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Overwatch Talon reign season 1 I started to decline, and that was the bigger story Five new heroes Who joined the list. A lot of attention has been directed to Jetpack Cat, a hero that was once scrapped in the game’s early design, but was revived on the cusp of the game’s 10th anniversary. It was a topic Ban and com. memory Due to her unique combo of always flying and the ability to fly any other hero into the air with her Lifeline ability.
But another support hero has come under the radar as one of the most played characters in the new season: Mizuki.
Mizuki is a complex hero, similar on paper to supporting heroes Brigitte and Lucio, who mix damage with healing in a radius around them, but with his own unique mechanics. He has a constant healing aura around him, which grows stronger when he takes damage with his weapon or uses other healing abilities. His main weapon is a projectile that bounces off surfaces. One of his abilities, Katashiro Return, provides a burst of movement, but also the ability to teleport back to your starting point within a few seconds.
All of this adds up to a hero design that gives players plenty of options but also requires you to carefully strategize to turn the tide of battle. Do you stay with your team to maximize the value of your healing aura? Or do you part ways with them for riskier, higher-reward play? Do you use your Katashiro Return ability to get behind the enemy team, or save to disengage from an unexpected attack?
In this clip, I used Mizuki’s Katashiro Return ability to take a risky situation while ensuring escape. Good thing too, because I didn’t expect to meet Junkers in a small room.
Despite spending most of my time in Overwatch playing support heroes, including Ana and Kiriko, I found Mizuki a challenge early in the season, even as I watched enemy Mizukis safely deal damage and clutch kills while constantly healing their teams.
This “unlockable challenge” element was an intentional part of Mizuki’s design, as I would soon learn from chatting with the hero’s creator, a former Overwatch eSports pro.
By and large, the supporting players have accepted this challenge. “Mizuki is consistently in the top four of all support picks in Season 1, in every region,” an Overwatch spokesperson told me via email. It’s one of many elements that are reviving the game, along with a new ongoing story, weekly faction quests, and the promise of more new heroes each season. People have been flocking back to the game since the beginning of the first season Average number of players on Steam More than doubled over the past month.
It was Mizuki-led design Scott “Costa” Kennedya long-standing presence in the Overwatch professional scene as a player, match analyst, and now co-hero designer. I spoke with Scott at Blizzard’s spotlight event and also spoke with him and character artist Mizuki, Melissa Kellyin early March to discuss how to create one of the game’s most iconic heroes.
She fought many of Mizuki’s duels in the first season. I didn’t win them all, but I won this duel.
From professional player to co-designer
After a few years as a professional player and several more as an analyst and broadcaster in the Overwatch League, Kennedy was looking for the next step in his career.
“Overwatch has been my life for the last 10 years in many different aspects,” he said, but when he reached retirement age in the esports world, he wanted a change. He spoke with some of Overwatch’s developers, including associate game director Alec Dawson, about what it takes to get into development for the game.
After doing some quality assurance and hands-on development work for the game (“I made the world’s hardest 2D cat platformer in three days,” he said), Kennedy landed an assistant hero designer slot for Overwatch, which was a perfect fit for his experience.
When Kennedy was tasked with envisioning the game’s next healer, he said he didn’t want to introduce another support designed around “point and shoot” mechanics that heal teammates and hurt enemies, like Anna or Juno.
“I wanted[Mizuki]to be more of a healing aura-type hero in AoE because I think that’s something that’s not represented enough in our heroes,” Kennedy said. Instead, he came up with an area-of-effect heal similar to how Lucio and Brigitte heal, but with the added layer of this healing becoming more powerful the better you play in combat.
Managing this nuance was a learning experience for Kennedy.
“One of the biggest things I’ve learned is how complexity can be really great on paper, but when you make a champion, how quickly it snowballs into a sinking player,” Kennedy said. But he feels the team has finally found a good balance, where inexperienced players can still contribute, while more experienced and skilled players can benefit more.
Mizuki’s concept art adds a distinct edge to his design, but still marks him out as a prop.
Kelly added that Mizuki was a complex hero in terms of design as well.
