in.

Skydrop

Inner ring damage radius increased from 1.5m to 2.0m. This is the ring where Skydrop deals its full 300 damage.

Max damage outside of inner ring decreased from 300 to 200. This is the ring where damage falloff happens, which still reduces the damage down to 15 at max range.

Dev Notes: The PTR Doomfist changes are all about trying to give his enemies more opportunities to effectively fight back, and these changes are no exception. The Skydrop changes will make it harder to secure a “free” kill on heroes without mobility such as Zenyatta or Ana, while still preserving its max potential damage when aimed well or when comboing with other abilities such as Graviton Surge or Sleep Dart.

Doomfist is getting some changes as well to make him less of a murder machine. Right now, he’s capable of getting into a fight and shutting someone down even if he misses his initial charge in. Now, his strengths and weaknesses should be a little more better defined, and enemies shouldn’t be dead upon a Doomfist getting in their face.

There are definitely more changes to come to CC in general based off community feedback.

Overall we’re looking carefully at the amount of crowd control abilities (such as stuns and knockbacks that remove air control) and seeing if we can remove or reduce some of the effectiveness of some of these. Any further changes to this PTR will be posted in this thread as well.

We’ll continue to update any PTR changes, but keep in mind that no nerf or buff is final until it hits live servers. The Overwatch meta will likely be subject to a few rounds of tinkering until season 2 of the Overwatch League starts in February.