Overwatch’s new patch includes rotating competitive map pool, date changes

A new Overwatch patch went live on November 5 and it contains hero updates along with some big changes to the way Competitive play works in the game.

Jeff Kaplan and the Overwatch team revealed that Competitive play would have a new map pool coming for Season 19 at BlizzCon 2019. 

The dreaded Paris and Horizon Lunar Colony maps are now out of the Competitive map rotation, which has 12 set maps for the entirety of Season 19.

Players will be able to say “au revoir” to Paris for Season 19 of Competitive play.

What are the Competitive changes?

It seems Jeff wasn’t lying when he said he wanted to implement the changes to Overwatch’s Competitive play “as soon as next week” on November 2 at BlizzCon.

Overwatch Developers did reveal they would be removing Paris and Horizon at BlizzCon, but the patch also revamps the starting and end dates for all Competitive seasons going forward.

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The Season 19 Map Pool is as follows:

• Assault: Hanamura, Temple of Anubis, Volskaya Industries
• Hybrid: Hollywood, King’s Row, Eichenwald
• Control: Nepal, Lijiang Tower, Busan
• Escort: Dorado, Watchpoint: Gibraltar, Havana

Horizon is also out of Competitive Season 19.

Starting with Season 19, all Competitive Overwatch seasons will begin (and end) on the first Thursday of every other month.

Going along with that, Season 19 will officially begin on November 7. Along with the map and schedule changes, there are also hero updates for Baptiste, Torbjorn, and few other heroes as well.

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The cost of Torbjorn’s Molten Core ultimate has been reduced by 10 percent, and Baptiste’s healing fire should be more effective at range and heal quicker with reduced recovery time.

So, along with not having to play two of the least popular maps in Overwatch this season, we could also be seeing more Torb and an increase in people picking Baptiste to along with it.

Baptiste should be a little more effective at dealing healing at range after the update.

There were a ton of changes and updates announced at BlizzCon 2019 with all the Overwatch 2 news, and it didn’t take very long at all for the Competitive changes to arrive.

The full November 5 Overwatch patch notes are listed below:

New Gameplay Option: High Precision Mouse Input

Enabling this option will allow Overwatch to use your mouse’s native polling rate when determining exactly where to shoot. Note: There may be a slight performance cost to enabling this option. More details can be found here.

General Updates

• Starting with Season 19, we are moving the beginning (and end) of competitive play seasons from the 1st of every other month, to the first Thursday of every other month. We will also be starting the season later in the day to better correspond with developer availability during the day. Season 19 now starts on November 7, at 18:00 UTC (10:00 PST, 13:00 EST).
• We will also be introducing a rotating, seasonal Map Pool to competitive play starting with Season 19. The initial map pool for Season 19 has 12 maps, with 3 of each game mode. Future competitive seasons will see maps rotating in and out of the pool, providing each season with a different experience and identity. Information about the current maps available in the map pool is available by opening the information panel of the Competitive Play card.

Season 19 Map Pool:

• Assault: Hanamura, Temple of Anubis, Volskaya Industries
• Hybrid: Hollywood, King’s Row, Eichenwald
• Control: Nepal, Lijiang Tower, Busan
• Escort: Dorado, Watchpoint: Gibraltar, Havana

New Workshop Features:

• Variable Renaming
• Increased number of allowed variables up to 128
• Autosave Preset

New Workshop Values:

• Custom String
• All Tank Heroes
• All Support Heroes
• All Damage Heroes
• Map
• Current Map

General

• Mei’s Icewall, Baptiste’s Immortality Field, and Sigma’s Gravitic Flux will now more heavily prefer edges over placing as far away as possible

Baptiste

Biotic Launcher

• Recovery decreased from 0.45 to 0.36 seconds
• Random spread removed
• Damage falloff range now begins at 25 meters, up from 20

Torbjörn

Molten Core

• Cost reduced 10%

General

• Fixed a bug that made it not possible to bind Left-Click to forward movement
• An appropriate error now appears when trying to accept a friend request after you have reached your limit
• Fixed a bug with spectating that caused “Next Player” and “Previous Player” controls to be reversed when using a controller
• Fixed a bug where sometimes explosion effects would not play for projectiles (like Pharah Rockets or Junkrat Grenades)

Workshop

• Fixed an issue preventing the Balanced Mystery Heroes preset from including Sigma
• Fixed issues preventing Dummy Bots from being used in Elimination
• Fixed an issue preventing the Communicate action from working on Dummy Bots
• “Is Dummy Bot” now returns the correct value when given an argument other than “Event Player”
• Fixed an issue preventing ray casts from colliding with certain objects
• Fixed issues with certain colors not working properly with HUD Text, In-World Text, and Create Icon
• Fixed an issue preventing Set Objective Description from working
• Fixed some discrepancies with Point Capture Percentage between certain modes
• Fixed an issue preventing rules from being properly disabled if the player target was a hero
• Fixed an issue preventing Soldier: 76 dummy bots from being able to Sprint
• Fixed an issue preventing null entities returned from Ray Cast Hit Player from being equivalent to null
• Fixed an issue preventing Disallow Button from disabling the Interact Button
• Fixed a bug where accessing other menus while in the Workshop caused any recent unsaved changes to be lost

Maps

• Volskaya – Removed a gap in the walls near point B that allowed D.Va bombs to kill players behind walls
• Nepal: Sanctum – Removed a tiny gap in the windows near the capture point on Nepal: Sanctum that allowed D.Va bombs to kill players behind walls

Heroes

Ana

• Fixed a bug that caused Ana’s legs to twitch when her Pharaoh skin is equipped
• Fixed a bug where the syringe would be visually missing in her Sleep Dart pistol after the first use

Doomfist

• Fixed a bug where Seismic Slam’s damage indicator was overlapping the reticle if a custom reticle was being used

D.Va

• Fixed a bug that could cause the wrong icon to display in the kill feed when D.Va denies an enemy’s ultimate with her Defense Matrix

Moira

• Fixed a bug that could cause Moira’s Right-Click sound to be behind you rather than in front

Roadhog

• Fixed a bug where Chain Hook could sometimes incorrectly connect with Symmetra’s Teleporter, Ashe’s Dynamite, and Junkrat’s Steel Trap and Concussion Mine

Sombra

• Fixed a bug where Sombra rarely would not properly translocate to a payload