Overwatch's 27th hero, a tank/support hybrid by the name of Brigitte, recently made her way onto the test servers. As you might expect from a newly released hero, Brigitte arrived alongside a couple of major balance issues, as well as the ability to essentially fly if you aimed the Shield Bash in just the right way while near a small incline.
With that in mind, I am glad to say that Blizzard has now decided to speed up their usually glacial balancing process and release some much-needed changes to Brigitte. The patch notes aren't very long, so you'll find all of the important bits right below. If you're interested in all of the bug fixes as well, however, you should head on over to the official website. But for now, here's the short version:
Brigitte
• Shield Bash
- Added a small delay before her shield drops after a Shield Bash
- Added a vertical speed cap after Shield Bash
- Please note that we are still tuning this value
• Rocket Flail
- Canceling a melee swing renders you unable to melee again until it would have completed had it not been canceled
• Rally
- Ultimate cost increased by ~30%
• Inspire
- Decreased cooldown from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds
I can fully understand why these changes had to be made, but I must admit I'm still a bit sad Brigitte is losing the ability to incapacitate and kill Tracer. There are so few heroes in the entire game that are able to deal with that pesky mosquito, so to have a tank/support hybrid that's actually capable of reliably fighting back would've been amazing. On the bright side, the Shield Bash combo still deals around 120 damage which should at least force Tracer to recall, thus limiting how aggressively she can dive in.
How exactly all of this will pan out when Brigitte goes into actual games that have players of equal skill on both sides, I'm afraid I don't know, but it's certainly going to be interesting to see her impact on the meta. Personally, I think she's going to be more of an off-tank than a healer, so do be prepared for potentially even triple-support lineups!