Overwatch patch notes reveal nerfs to Widowmaker and McCree

Oh, and the game now has more than 10 million registered players.

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Blizzard has been keeping a close eye on the competitive balance of its various characters, but a new update has nerfed McCree and Widowmaker.

In the patch notes for the update released today, McCree's bullet damage on his Peacekeeper alternate fire was cut almost in half from 70 to 45. Recovery time was decreased from .75 seconds to .3 seconds. The dev teams reasoning? "McCree was performing too well against all targets, making him feel like a must-pick in many situations. By reducing the damage of his alternate fire, McCree is now significantly weaker against tanks like Roadhog and Reinhardt, but still maintains his lethality against smaller targets like Tracer and Genji."

As for Widowmaker, the base damage of Widow's Kiss Scoped Shot was droped form 15 to 12, but the headshot multiplier was increased from 2x to 2.5x. The cost of her Infra-Sight was also increased by 10%. "In the right hands, Widowmaker can often feel unstoppable—even when just landing body shots instead of critical heads shots. The changes to her alternate fire weaken body shot damage while leaving her headshot damage unchanged. Additionally, we felt her Ultimate ability, Infra-Sight, was coming up a little too frequently, especially considering its impact on the game," the notes said.

Various bug fixes were also applied. The changes to McCree were not unexpected. D.Va could be next.

These fixes come on the heels of Blizzards announcement that the game now has 10 million registerd players "and growing" across all platforms. The game launched on May 24, and by June 2, the game had passed the 7 million mark.

That is a tremendous amount of popularity for the game, with little sign of slowing down. And with competitive mode hitting later this month, those numbers are bound to jump even more quickly.

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