Moira’s Necrotic Orb is being reverted, Overwatch devs say

Moira’s Necrotic Orb ability is being reverted for future betas and Overwatch League builds, the Overwatch 2 development team has revealed.

In a blog post discussing post-beta changes for Moira and Mercy, the dev team explained that Necrotic Orb made Moira’s gameplay feel too passive. Its high cooldown and strong effect meant that players tended to hold on to it while waiting for the perfect moment, which resulted in less of an impact during matches than the dev team expected.

As a result, Moira became more like a typical healer with occasional bursts of damage, which doesn’t match her character or gameplay role as well as her old abilities. Necrotic Orb will be removed by the time the OWL begins on Aug. 11.

The team also discussed its changes to Mercy’s Guardian Angel. During the beta, the team used the “super jump” Mercy bug as inspiration for changes that gave her more power over where she flew and at what point she landed after being in the air.

In the blog post, Blizzard revealed it is testing another version of Guardian Angel that incorporates both the super jump capacity and the new directional changes in order to give players more control over their path than ever. The devs noted specifically the new build will allow Mercy to launch straight up when canceling Guardian Angel with jump, but that she won’t have to look up in order to travel there.

Before Necrotic Orb, Moira’s ability was named Biotic Orb. It allowed Moira to fire either a damaging orb or a healing orb; both orbs shared a single cooldown, and only one could be used at a time. It had a much lower cooldown than Necrotic Orb, but its damage potential was slightly lower and it didn’t grant the Weakened debuff.