The biggest takeaway from the new Overwatch 2 beta patch is the complete reworking of Support hero Moira. Her Biotic Orb is being entirely reworked being split into two, with more changes planned for the rest of her kit to compensate.
Overwatch 2 is well and truly into its beta era, with Blizzard working on fixing up many issues within the game. With new heroes like Junker Queen making waves and a distinct change up in gameplay style, many older heroes getting reworks as a way to fix balancing issues in the game.
The July 11 patch notes for Overwatch 2 includes many quality of life fixes as well as making some big changes to a few of the Support heroes in the game. While Mercy got a few tweaks, the main change up came the way of Moira.
Here are some of the biggest changes for Moira in the recent patch and what these could mean for the hero going forward.
Moira’s Biotic Orb Ability now split in two, Blizzard gives reasoning
While Moira will still use her Biotic Orb ability, it will now look vastly different. The devs have added a new ability to her arsenal called the Necrotic Orb. Moving forward, Biotic Orb will no longer include the Damage Orb. The Healing Orb’s capacity will be dropping from 300 to 250, and the cooldown will increase from 8 to 10 seconds.
The new Necrotic Orb ability is temporarily named “Enfeebling Orb” in-game. Replacing the Damage Orb, it has a separate cooldown of 16 seconds. It fires a straight moving projectile that, on impact with an enemy or environment, explodes in a 3 meter radius. Moira’s Necrotic Orb deals 40 impact damage and 10 explosive damage and those affected by it will receive the “Weakened” effect. This will reduce all damage dealt by 75% for 4 seconds.
This Overwatch 2 Moira rework comes in wake of many heroes fixes and changes ahead of the game going live on October 4. Overwatch devs Blizzard explained in the patch notes their reasoning for the change up.
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“Moira’s strengths lie in her extreme survivability, high healing throughput, and consistent damage output, but other supports have at least one utility option or play-making ability.
“To remedy this, Biotic Orb has been split into two abilities on separate cooldowns: Biotic Orb and Necrotic Orb. Due to Necrotic Orb’s potential to shut down many Ultimates and heavily swing duels in her favor, Moira has also received some compensation nerfs to her overall power.”
Those compensation nerfs are targeting her Biotic Grasp and Fade.
For her Biotic Grasp, self-healing is decreasing from 24 to 20 per second, reducing the amount one can heal when using the ability. Fade’s cooldown will increase from 6 seconds to 7 seconds.
Both these drawbacks are minor but will impact how Moira is able to engage in combat situations.