Blizzard also addresses recent targeting issues on the PTR
Moira – the latest hero to be added to the Overwatch roster – will finally be added to Competitive Play a little later on today – around 11:00am PT, which is 7:00pm GMT and 8:00pm CET. The news was confirmed by Bill Warnecke on the Overwatch forums late yesterday evening.
In addition to confirming Moira’s full release in the live game, the Overwatch devs have also released a statement surrounding some of the targeting issues that players have experienced on the latest version of the PTR.
Where Moira’s Biotic Grasp tracking on the live servers is extremely generous, the most recent update to the test server makes it much tougher for her to target certain heroes. The good news – for Moira mains at least – is that this is an unintended result from a wider adjustment, and will not make it into live play.
Here’s what the developers had to say on the subject:
“On the PTR, we made a number of improvements to the mechanism that Moira uses to select a target. Now players can more accurately select a target when multiple targets are in the field of view (which resolves issues like this: https://streamable.com/rosvo), and the new system can better discern which target is closest to the player’s reticle when multiple targets are valid.
“When we made this change, we did our best to make the everything feel as close to her original system as possible, but since the new mechanism uses a different functionality, it didn’t convert perfectly for a number of heroes. Generally, the larger heroes are a little harder to target, while the smaller heroes are much closer to her original behavior. The training bots also need to be adjusted, as they are by far the worst offender in the new system.
“Since it wasn’t our intention to do anything but improve Moira’s targeting, we’re hoping to test a new configuration on the PTR either late this week or early next. Thank you so much for surfacing the issue for us; these reports are incredibly useful for us when it comes to tracking down bugs.”
Expect a re-worked version of the updated targeting system to hit the PTR in the next week or so, then. This should hopefully restore Moira’s previous tracking capabilities, as well as make it easier to switch targets in brawl scenarios.
If you’ve yet to play the new damager-healer hybrid hero, take a look at our comprehensive Moira guide which covers every element of her playstyle in a huge amount of detail.
