This article is part of our Personal Playthrough series.
There was plenty of new and exciting features for Overwatch fans to sink into at BlizzCon this year. Not only was a new character, Moira, released, but there was a brand-new map to play on, BlizzardWorld, to boot. We got plenty of hands-on time with both the hero and map to bring some impressions of how it all shapes up.
Moira is strong, duh
With such a unique kit, it was no surprise that Moira was going to be a strong hero. She can (almost) keep up in healing with the likes of Mercy, but can also deal damage at comparable, if not faster, rate than Zenyatta, putting her in a new category in terms of support heroes in the game.
Let's just get the Mercy-sized elephant in the room out of the way first. Moira likely isn't going to replace Mercy as the top healer in the game. Mercy is far too useful in any situation and will continue to be a main healer for as long as her kit remains unchanged from its current state. I often found myself wishing I would revive teammates when I was playing as Moira throughout the weekend. Mercy is here to stay.
That being said, Moira will certainly have a spot in the current meta. Her combination of healing and damage gives her a place on certain team compositions, likely those of the dive variety since her mobility will be key at keeping her team alive and doling our damage. In almost every game I played, either myself or someone was near or at the top of both the damage and healing charts. Granted, we were playing on teams with multiple Moiras, making these results slightly skewed. The fact remains, however, that she brings much to the table.
One thing that I really liked about her kit is that you really have to think situationally to pick-and-choose your battles. Do you use your Biotic Orb ability to heal or to damage? They run on the same cooldown, meaning that taking a look at how a fight is going will be essential to utilizing her correctly. It's not as simple as using Ana left-click to shoot both teammates and enemies to heal and do damage.
Speaking of the left-click, this is another one for Moira that changes how you play the game. Whereas Mercy and Ana are somewhat long-range healers, Moira's left-click heal has a pretty short range, You've got to be within maybe 10 feet or so to actually heal. Not only that, but it has a finite amount of resources before you have to wait for it to recharge. While the timer on said recharge is somewhat long when you're in a pinch, there's a catch, and this is where her right-click comes in. This is her other damage ability and works a bit more similarly to Mercy's heal in that it's a long-range beam, albeit one that does a good amount of damage instead of healing. It has an extra effect of recharging your left-click, making it so that you can't solely focusing on healing without also putting in work as a damage dealer, too.
She's also a pretty mobile hero with the help of her shift ability. In its current state, it will actually allow you to escape a Zarya ultimate, which is a pretty big deal. We'll see if that changes at all between now and the PTR testing.
That brings us to her ultimate, which really rounds out her kit. It's such a different ultimate than what we've seen in the past, with its dual healing and damage hyper nbeam. It hits very hard and is incredibly fun to use in a teamfight. Just pop it and sweep back and forth to shred enemies and heal teammates with relative ease. The fact that it also pierces shields and barriers is doubly great since it allows you to push through pesky Orisas and Reinhardts.
Overall, this is a great addition to the roster and I can't wait until the pros get their hands on her so they can really dig in and use her much better than I ever could.
BlizzardWorld is a fun map filled with tons of easter eggs
The newest map coming to Overwatch is quite literally a Blizzard-themed DisneyLand, complete with rides and attractions featuring plenty of references to every game in the Blizzard universe. Anything from Murloc Island to the Hearthstone Tavern to The Nexus Experience to the Heroes Arcade, this map has it all. While you could spend hours looking in every nook and cranny for easter eggs, there are battles to attend to on this map at the end of the day.
BlizzardWorld is another Assault/Escort hybrid that feels pretty balanced. There is a hard bottleneck at very start, but once the attacking team can get through, taking the point is certainly doable. On the flip side, it's pretty easy to set up a solid defense to stop the attackers from doing much of anything. All in all, this is a nice addition to the map pool and I'm very interested to see the pros battle it out on this on.
