If you were too busy playing Overwatch this weekend to look at the Overwatch forums, or simply can’t be bothered to look at the forums at all, you might have missed that Reaper received a pretty handsome buff which went completely sideways. His buff was supposed to reduce the spread on his shotguns which would make it easier for Reaper players to consistently land damage on the opponents. While the buffs definitely did improve the consistency on his weapons, it turned out to dramatically decrease his damage output, instead of increasing them.
When this unintended Reaper nerf was first noted the Overwatch subreddit and the forums went a bit crazy with testing to see if the nerf was actually true. People quite quickly realized that it was either a miscommunication by Blizzard and that it was indeed supposed to be a nerf, or that it was simply a mistake/bug and that it should have been a buff instead.
Fortunately for all of us Overwatch fans, the Blizzard Overwatch team is relatively transparent with bugs that are in the game and Jeff Kaplan quickly confirmed
He said the following, “We’ve changed the spread pattern and adjusted the distribution of the bullets. This will go to PTR with the next update. All of the changes to Reaper were done with the intention of making him more reliable. None were intended as nerfs.”
This interaction between the Overwatch community and Blizzard shows why it’s such a fantastic community. Whenever people find a bug or mistake Blizzard will often acknowledge it and try to come up with a fix. This goes for almost everything in the game except for all of Reinhardt’s bugs which have been in the game since it first launched.
Hopefully, these changes will indeed make Reaper a stronger foe so that we can see a lot more of the dual shotgun wielding edge lord.
