Hanzo is causing serious problems for the developers of Overwatch. They had many ideas – but none of them worked.
If you ask the players of Overwatch about the most annoying abilities in the game, two names always come up: Hanzo’s Scatter Arrow and Mercy’s Resurrect. While Mercy is adjusted and fine-tuned patch after patch, Hanzo has so far gotten away without major changes. Did they just forget about it?
No, because Blizzard has already tried some things internally to replace the Scatter Arrow. Three of these failed ideas were presented by Geoff Goodman from Blizzard in the official forum.
Three Failed Hanzo Reworks
Replace Scatter Arrow with Piercing Arrow: Because the Scatter Arrow caused many problems, they wanted to simply replace it. Instead, there was supposed to be a special shot that could fire particularly fast, particularly far, and especially through barriers. A skilled player could thus eliminate a healer through Reinhardt’s shield or take out a Widowmaker at the other end of the map.
This arrow, however, felt too frustrating. When the protective barrier is simply pierced, the fun is lost.
Massive Restrictions for the Scatter Arrow: A second idea was to significantly weaken the Scatter Arrow. It could no longer bounce off the ground, but only off walls and ceilings. At the same time, the arrows would only bounce off walls once and disappear upon the next contact with an object.
This also felt bad, as the arrow was only useful in very few situations.
New “Reload” Ability: Another idea was an additional ability that could be activated by the “Reload” key. Anyone who wanted could play a special animation that lasted 2-3 seconds, but finished the cooldown of the special arrows. Especially in combination with the Piercing Arrow from the first idea, exciting possibilities arose. However, in connection with the Sonic Arrow, this granted permanent vision over a large part of the map, which is why this idea was discarded.
Since then, Blizzard has been lacking the brilliant idea. They are still unsure about the direction Hanzo should take.
Do you have ideas and suggestions on how Hanzo should be adjusted? Or do you particularly like one of the three failed ideas?
Hanzo is so popular that there is even a church for him – one was founded by a fan.
