One of the new events that Blizzard started for Overwatch 2 is called Quick Play: Hacked, which sees the character Sombra 'take over' the game mode, adding new features for a short time only.
We've seen previous Hacked events discard the one hero limit for Role and Open queue, institute quicker respawn times, and make the payload travel faster, which I wasn't entirely convinced by, if I'm honest. But this time, the Hacked event brings a feature that I didn't know I needed or wanted until now: pickable passive abilities.
Each role will get three passives to choose from at the beginning of a match, but you can change it throughout the game in the hero select screen. The tank passives are: debuff duration reduced by 40%, convert 100 health into armor, and 50% cooldown reduction when below 50% health. Tanks are already pretty strong after a recent major patch, which made them all much stronger, so playing D.Va was great before this, but picking the 100 armor option meant that I was significantly more durable.
The damage passives include: seeing critical health enemies through walls, increasing ammo capacity by 20%, and eliminations granting a 30% speed boost. Playing heroes like Ash and Cassidy, I found that the increased ammo was a massive help, especially when it came to taking on enemy tanks.
But if you tend to play dive heroes like Tracer or Genji, the 30% speed boost would almost definitely be the best option for you, as it'll mean you can get in and out of a fight quicker. Genji can already do this to some extent with ghost dashing, but a speed boost would only make it easier and more effective.
Finally, the support passive includes: 20% reduced cooldowns, 50% increased healing for targets below 35% health, and gaining a brief 20% speed boost when below 50% health. As a support main, these were the changes I was most interested in, and honestly, they did not disappoint.
Ana's gone through a sequence of pretty rough nerfs, whether that be increasing the cooldown for her biotic grenade or making her sleep dart less effective against tanks—it's been rough out here. The old sniper has always been consistently good, and while she's definitely still playable, it has been quite punishing to deal with diving DPS and tanks while also keeping my team healed.
These little adjustments add a new layer of customisation which is incredibly useful.
That's why the pickable passives are such a massive help. They gave me the option to tweak my hero slightly according to the situation. If my opponents were dealing a ridiculous amount of damage, I could pick increased healing to lessen the blow. If I was constantly getting dived on, then the speed boost came in handy. If my team was going on the attack, then the reduced cooldowns helped me keep up with the fights with more sleep darts and biotic grenades.
The pickable passives don't make any drastic changes, which is a good thing, as big sweeping changes for an established meta like Overwatch 2 don't usually go down very well. But these little adjustments add a new layer of customisation which is incredibly useful given how different each fight can be in Overwatch 2.
Blizzard previously mentioned in a blog post that it uses Hacked events as a way to test features: "Testing new ideas with you for a limited time allows us to quickly understand what you like and possibly implement changes to improve gameplay." While this doesn't necessarily mean that everything in a Hacked event will be implemented into the game, I do hope that Blizzard decides to bring pickable passives back in some form in the future.
