New Overwatch Update Seeks to Appease Roadhog Players

A few hours ago, principal designer Geoff Goodman announced the details of a new Overwatch update coming to the PTR that adds some more hero changes. Most notable is that they plan to change how Roadhog’s hook works…again.

For those that haven’t been keeping track, a recent update to the Overwatch public test realm introduced a bunch of hero changes including reworking Roadhog’s hook to make it feel more consistent to the Roadhog player and make it more fair to the hook’s target. This new hook, which the community dubbed as Hook 2.0, immediately received flak after a video demonstrating how unreliable Hook 2.0 is reached the front page of the Overwatch subreddit.

Well it looks the development team caught wind of these complaints and made a few adjustments that, on paper, sound like a fair change.

• Added some more line of sight checks towards the left/right of a potential hook target. This means it should be easier to hook someone who is sticking halfway out of a doorway, or behind a thin pole, etc. These checks are also used for the persistent line of sight check, so if a hook target moves behind a slim object like a stump or a lightpole, they won’t be released anymore.
• Hooked targets are now slowed heavily while they are stunned, even if they are in the air. This means if someone is strafe jumping away from you and you land a hook, they are a lot less likely to slide out of line on sight, breaking the hook.
• Fixed a bug that could allow you to hook someone and pull them behind you if you spun around before the hook landed.

Of course the biggest changes are the first two bullet points which seem to directly address the video that initially caused the outcry. They’ve maintained the hook breaking mechanic from the initial update, to make it feel more fair to the target, but also added some more checks to make sure that the hook doesn’t break in cases where it really shouldn’t, again like those in the clip above. The last point seems to address another abuse that players found where Roadhog players could hook a target off the map by simply turning to face a pit before a hook connects.

In addition to the Roadhog changes, Goodman’s forum post also stated that they are nerfing Ana just a bit more by reducing how long the effects of her Biotic Grenade lasts and are buffing Sombra by reducing the cooldown of her Hack ability.

People were initially worried that Roadhog would be dead in the water because Blizzard doesn’t have a history of altering things in the PTR before arriving to the live servers despite a lot of feedback from the playerbase on how some changes are just too much. So it’s good to see Blizzard and the Overwatch team listen to feedback regarding these changes.