We’ve known that Blizzard has been working on new Heroes for its latest, popular, FPS game Overwatch for a couple of months now. A new hero was confirmed for release a few days ago when the official Overwatch Twitter accounts tweeted a teaser, showcasing a support sniper rifle, sparking fierce debate as to who the new Hero is. I believed it would be Ana Amari, Pharah’s mother, operating under the moniker Sombra. However, it seems that Sombra is still an unknown, with Ana being confirmed as the Overwatch’s newest Hero. Whether Sombra is a separate hero or just her nickname still has to be confirmed.
Ana Amari is one of Overwatch’s Founding Origin heroes, alongside Jack Morrison, Gabriel Reyes, Liao, Reinhardt Wilhelm, and Torbjörn Lindholm. She was believed to have been killed by Talon operative Widowmaker, another playable hero and was survived by her daughter Fareeha Amari AKA Pharah. An Origin Story video was released to go along with her reveal that can be viewed below.
Ana’s primary ability includes a long-range biotic rifle that can heal teammates or deal damage-over-time to enemies via darts. For close-range she has a biotic grenade that can heal allies in an area as well as dealing damage to enemies in the same area. Furthermore, teammates affected by the grenade will receive a boost from healing sources whilst enemies won’t be able to be healed for a short period of time. Ana also packs a secondary weapon that can fire a sleep dart, knocking enemies unconscious for a short period of time. Currently Ana is only playable in the game’s PTR mode. You can see her in action in the video below.
Ana’s reveal wasn’t the only news about Overwatch to come out over the day. Blizzard also unveiled some changes to the game’s competitive mode along with a wide range of general bug fixes and class balances. The biggest change to affect competitive will be the limitation of one of each hero per team, ala no more “hero-stacking”. Hero-stacking was a popular gimmick where the same hero would be chosen more than once by members of a team, often resulting in an over-powered team that would render the careful hero balances useless. Popular hero-stacking parties would include 6 Lucio’s or 3 Reinhardts protecting 3 Bastions.
“We’ve been discussing the idea of hero limits for almost as long as Overwatch has been in development. It’s been somewhat of a controversial topic, but we’ve always liked giving players the freedom to select any hero, regardless of the team’s composition, because it opened up the possibility for tons of crazy strategies and match-ups. We’ve also seen players use specific stacked compositions just to frustrate their opponents or cause indefinite delays in overtime (among other strategies). While this kind of thing is certainly possible in any mode, the higher stakes of Competitive Play means these kinds of tactics were popping up more often than anyone would like.”
-Jeff Kaplan, Game Director of Overwatch.
As a result, players have the option to start Overwatch in its “Public Test Region” (PTR) Mode, which currently includes a mechanic that limits the number of each hero per team to one. However, it should be noted that you can still hero stack in the games other playable modes, such as Quickplay or Custom. If the change to Competitive sees favourable responses, the patch will be rolled out to the normal versions of the game on PC, Xbox One and PS4.
You can read more about the patch here.
