News - Massive Aiming Buffs, Health Regen Improved, Much More. Warzone 2 Season 2 Update Details
And with this update, there were actually a few really key changes that are going to have a fairly significant impact on the overall gameplay experience, especially for mouse and keyboard players, but this will also be great for controller players. Now, just to head up. I'm not covering any of the weapon balancing adjustments in today's article; I will get to that for tomorrow's article, and that's just because it takes me a long time to get those together because I like actually showing exact before and after comparisons whenever possible, and I'm not just reading out the patch notes like most other content creators will, and therefore it always takes me a little extra time because I aim to be the best at these patch note articles, not the fastest.
Huge aiming idle sway improvements
So without further ado, let's dive right into the changes. The first big change that came with these season 2 updates is a complete overhaul to how they're handling Idol Sway, and this is the change that's going to have the biggest impact for mouse and keyboard players, but like I said, this is also going to be good for controller players, and I'm happy to see this as a controller player as well.
But diving right in, the first thing they did here was that when you initially aimed down sight pre-patch, your reticle wouldn't necessarily be perfectly centered, and that meant even if you were really precise with your centering and your aim, it didn't really matter because there's some randomness programmed in there, and you can see that taking place right here, especially when I add the crosshairs to the screen.
When I first aimed down, that dot was not perfectly centered on my screen, whereas post-patched now it is perfectly centered on the screen. Every single time I aim down, it goes perfectly to the center of the screen. And that's excellent to see, but that's just the first part of it. The second part is that your idle sway has a slight delay before it kicks in now.
Previously, idle sway was happening while you were in the process of aiming down site; it was already happening. Now there's a slight delay after you get fully aimed down the site before the idle sway kicks in, and again, this is really going to reward Precision for snapping onto Target quickly. And this is excellent news.
This is actually how Idol Sway used to work in the older Call of Duty games. I'm not too sure why they ended up changing this; I'm pretty sure it was Infinity W that changed this back in the day, and Sledgehammer just sort of inherited that code, and now they're fixing those issues, but in either case, that's great, especially for those mouse and keyboard players out there.
Now, one big note here with this is that this will not apply to sniper rifles. Sniper rifles, when you first get down, aren't necessarily going to be perfectly centered, and in my opinion, this is a good thing; it helps keep quick scoping in check, at least to a degree. This is something I've actually been doing for a long time in Call of Duty as well.
I believe it was like Black Ops 1, where they first introduced this mechanic, specifically sniper rifles. You would have a little bit of random off-center aim when you first aim down sight, and again, I think that's perfectly fine for this game; quick scoping is powerful enough as is.
Hipfire aim improvements
The next thing that's kind of related to this is your hip fire previously. As you were swaying your aim around, your point of aim with hip fire wouldn't be perfectly centered, and it would either lead or follow wherever your aim was moving.
As you can see here, compared to those center lines, it's all over the place. Pre-patch, whereas post-patch it now remains perfectly static on that, and keep in mind I didn't just change my in-game settings so it has the stat static crosshairs. The crosshairs and the point of aim are actually static by default, and this is going to make your hip fire a lot more accurate as well.
So there we go. Those are the first couple changes, and these are honestly a very big deal with the game. I think aiming and shooting are going to feel a whole lot better after this update, especially on the M and keyboard, but also with the controller.
Big health regeneration buff!
Next, let's get into another really big change that came with this update.
I was very surprised to see that this is faster health regeneration across the board by default. I know many of us have been asking for things like a quick fix style perk or vest in the game, and I don't think we're going to need that anymore because they very noticeably sped up our health regeneration rates, and it was nice of them in the patch notes that they provided exact values here, so I didn't have to calculate this for myself, but I did test and confirm in the game pre-patch when it came to the healing delay, so how long does it take from the last time that you've taken damage before you start your health regeneration?
Previously, this was 4 seconds; now it's been cut down to 3 seconds, and that 1 second difference is actually a pretty big deal. 1 second in Call of Duty terms when we're talking about being in the action and in gunfights, that's a very long time on top of that, though they also significantly improved our healing rate from 40 HP per second up to 75 HP per second, and what this means is that if you took 50% damage or 75 damage in the game previously, it would take you a total of 5.9 seconds from the moment you took that damage to the moment you were back to full health, whereas post-patch it's now just 4 seconds.
That's the amount of time it used to take just to start your healing in the past, but now you're going to be back to full health by the time 4 seconds have elapsed. Then, taking a look at a more extreme example, if you took 140 damage and you're super low on health pre-patch, the total healing time would be 7.5 seconds; now it's just 4.9 seconds, which is an insane difference.
You're going to be able to get back in the fight way faster now after this update, and I think this is going to play out great now. Of course, we have to get some play time with it to really see how we feel. Honestly, I think on the bigger maps, health regeneration wasn't a really big issue, but on the smaller maps, especially.
Health regeneration definitely felt super slow, especially if you were used to using Quick Fix in Modern Warfare 2, for instance, and this is just going to allow you to get back in the fight after taking damage significantly faster than pre-patched. And there we go. That's two major changes to how the game is going to be played on a game-to-game basis and on a gunfight-to-gunfight basis, and I'm very excited to get some play time with this update to try this out and see how the game feels now because I think both of these combined are going to have a pretty big impact.
