Genius Moira rework would give Overwatch hero exploding orbs

Michael Gwilliam
Moira in her lab on Oasis

Overwatch’s support hero Moira has proven to be quite controversial since her introduction to the game. Now, a new rework idea has surfaced turning her damage orbs into an explosive healing mitigation ability.

For many, Moira’s biggest problem lies in the fact that she is able to output insane healing numbers while also having one of the most obnoxious moves in the game: damage orb.

Damage orb can train as much as 200 HP from a target, which is enough to eliminate most of the cast by itself. Add in some of Moira’s primary fire, and suddenly she’s able to score frags with relative ease and not much counterplay.

An alternative to damage orb was pitched by Florida Mayhem content creator and streamer Sam ‘Samito’ Dawahare. With this change, Moira’s orbs would become detonation-style projectiles similar to Junkrat’s mines.

“Damage orb is replaced with a heal mitigation orb, if stuck to a target it reduces the amount of healing they receive by 40% for 2.5s,” Samito wrote in his proposed game balance document. “Orbs would have a small detonation AOE and only be able to travel 20ish meters.”

Additionally, orbs would now be able to stick to players and surfaces, but no longer go through shields. Instead, it would stick to them and could be dropped like Tracer’s Pulse Bomb.

This change would also adjust orb’s cooldown, lowering it from ten seconds down to four.

The suggestion was met with approval by the Overwatch community, who hadn’t taken kindly to Blizzard’s previous attempts to balance Moira. In fact, it even inspired some Workshop gurus to add the change to the game.

In the video detailing the proposed rework, Irish content creator Andy Bohan showed off how the orb would look in-game, including how it would interact with shields.

If you want to try out the rework for yourself on the PTR, use the workshop code HP5CX.

As for Samito, he still believes he could make the proposed rework better. “It’s not quite done yet… gonna have to tweak it a lot but I think it’s a solid start,” he replied to Contenders commentator Jennifer ‘LemonKiwi’ Pichette.

Hopefully, the next time the Overwatch team tries to rework Moira they could look to this proposed change for some inspiration.

About The Author

Michael Gwilliam is a senior writer at Dexerto based in Ontario, Canada. He specializes in Overwatch, Smash, influencers, and Twitch culture. Gwilliam has written for sites across Canada including the Toronto Sun. You can contact him at michael.gwilliam@dexerto.com or on Twitter @TheGwilliam