“One of the problems was that he looked like a ‘damage champion,’” she said. “He seemed too aggressive for a therapist. So we were just trying to tone it down.” Kelly noted that Mizuki’s weapon is a combination of a priest’s staff and a scythe, which also blurs the lines between support heroes and damage heroes.
This nuance seems to be a big part of Mizuki’s appeal. Although I generally prefer the “point-and-shoot” type of healing hero that Kennedy said he wanted to avoid, I found Mizuki to be one of the more interesting additions to the roster, especially among support heroes. His Binding Chain ability, which holds an enemy struck by the chain in place, rewards good aim and timely use, while the Healing Kasa and Katashiro Return abilities allow my brain to think up creative escapes and ambushes.
When I play Mizuki, I’m always thinking while fighting, and I enjoy feeling that kind of active involvement in the game.
Here my Katashiro Return ability allows me to turn the map against the enemy team and give the allies final protection in Kekkai Sanctuary.
Mizuki’s reception and professional playing prospects
Kennedy was concerned that players might be put off by the hero’s complexity – wondering: “Are players going to try it, not get it and then say… ‘I’m just going to play the cat?'” (The cat, of course, is Jetpack Cat, who was released alongside Mizuki in the first season and instantly became one of the most popular and recognizable cats). Most banned heroes. It has a more intuitive and precise design, although its firing state also allows for particularly aggressive play.)
Instead, Kennedy enjoyed watching players stick with Mizuki and later posted about how to “unlock” the hero by discovering the formula To succeed with him. Kennedy said it was rewarding to see players absorb his original concept of the hero as he played it out within the game. After that rather disastrous first game I played, I started clicking with Mizuki as well.
Players are still struggling with parts of Mizuki’s kit, and Kennedy noted some initial frustration with the “deliberate design limitations” he and the team placed on the hero. Players seemed to want to use his Katashiro Return ability to advance on enemy flanks, but found that it didn’t last long enough to successfully move behind enemy teams. This kind of greater repositioning would conflict with the design team’s vision of the hero, who is supposed to stay close to his team and use the ability to quickly return to them.
Now, Kennedy said, “the players seem to understand the limits of the champion, and it’s been great to see that.”
Mizuki’s Spirit Glaive is a unique weapon, especially among the support list.
Mizuki has been off to a strong start, boasting a win rate of nearly 54% in competitive modes since the start of the season. This is a very high number, ranking behind last season’s top performer: damage champion Vendetta. I asked Kennedy how he reads that data — whether Mizuki is outmatched or just a fit among the most played champions this season.
Kennedy said Mizuki was in a “very healthy” position, but it was possible that he could regress a bit in the coming seasons. “The numbers he can put up in terms of healing and damage are things that really put him above everyone else at this point. So it’s definitely something we’re keeping an eye on.”
But that power won’t necessarily translate into Mizuki being selected into professional play, at least based on the Overwatch Championship Series training camp last month. Kennedy said the hero’s kit isn’t as good for surviving and making plays as heroes like Lucio and Kiriko, who have long been must-have picks in professional play.
“I can see Mizuki getting more playtime in a world where we start playing more fast deathmatches (centered around tanks like Ramatra or Orissa),” he said, “but with how fast the game is being played at the highest level, it might be hard for Mizuki to keep up.”
Kennedy talked about one of Overwatch’s biggest and most inescapable challenges in a decade: balancing heroes for both the pro level and the rest of the game, and how the difficulty lies in the fact that some resources — like speed boosts, mobility, and burst damage — are more valuable at the highest levels of coordinated play. He said that the design team is always working to ensure that the heroes do not completely lose balance on any of the skill levels.
This has been working since the launch of Season 1, with balance patches appearing almost every week until the mid-season patch on March 10. These updates focused mostly on the five new heroes but also included some changes to Vendetta, who continues to terrorize the game with a very strong win rate and the ability to chop someone down almost out of nowhere, leaving opponents with little time to react.
However, overall the season has been a win for the game, thanks in large part to the influx of new heroes and the different playstyles they add to the game.
“(I’m) definitely a little surprised at how positive everyone has been with Mizuki — and honestly, the Five Champions in general,” Kennedy said. “I think the reception was amazing. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.”