Ever since the first Overwatch cinematic appeared Doomfist has been the hero everyone wanted to play around with, so when he finally reached the live servers I highly doubt anyone was really surprised to see him soar in terms of pick rate. However, while he was a fun hero to play, he was also somewhat overpowered since his Rocket Punch could instantly kill you even around corners due to its massive hitbox. As expected, this eventually led to a small nerf, but unfortunately that nerf also brought with it more bugs than even someone as strong as Doomfist could bear.

After this patch Doomfist went from being one of the strongest heroes in the game to one of the worst, with a competitive win rate that mostly hovered around a miserable 46%. A truly unfortunate fate for a character that rode in on such a massive hype-wave. Thankfully, this sad state of affairs is soon going to end as Blizzard has just announced a whole bunch of bug fixes and tweaks to Doomfist's abilities. There is no easy way to summarize the changes, so here's the full list:

Things that are fixed

• Wall slamming should be much improved. The wall slamming logic has also been simplified so players should find that a 45 degree impact angle is the cutoff between the target being slammed into the wall, or sliding off. This is the biggest change that should be noticeable instantly.

• Rocket Punch now breaks breakables again. Not only was the bug fixed that caused it to no longer break breakables, but the system we have in place now should break them much more consistently than before.

• Seismic Slam being canceled when landing too close to a wall should be fixed.

• Seismic Slam will now ‘slide’ a small ways up ramps instead of instantly triggering. Winston’s leap has also changed in the same way. The slide distance is manually tuned so let us know if it seems like he is sliding up ramps too much or too little.

Things we’re still working on

• Seismic Slam has a bug when you or your target is near a corner, it will sometimes not find them as a valid target. We have identified this bug but it is going to take a little longer to get a fix in place.

• Ghost punches. This is an issue where you Rocket Punch and go through an enemy, instead of impact them. Some of these reports are latency related, but we did find an issue that was causing this to come up beyond just typical networking issues. Hopefully we’ll get in a fix in soon.

• Corner bounce. This happens if you use Rocket Punch near a corner or edge, and it causes you to ‘bounce’ off and slide quite a ways away, probably messing up your punch. This is a recent bug caused by a seemingly unrelated change. We have identified why this can happen though, and are working on a fix for it.

Things we’re still investigating

• Rocket punch vs. Rocket Punch/Charge. We get reports that it can feel really ‘random’ what happens when 2 Doomfists using Rocket Punch hit each other, or a Reinhardt using charge hits a Doomfist that is Rocket Punching. We’re still gathering data and information on this one, and hope to be able to improve the consistency of situation. The intended result is that both players should fall over, much in the same way that two Reinhardts charging into each other knocks both of them down.

• Aerial Seismic Slam sometimes causing Grounded Seismic Slam. We’ve gotten reports of people being up in the air and using Seismic Slam sometimes triggering the ‘Grounded’ version instead of the ‘Aerial’ version. This one seems really rare so its pretty hard to track down, but we’re looking into it.

The first set of these changes are already up on the PTR, so if you feel like giving Doomfist another chance now would be the time to do so. I've only done some brief testing and he does at least feel much more consistent, which should go a long way towards facilitating his return into actual, serious competitive play. I certainly hope so as Doomfist really adds an interesting dynamic to the matches he's in.

As for the future, you'll also be glad to hear that Blizzard will be doing more detailed patch notes from now on! Its not exactly a massive change in the grand scheme of things, but it should go a long way towards removing the rampant confusion and rumor-mongering that happens every time a major patch gets released. With all of that said, I'll leave you to go and toy around with Doomfist. Have fun!