'Aiming is optional now': Overwatch 2's bigger bullets divide players as they adjust to Blizzard's season 9 rework

‘Aiming is optional now’: Overwatch 2’s bigger bullets divide players as they adjust to Blizzard’s season 9 rework

In Overwatch 2’s newest season, every hero shoots bigger bullets and it’s driving players mad as they watch clips of the most egregious examples.

It was hard to visualize just how much Blizzard had increased the size of weapon projectiles in Overwatch 2’s newest season until a bunch of people started firing at a Tracer bot in the game’s practice range. While some don’t seem to have changed much, others are so big now that you don’t have to aim even remotely close to the enemy’s character model to score a hit.

Heroes like Sojourn, Widowmaker, and Hanzo can shoot air and still hit headshots, which has some players jokingly (and sometimes not jokingly) claiming that aiming is optional.

As a regular Overwatch player since 2016, I can tell you that some heroes have always been like that. Mercy’s pistol, for example, shoots projectiles that look like rockets when you’re shooting at a stationary target. Although they’re a little bigger now, clips of her gun go viral every now and then because many people don’t realize Overwatch heroes have much bigger hitboxes than their character models suggest.

If you’ve played or seen any amount of Overwatch at all, you know how erratic movement can be with heroes who can jump, dash, and fly around the maps. Aiming is actually a lot harder than it looks, especially when healing and defensive abilities are in play.

But after playing a few matches last night, even I could feel the size increase. On Ana, I was hitting enemies by accident, and I was forced to take cover more often after being shot by what felt like the entire enemy team all at once. The bigger health bars saved me from instantly dying, but it was considerably harder to keep my teammates healed as they took near-constant damage. Combined with the new DPS passive that makes their targets receive less healing, there were plenty of times where Ana’s burst heals just couldn’t keep up with the amount of damage going out.

Opinions on the changes differ wildly depending on who you ask. Some high-level players see them as Blizzard putting “training wheels” on the game, while others find it satisfying to hit more shots. Hitscan heroes, like Cassidy and Widowmaker, who deal instant damage when they fire a shot, look the most egregious to players who believe they wouldn’t have aim as good without the buffs.

It’ll probably take some time for things to settle. Blizzard says all the changes are meant to remove one-shots and burst healing from the game and that it should feel close to how it felt before. In my experience, that’s mostly true, but certain heroes and interactions stick out. Players are already witnessing how much damage you take from a Zenyatta’s Discord orb debuff with the amount of shots that hit now, and I suspect Blizzard will have to go in and prune back some of the heroes in the next few weeks.