[Update]: The Experimental Update has now gone live without changes, though Blizzard did add some developer commentary to help shed light on some of the stranger tweaks.
Now that the Archives 2021 event is no longer hogging all of the spotlight, Blizzard has unleashed another interesting Experimental Update. It might not be quite as bombastic as some of the previous one, but I feel like the update still has a great deal of potential to make the current meta even better.
As for what exactly Blizzard is testing, and which heroes are getting slapped by the nerf-bat, that you can find out right below. Here's the full list of the experimental changes:
Baptiste
• Biotic Launcher (Secondary Fire)
- Healing projectile explosion reduced from 60 to 50 health
- Healing projectile direct impact now restores an additional 20 health• Immortality Field
- Now protects teammates to a minimum health threshold of 10% maximum health, down from 20%
D.Va
• Call Mech
- Damage increased from 50 to 250
Echo
• Duplicate
- When Duplicate ends, Echo will return to the health value she had prior to activating the ability, or to 100 health, whichever is higher
Moira
• Biotic Orb
- Cooldown reduced from 10 to 8 seconds
Orisa
• Halt!
- Cooldown reduced from 8 to 6 seconds
Reinhardt
• General
- Armor reduced from 250 to 200 (Health/armor total reduced from 550 to 500)
Roadhog
• Scrap Gun (Primary and Secondary Fire)
- Damage per projectile increased from 6 to 6.6
Sombra
• Stealth
- Fade time when entering or exiting Stealth reduced from 0.75 to 0.45 seconds
- Movement speed bonus increased from 50 to 60%
It's a bit of a strange patch, I'll be the first one to admit that, but that's kind of why I like it. The balance is already in a pretty good place, at least as far as standard Competitive Play is concerned, so there's really no reason for drastic changes. As such, putting out these sorts of minor yet still relevant tweaks seems like the perfect way forward. None of them are big enough to really break the game, yet they might make a few underused heroes become slightly more popular, which is always a positive in my book.
Whether all of these tweaks will actually make it to the live servers though, that still remains to be seen. Whatever the case may be, I encourage you to give the experimental mode a try and to offer Blizzard some much-needed feedback. They've pulled back unpopular changes before, so it's well worth the small trouble.
Have fun testing!