Amidst all the hype for E3, Blizzard have released the latest patch for their first person shooter Overwatch. The patch brings with it significant nerfs to two of the most popular heroes in the game.

It has long been known that Overwatch's next update would bring about a nerf to the American hero McCree - and it looks like that has been done quite effectively. Blizzard's reasoning for the nerf was that McCree used to be able to take on the entire cast, tanks included, thanks to his secondary fire doing as much as 420 damage in quick succession. Now the bullet damage has decreased to 45 per shot, allowing for a total of 270 damage per unloading.

In this way, Blizzard comments that McCree "is now significantly weaker against tanks like Roadhog and Reinhardt, but still maintains his lethality against smaller targets like Tracer and Genji." The hero's recovery time between reloading, following this bullet barrage has decreased slightly from 0.75 seconds to 0.3 seconds, to help keep the cowboy balanced.

Widowmaker has also seen a nerf with her charged sniper shot now doing 120 damage, rather than the 150 she was putting out upon the game's release. This damage reduction means that the hero can no longer kill Tracer or Zenyatta with a single shot, unless it is a well-placed headshot. To make up for this change, her headshot damage mulitplier has increased from 2x to 2.5x, meaning that a headshot with the Widow's Kiss will still do the same amount of damage as it did pre-patch.

Another change that the sniper saw was the necessity to have the players wait fully for the unscoping animation to finish before rescoping, which should help balance the hero a little more. Blizzard have also seen fit to increase her Ultimate charge cost by 10% and in turn making the infrared vision less active during matches. The rest of the changes to the game can be found here.

At the time of writing, the patch has reportedly been released in America but should be coming to the rest of the world shortly, with maintenance scheduled over the coming hours. The patch is also only available for PC users, following Blizzard's recent announcement that Overwatch will be balanced separately on PC and console.

As of yet there is still no word on the release date of Overwatch's ranked play, though the developer claims that it should be out later this month. Regular patches like this latest one will help ensure that all the heroes feel balanced and viable when ranked matches finally drop.

Overwatch is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

Source: Reddit