Less than a month after the end of the Winter Wonderland, Blizzard has come out with a new event to celebrate the new year: specifically, the Year of the Rooster event, lasting from January 24th to February 13th.
While they’re a little late to the party on celebrating most of the world’s new year, they’re right on time for the Chinese new year, and the theming of the event matches right up with that, with many heroes receiving Chinese celebratory skins and voice lines, every hero receiving a new spray, and Lijiang Tower having a fireworks celebration occur in the background of the massive firefights you’ll be partaking in. On top of that, capture the flag has been added as this event’s special gamemode, with its own small Overwatch twist, and there have been some tweaks and fixes to several heroes and various other changes.
Things aren’t looking so great for D.Va this patch. (Image Source: Digital Trends)
The long-awaited emote wheel update has arrived, now allowing players to equip up to 4 different voice lines, sprays, and emotes to be used in battle. The kill feed has also received an update, with headshot kills and ultimate kills being specifically marked outside of normal kills.
As for hero changes, I hope you liked playing as D.Va before this update, because she took a massive and pretty unnecessary hit this patch. 200 of her armor has been replaced with standard HP, her bullet damage has been cut down significantly, and there’s currently a bug where D.Va will be ejected underneath the map upon the destruction of her mech in the 1v1 and 3v3 modes, sending pilot D.Va instantly to her death. Hopefully things will look better for the gamer girl next patch.
In other news, Roadhog has received yet another fix to his hook, Lucio can now wallride backwards, Sombra’s hacking ability has been sped up, and Ana’s biotic grenade now lasts a second shorter and gives 50% less of a healing boost.
As with every previous event, many themed skins are now available. (Image Source: Mashable)
The Lunar New Year event also brings some new things, among them are lots of new skins for heroes. Though I won’t go over all of them, some of the highlights include Mei’s very cute oriental dress and hairdo, Zenyatta’s oddly disturbing mask and crown, D’Va’s weeby but charming new outfit, and Roadhog’s funny looking pig king skin. As stated earlier, every hero has also received a new spray for the new year, and there are several new highlight intros and emotes that I suggest you go check out.
As with any seasonal event, the major addition to this one is the special gamemode, capture the flag. This gamemode is as it sounds, a capture the flag match between two teams. Though Blizzard commented they initially wanted to disallow movement abilities, they decided against it, and instead of one small change where the player capturing the flag must stand on the flag and receive no damage for several seconds in order to pick it up, there have been no other changes to the formula. Though the gamemode is currently on Lijiang Tower only and is an arcade mode exclusive, Blizzard has commented they are open to the idea of making capture the flag an official gamemode at some point in the future.
