The hitboxes in Overwatch are quite large. Headshots can land even when the head is not visible.

Headshot without seeing the opponent

Anyone who plays many shooters surely knows the term “hitboxes” – these are basically areas on a character that need to be hit by weapons to inflict damage. Depending on the character, these hitboxes vary in size. No wonder, a slim Symmetra is harder to hit than a bulky Roadhog. However, a special feature are the hitboxes for heads in Overwatch, because hitting them deals double damage with most weapons. However, those who think that the hitbox is only as large as the actual displayed head of the respective character are mistaken!

The YouTuber Force Gaming shows in his latest video how large the hitboxes actually are.

A second factor is the used weapon. Projectiles, such as Mei’s icicles or Hanzo’s arrow, also have a relatively large hitbox, which further enhances the aforementioned effect. As long as both hitboxes “barely” touch, it counts as a headshot. This makes it possible to eliminate opponents with headshots even if they are completely covered by a wall.

Mein-MMO says: Of course, it is frustrating when one gets shot “around corners” because the hitbox of a projectile or one’s own head is significantly larger than one might expect from other shooters. Especially in the video, when one sees the exact dimensions of the hotbox, it can seem quite silly. However, in fluid gameplay, it fits well into the feeling of Overwatch – still, some deaths feel quite unfair due to this. It would at least be commendable if Blizzard implemented some kind of check to verify whether a character is at least visible in the line of fire.

For more news and articles about Blizzard’s hero shooter, you can find them on our Overwatch game page.

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In our guide, we reveal how to keep the team alive with Mercy from Overwatch and become a real pain for the enemies.

Angela “Mercy” Ziegler – The Savior of the Injured

We continue our series of Overwatch guides and this time focus on the Swiss Angela Ziegler, who should be better known to players as Mercy. In Overwatch, she is a supporter and is responsible for the health of her team. However, we will tell you what special aspects you need to consider in order to be a “good” Mercy.

Mercy in Raw Numbers

• Mercy has 200 health points and regenerates 22 HP every second if she hasn’t been attacked in the last 2 seconds.
• Mercy’s Caduceus Staff (yellow beam) heals an ally for 50 health points per second.
• In the alternate fire mode (blue beam), it enhances the damage dealt by targeted allies by 30%.
• The Caduceus Pistol has 20 shots, each dealing 20 damage (40 on headshot), firing 5 shots per second.

Heal or Boost?

The difference between a good and a bad Mercy is the timely switch from healing to boosting. It is important to always keep in mind that it is not necessary to keep the entire team at 100% health all the time. The game’s audio cues are especially important as they give you valuable tips – provided you know all the other heroes at least roughly. Do you hear that Roadhog just threw his hook? After that, he will land a pretty safe headshot on the person he has pulled – so boost that damage! Did Widowmaker use her ultimate? Boost her, because she is sure to surprise some enemies.

An important tip to internalize: Every character functions independently of their current HP. As long as a character still has health points, they deal full damage. This may sound trivial, but it means in clear words: Only ensure that allies are rescued from the “deadly zone” where they will die from most abilities.

Revival – When the Whole Team Returns

Revival resurrects all fallen allies within 15 meters of Mercy.

• After revival, players are immune to damage for ~1 second but cannot shoot yet. However, they can still contest control points during this time! Use this knowledge to turn a game around at the very last second.
• Activating revival leaves Mercy motionless for about a second. Since the other characters are immune to damage, enemies will focus on you. So know that revival is almost always your own death sentence.
• Revival can be quickly filled by healing and boosting. Don’t wait for a “perfect” revival with 4 or 5 dead – that won’t happen often. Often, it is already sensible to let only one or two people resurrect.

When Do I Use the Caduceus Pistol?

In order not to leave Mercy completely defenseless, she can switch to her Caduceus Pistol if necessary. However, this should be avoided in 99% of all cases. Each shot does deal 20 damage, but the projectiles fly quite slowly. More importantly: While Mercy is shooting, she is not healing. The pistol should only be a last resort when you are either completely on your own or there is absolutely nothing to heal or boost – such as when you are behind Reinhardt’s shield and the rest of the team is absent. In general, it can be said: If Mercy pulls out the pistol, something is going wrong.

When is a Mercy Useful?

As with Lúcio and Zenyatta, it is generally always sensible to have at least one healing hero in the team to gain the upper hand in prolonged firefights. However, there are some heroes that harmonize better with Mercy than others. Particularly easy to boost group members are Soldier: 76, McCree, Pharah, Junkrat, Widowmaker, and Bastion.

A Pharah on the team proves particularly helpful since she can quickly ascend into the sky – and Mercy can follow her with “Guardian Angel” directly.

General Tips for Mercy

To conclude, we have a whole bunch of tips and tricks for you that can help you improve as Mercy.

• Don’t forget your melee attack! You can also strike with the Caduceus Staff in close combat. While this briefly interrupts healing/boosting, these 30 damage points can mean the difference between life and death, especially against weak characters like Tracer or Zenyatta.
• Healing and boosting require line of sight to be triggered. However, both beams remain active for a few seconds after line of sight is broken – use this knowledge to continue healing while hiding.
• Mercy’s mobility is her lifeline. Remember that you can also fly to “dead” players by targeting their souls.

  

• Both beams have a pretty high range of 15 meters. It is not necessary to stay right next to the player you are supporting, as this only invites both of you to be killed by area attacks.
• The boost increases damage only at the moment you buff the respective player. This is particularly important for Junkrat – he must be boosted when his grenades explode and not when he fires them. The same applies to Symmetra’s alternate fire and Reinhardt’s hammer strike.

You can find more guides and tips in our overview article on Overwatch. Do you have any tips for Mercy yourself? Then share your tips with us in the comments!

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Overwatch is quite well balanced, but some heroes are still too strong or too weak. Therefore, Cowboy McCree should be nerfed, while Mech gamer D.Va is to receive a buff. We have new information about the planned changes!

Currently, a lone cowboy is upsetting Overwatch players. Because gunslinger McCree is a real DPS machine with his secondary fire mode “Bullet Storm” and can put even seasoned tanks like Winston or Zarya in serious trouble. But according to game designer Jeff Kaplan, that’s not actually his job, because fundamentally, McCree should be more of a threat to light and medium heroes. So Tracer and not Winston.

“McCree should absolutely be able to take out a Tracer. What we’re not very happy about is that McCree can totally demolish tanks. We want to reduce the damage of “Bullet Storm” so that he can still kill “squishies” and medium heroes, but will be less effective against tanks. If everything goes perfectly and he hits every single shot, he should have a chance against tanks, but not this instant “I win” button that he currently has.”

What about D.Va?

The nerf patch for McCree is said to come sooner rather than later, as the McCree situation is currently causing some discontent among players. However, Kaplan is not yet entirely sure what to do with D.Va. Because the Korean gamer in her pink mech is not functioning as she should.

As a tank, she should always be at the front, but there she dies too quickly. In addition, she only deals significant damage at close range, and at that range, her survival chance drops rapidly. Therefore, the developers will look for ways to improve both D.Va’s damage output and survivability. But for now, McCree takes priority.

What do you think of Blizzard’s balance plans? Is McCree really too strong or are you afraid that he will be rendered insignificant by the nerf? And how would you buff D.Va? Write it in the comments! And don’t forget our overview of guides and tips for Overwatch!

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Good Wednesday afternoon everyone! It’s already 5 in the morning and the boss is gently asking if I have “Mecker Wednesday” on my mind. Of course – right after just “one more round” Overwatch. But the game simply doesn’t have enough content!

You can already see where this is headed today. Overwatch has been out for almost 2 weeks, and since the game falls largely under my reporting, I have to deal with several comments and discussions. What really bothers me are the (in my opinion) poorly thought-out complaints that the game lacks content. Sure, it’s not always sensible to look back, because games were developed, distributed, and maintained differently back then. Nevertheless, it well illustrates the shift in expectations that has crept into the minds of players over the last decade. Did we scream for new “content” back then? No, we did not. Games on the consoles that accompanied a large part of my childhood, such as Mario Party (the good old… parts 1-3), Warcraft 3, or Counter Strike (which I was never good at – but hey, it was fun on a LAN). Back then, there were no cries for new and more content – why would there be? The fun in these games was (and still is, to some extent) to engage with what you already know and what has been proven, and to get better constantly in order to compete with friends.

Do multiplayer titles need “content”?

And while it may seem that I’m just trying to “defend” Overwatch, these demands really annoy me. I’ve put so many hours into other games, like Left 4 Dead 2 and Evolve, and I was satisfied with what the games offered. The variety in these games comes from encountering other players. Every round is different, no fight is the same. That is – at least for me – significantly more “content” than much else that developers could still add.

Perhaps I just have a different definition of content than all those players in the comments. A game like Witcher 3 needs a lot of “content”, since it’s a single-player RPG. World of Warcraft needs more “content”, otherwise the item spiral doesn’t work anymore. But Overwatch, as a pure multiplayer title? Nah. Not from my perspective.

What do you think? Do shooters that are announced from the start as pure multiplayer titles really need more “content” in the form of single-player campaigns or similar things?

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In an interview, Jeff Kaplan talks about the upcoming Ranked mode of Overwatch and also shares some words about the mysterious “Sombra”.

Ranked mode is solid, final tests underway

The colleagues from Eurogamer had the opportunity to conduct a detailed interview with Jeff Kaplan, the Game Director of Overwatch. Most of the questions revolved around the upcoming update, the ranked game mode, and “Sombra”, a potential new hero in Overwatch.

More skill, less farming

Even during the closed beta, players could try out the ranked game mode of Overwatch. However, neither the team nor the player base was really satisfied with it, which is why they wanted to tackle two major points.

The original system felt too much like “progress”. Players started at the lowest rank and had to work their way up slowly. There were several tiers and divisions through which you could slowly progress. You started as a “beginner” with one star, and through wins, you gained more stars until you promoted to the new rank “Advanced”. Within a rank, you could lose and gain stars, but you could never drop out of your rank – so anyone who was “Advanced” and kept losing remained so.

Professionals particularly criticized that sooner or later, any player could reach the high ranks if they just had a small streak of good luck. For this reason, the new system will be more straightforward: those who win will rank up. Those who lose will rank down. There will no longer be a “safety net”.

The second important point was the duration of a season. These should last one month each, similar to Hearthstone. However, players felt that was too little time, especially in combination with the ranking system. The new plan is for a season to last 10 weeks, followed by a 2-week “break”, before the next season begins – so one season each quarter.

A specific date for the first major patch has not yet been set, but they are still aiming for “late June”. However, they make no promises if there are any last-minute issues – so that no one will be disappointed.

And what about the “new heroine” Sombra?

At the end of the interview, they asked Kaplan again about Sombra – according to the hints in the game and the theory of many players, she is Pharah’s mother and could be implemented as a new hero in Overwatch in the near future.

“We have spread many hints in and outside of the game. I would say it’s slowly time for players to ask who Sombra really is. I hope fans continue to search and find even more hints that are hidden out there.”

And with that, Kaplan opens the new scavenger hunt, because when asked the last question “So have they not found all the hints yet?” he responds with a clear: “No”.

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In South Korea, Overwatch also achieved full success and surpassed almost all other games.

Entry directly to 2nd place of the most played games

For several weeks now, Overwatch has been playable worldwide. After Blizzard announced that more than 7,000,000 players have decided to purchase the hero shooter, the number is likely to have increased significantly again. However, purchases do not necessarily mean that a game is played a lot, right?

That’s why further information is so important to properly assess the current success of Overwatch. A prime example is South Korea, where a large portion of games are played in internet cafes, known as PC Bangs. In the West, such internet cafes have been more of a trend; we moved gaming “home.” In parts of Asia, these PC Bangs have essentially replaced the old “arcades” and are an important part of gaming culture.

According to data from Gametrics, Overwatch pushed almost all popular titles aside in its release week and entered directly at 2nd place, with 14.7% of total playtime. This left games like Sudden Attack (12.8%), Fifa Online 3 (5.4%), Lineage (3.6%), and StarCraft (3.3%) behind. Only League of Legends remains in first place with a significant margin at 35.2%, but had to give up 10% of its players to Overwatch.

The great success also comes from the fact that Blizzard offered special discounts in internet cafes at the game’s launch.

Mein-MMO says: Even though the data at the launch of a game is not very indicative, as the hype is usually the largest at the beginning, this is still good news for Blizzard. Whether Overwatch’s success is just a temporary phenomenon or whether the game will be a long-term hit will be decided by the players in the coming weeks. This will also significantly depend on how quickly Blizzard implements further game modes, maps, heroes, and of course the overdue “Ranked Play”.

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