Overwatch 2 Season 12 Starring Juno And A New Way To Avoid Dickbags Is Live

Overwatch 2 is now live with its twelfth season of content, introducing the world to New Frontiers – a somewhat sandy saga that has brought the newest support down to Earth.

The Season 12 Patch Notes are here 💥

🧨 Junkrat Frag Launcher projectile size reduced after 2nd ricochet
🌸 Lifeweaver Pedal Platform health reduced
😇 Mercy Caduceus Staff healing increased
🧑‍🚀 Juno Orbital Ray travel speed increased

✨ https://t.co/JvSLXsRTCL pic.twitter.com/KoHZhZ56yI

— Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) August 20, 2024

Besides adding Juno to the game, there are also some amazing system improvements to take into account – such as the massive revamp of the Avoid As Teammate system.

Initially a simplistic tool that aimed to…well, avoid certain teammates; the evolving needs of players saw fit to expand and improve how this works. Having a paltry number of slots didn’t quite work, and simply expanding the list would just cause havoc with matchmaking if every player had a dozen people to avoid – so a little finesse has been applied to the system.

From the patch notes:

• Players now have 15 avoid slots divided into 3 Pinned slots and 12 Recent slots.
• Pinned Avoid slots guarantee that these players will never be in your matches and unlike our old Avoid slots, they never time out.
• The new Recent Avoid slots do time out after 7 days like the old Avoid slots, and they only prioritize constructing teams without these players on them.
• The player with the lowest time remaining in the Recent list is removed from the list if a new player is avoided when the list is full.
• Time Remaining for an avoided player in the Recent list can be refreshed by using the Reset Avoid Expiration feature.
• The Avoid List is now its own tab in the Social menu (which still only appears when at least 1 player is avoided).
• Any players that were avoided when Season 11 ended will be removed from the avoided list due to the aforementioned updates to the system.

This makes perfect sense, at least for a player like me, as often my desire to avoid would be mostly derived from a particular play session – where someone has taken a disliking to me and has ended up in a number of my games bringing their specific brand of tomfoolery. This feels ideal for the expiring avoid slots, because after 7 days I am sure the two of us will not remember whatever caused the silliness and we can forge fresh new beef.

There is also a ton of room to tweak this system, so if it doesn’t quite work for more involved players there is room for improvement.

Similarly, a rather curious tweak has appeared for the respawn system in all non-Competitive modes – hoping to solve the issue with some games turning into a one sided gutter stomp.

From the notes:

• Group Respawn is replaced by Wave Respawn for all non-Competitive modes.
• Wave Respawn is added to Competitive Play.
• Default respawn time increased from 10 to 12 seconds.
• Overtime respawn time increased from 13 to 14 seconds.
• Wave Respawn is disabled in Overtime.
• Overtime respawn time is not increased in Flashpoint.
• Wave Respawn is disabled when the Payload is near the end of the track in Escort and Hybrid game modes (the same time the existing Anti-Stall system activates).
• When the first hero on a team dies, they start a new Wave for their team.
• Any hero that dies within 6 seconds of a Wave starting automatically joins that Wave.
• A hero joining a Wave will respawn at the exact same time as the hero that started the Wave. This means that the respawn time of heroes joining the wave can be as long as 12 seconds if they died at the same time as the first hero or as short as 6 seconds if they catch the end of the Wave.
• If a hero starts a Wave and no other hero joins the Wave they will respawn 2 seconds faster. This hero will respawn in 10 seconds (the default respawn time before Season 12).

I have seen many other games with a similar system, so really I am not surprised this made its way into Overwatch 2. I can definitely attest to the frustration felt when I saw staggered teammate spawns result in people throwing themselves at the enemy team single file, as if their corpses would perhaps slow their advance.

Oh, and they buffed Mercy’s damage boost – both with higher numbers (from 25% to 30%) and a cool visual effect:

WAIT?? MERCY DAMAGE BOOST MAKES HEROES HANDS / WEAPONS GLOW NOW pic.twitter.com/QdZZPyWOkm

— Skiesti 🌻 (@skiesti_) August 20, 2024

Neato.

For a full breakdown of the patch notes, they are of course available via the Blizzard Overwatch feed – but of course you can just jump right in to Season 12 and experience them all for yourself right now.

Does Season 12 of OW2 get you orbiting? Are you a Reaper main, ready to sandblast some tanks? Let us know in the comments or on social media.