Overwatch's new hero, Orisa, hits test servers
Bot buddy!
The next fighter to join the happy-go-lucky crew of thieves and murderers in Overwatch [official site] is, as expected, not an 11-year-old. It is the honking great robot that child prodigy designed, though. Last night Blizzard revealed Orisa, and popped the tanky four-legged deathbot onto the public test servers for all to tinker with.
If you want the hard, serious lore: a ne'er-do-well named Doomfist was causing trouble in the neighbourhood and smashed up everyone's robot friends, so a clever girl named Efi built Orisa from the guts of those bashed bots. Voila! A four-legged, long-range tanky character joins the Overwatchers. See:
As for what Orisa actually does, Blizzard say:
"Orisa's main weapon is her rapid-fire Fusion Driver, an automatic gun with good range and accuracy even at a distance—though it comes at a cost, as Orisa’s movement slows down while she fires. Her alternate fire, Halt!, launches a graviton charge across the map, slowing nearby enemies as it passes, then pulling them toward it when it detonates.
"Her Fortify ability boosts her personal defense, reducing damage taken and making her unstoppable for a short time. She can throw a device that creates a curved, stationary Protective Barrier, perfect for intercepting projectiles and shielding teammates. Lastly, as her ultimate ability, Orisa deploys a high-powered Supercharger that beams a buff to allies within its range, increasing the damage they can inflict on the opposing team."
If you want to check out Orisa before she officially joins Overwatch, you can hop onto the public test realm. Also now on the PTR is a slight depowering for Bastion, who's been something of a monster since recent buffs. Overwatch game game director Jeff Kaplan has written a bit about balancing about the meta, acknowledging Bastion is overpowered but getting into interesting stuff about how "often, the perception of what the meta is does not match what the actual meta is." He says:
"The perceived meta is largely driven off of the professional scene and what gets played in tournaments. After those tournaments, really cool reports are written analyzing the pro scene. Those reports go out of their way to say that they are solely reflective of the pro scene and not necessarily representative of the playerbase at large. Yet people cite the pro pick choices as gospel. One thing that I found interesting was that there was a perception based on those reports and in the community that Mercy is never played. Yet according to our stats back during the "3 tank meta" when "Lucio and Ana were the only viable healers", Mercy was the 5th most played hero OVERALL -- and yes, I am talking about in Competitive Play, not Quick Play."
Oh and hey, here's Kaplan again to explain a lot more about Orisa's lore, abilities, and place in the meta:
