Out of all the heroes in Overwatch there are few that have suffered as much as Reinhardt has recently. Not only is the meta completely unfavorable to him, but almost all of his spells are currently inconsistent and buggy, which as you might imagine makes playing him about as fun as setting your hair on fire.

Thankfully, the German crusader will soon be getting most of his bugs fixed, as announced by Overwatch's Game Director Jeff Kaplan himself! The whole post is fairly short and to the point, so here it is in full:

A few of the addressed issues (Fire Strike hit box, for example) were fixed before 1.13. The rest have either been fixed or iterated on in 1.13. All of these fixes should be available on the PTR by this afternoon.

Addressed Reinhardt Issues:

• Fire Strike hit-box was too small

• A host of hammer swing issues affected by high network latency have been addressed

• We’ve also increased Reinhardt’s hammer swing speed by 10% in general in 1.13

• Several animation cancelling bugs (also high network latency related) have been fixed

• Fire Strike and Charge animations now synch correctly regardless of network latency

• Charge reliably pins targets instead of knocking them back (Note: we fixed a number of issues and all of the issues we were reliably able to reproduce. Because charge is a cone-based attack and latency is involved, there might be other issues that surface. Providing us reproducible steps or video clips will help us if additional issues arise)

• Charge reliably pins targets when moving up steep stairs/ramps (see above note)

Remaining issues:

• Earthshatter isn’t picking up targets under certain circumstances. We intend to fix this issue in the next patch.

Besides finally getting Reinhardt into a playable state these changes are also incredibly important because they, along with the rest of the recently announced buffs, are exactly the sort of tweaks Overwatch needs right now in order to combat the dominance of dive teams. Whether or not this strategy will work, I'm honestly not sure, but I'm very glad to see that Blizzard is choosing to buff underutilized heroes rather than nerf those that are seemingly overpowered. Its going to take a little while before an equilibrium is found, but once a certain level of balance is established we're going to have many more viable heroes to mess around with, and that is always a good thing!