Overall, Overwatch is in a good place right now. The five new heroes Blizzard released for the shooter are dynamic, the focus on story has given us new lore on a weekly basis, and the roadmap for future seasons sounds promising. But like any service game, there’s always going to be something that’s getting on the community’s nerves, and players who use characters whose primary function is to heal are fighting for their lives thanks to one subtle but significant change.
If you play a character like Mercy or Lifeweaver whose primary utility is in straightforward healing, you might’ve noticed that it’s a bit harder to keep your teammates alive than it used to be. That’s because there’s a new universal passive across all heroes that reduces incoming healing on players who have been damaged in the past three seconds. Previously exclusive to damage characters, this reduction lowers healing by 30 percent for most heroes, and 15 percent for tanks since they’re sturdier and have bigger health bars to fill.
Where once you’d have to be chased down by a damage hero and pestered with bullets to feel the effects of this healing reduction, now every opposing hero can limit your support’s healing output for long enough that some characters like Mercy can’t outheal incoming damage like they once did. Heroes like Winston and Moira, who are able to apply constant damage through their beam-like primary fires, can now overpower Mercy’s healing with little effort, even when she’s using her ultimate ability. Because she’s a single-target healer, her entire utility has been cut off at the knees.
People intentionally misunderstanding bc it’s a static example. The point is about how ineffective her healing is now as a single target healer. Mercy takes an eternity to even TRY to sustain her target with little room to DMG boost
Here’s a 6s example in game in Valkyrie https://t.co/wAYRX6A3XM pic.twitter.com/7Q9uY2nVzD
— Skiesti 🌻 (@skiesti_) February 18, 2026
Though Mercy is the most impacted by this change, you can see some pretty damning examples of it for characters like Moira as well, who is having trouble healing teammates who have been focused.
Though supports are struggling right now, some fans argue that this incentivizes players to actually get behind cover and not run into the line of fire with reckless abandon. Which is fair enough, and I would love to not have to Life Grip every tank who thinks they can 1v5 an enemy team through sheer willpower, but if Blizzard is going to keep this universal passive across its heroes, characters like Mercy and Lifeweaver will probably need some kind of rework or buff to keep up. Blizzard has already said both heroes will be getting some of their old Perks integrated into their kits; we’ll see if it’s enough to make them viable in Overwatch’s healing suppression era.
