[Update]: Overwatch 2's Season 9 has arrived with massive changes to core principles like health and damage.

Once it arrives this February, Overwatch 2's Season 9 will bring with it some drastic changes in order to shake up the rather messy current metagame. The end goal, as you might imagine, is to shift the gameplay from 'heal spam vs damage spam' to more varied and interesting playstyles where all sorts of heroes can shine.

In order to achieve this, Season 9 will be adding a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive to both Damage and Tank heroes. This should, in theory, reduce the pressure on Support players as everyone will be able to manage their own health while out of combat. More importantly, it will also give dive heroes a bit of a boost as they'll now be able to constantly harass the enemy without having to glue themselves to a health pack or rely on heroes like Ana to keep them alive.

Furthermore, Season 9 will also be reducing various sources of burst damage in order to make combat flow better, though the exact details about that are still few and far between. I can only imagine this will be accompanied by an overall nerf to burst healing as well, because those are the two sides of the same coin. If so, I definitely agree as watching a tank's health go up and down like a yo-yo is a bit ridiculous.

Balance aside, Blizzard is also looking to improve the core gameplay experience. As such, in order to test out some of their theories they'll be releasing a bunch of Quickplay: Hacked events that will add special rulesets to regular ol' Quickplay in an effort to see if it makes the game better.

For example, the first one made matches significantly faster - something that sounded good on paper, yet in practice ended up being kind of messy. So as disruptive as these events may be, I'm glad to see Blizzard at least try a couple of new things as there's always something that can be improved, even if we don't know what it is just yet.

Whatever the case may be, I'll make sure to let you know once Blizzard finally spills the beans on the big changes coming with Season 9. Until then, you can read a little bit more about their plans and ideas over at the official website. Enjoy!