Technologies

Here’s How a Former Overwatch Pro Made the Support Hero He Always Wanted

Scott “Custa” Kennedy used his experience as a former Overwatch League pro to design one of the game’s most popular heroes in Reign of Talon season 1.

Overwatch’s Reign of Talon season 1 is starting to wind down, and the biggest story has been the five new heroes who joined the roster. A lot of attention has understandably gone to Jetpack Cat, a hero once scrapped in the game’s early design, but resurrected on the cusp of the game’s 10th anniversary. She’s been the subject of bans and memery due to her unique kit that features permanent flight and the ability to fly any other hero through the air with her Lifeline ability.

But another support hero has quietly gone under the radar as one of the most-played characters in the new season: Mizuki.

Mizuki is a complex hero, similar on paper to support heroes Brigitte and Lucio, who mix damage with healing in the radius around them, but with his own unique mechanics. He has a constant healing aura around him, which grows more powerful as he deals damage with his weapon or uses other healing abilities. His main weapon is a projectile that bounces off surfaces. One of his abilities, Katashiro Return, offers a burst of movement, but also the ability to teleport back to your starting point within a few seconds.

That all adds up to a hero design that gives players lots of options but also requires you to carefully strategize to turn the tide of battle. Do you stay with your team to maximize the value of your healing aura? Or do you split from them for a higher-risk, higher-reward play? Do you use your Katashiro Return ability to flank behind an enemy team, or save it to disengage from an unexpected attack?

Despite spending most of my time in Overwatch playing support heroes, including Ana and Kiriko, I found Mizuki challenging early in the season, even as I watched enemy Mizukis pump out damage and secure clutch kills while constantly healing their teams.

This “unlockable challenge” element was an intentional part of Mizuki’s design, as I was soon to learn from chatting with the hero’s creator, a former Overwatch eSports pro.

By and large, support players have embraced this challenge. An Overwatch spokesperson told me via email that “Mizuki is consistently in the top four for all support picks in Season 1, across every region.” He’s one of several elements powering a revival of the game, along with a new ongoing story, weekly faction missions and the promise of more new heroes every season. People have flocked back into the game since the start of Season 1, with its average player count on Steam more than doubling over the past month.

Mizuki’s design was led by Scott “Custa” Kennedy, a longtime presence in Overwatch’s professional scene as both a player and match analyst, and now an associate hero designer. I spoke with Scott at Blizzard’s spotlight event and also spoke with him and Mizuki’s character artist, Melissa Kelly, in early March to discuss how they created one of the game’s most popular heroes.

From professional player to associate designer

After a few years as a professional player and several more as an analyst and caster for the Overwatch League, Kennedy was looking for the next step in his career.

“Overwatch [had] been my life for, like, the last 10 years in many different facets,” he said, but as he reached retirement age in the esports realm, he wanted a change. He spoke with some of the Overwatch developers, including associate game director Alec Dawson, about what it would take to get into game development.

After doing some QA work and hands-on game development (“I made the world’s hardest 2D cat platformer in three days,” he said), Kennedy secured an associate hero designer opening for Overwatch, which was a perfect fit with his experience.

When given the task of envisioning the game’s next healer, Kennedy said he didn’t want to make another support designed around “point-and-shoot” mechanics that healed teammates and hurt enemies, like Ana or Juno.

“I wanted [Mizuki] to be more of an AoE healing aura-type hero because I think that’s something that’s been underrepresented in our heroes,” Kennedy said. Instead, he came up with the area-of-effect healing that’s similar to how Lucio and Brigitte heal, but with the added layer of that healing becoming more powerful the better you play in combat.

Managing that nuance was a learning experience for Kennedy.

“One of the biggest things that I learned is how complexity can be really cool on paper, but when you’re making a hero how quickly that snowballs into making a player overwhelmed,” Kennedy said. But he feels the team ultimately found a good balance, where inexperienced players can still contribute with him, while more experienced and skilled players can benefit even more.

Kelly added that Mizuki was a complicated hero on the design side, too.

“One of the issues is that he was looking kind of like a [damage hero],” she said. “He looked very aggressive for a healer. So we were just trying to soften him up.” Kelly pointed out that Mizuki’s weapon is a mix of a priest’s staff and a sickle, which also blurs the lines a bit between support and damage heroes.

That nuance seems to be a big part of Mizuki’s appeal. Even though I generally prefer the kind of “point-and-shoot” healing hero Kennedy said he wanted to avoid, I’ve found Mizuki to be one of the most interesting additions to the roster, especially among support heroes. His Binding Chain ability, which roots an enemy hit by the chain into place, rewards good aim and timely use, while his Healing Kasa and Katashiro Return abilities let my brain ponder over creative escapes and ambushes.

When I play Mizuki, I’m always thinking while I fight, and I enjoy feeling that kind of active engagement with the game.

Mizuki’s reception and prospects for pro play

Kennedy worried that players would be turned off by how complex the hero is — wondering, “Are players going to try him, not understand him and then be like… ‘I’m just gonna play the cat?'” (The cat, of course, is Jetpack Cat, who was released alongside Mizuki in season 1 and immediately became one of the most popular and most-banned heroes. She has a more intuitive, point-and-heal design, although her launch state also allows for particularly aggressive gameplay.)

Instead, Kennedy has enjoyed watching players stick with Mizuki and later post about how they’ve “unlocked” the hero by figuring out the formula to succeed with him. Kennedy said it’s rewarding to see players grasp his original concept for the hero as it plays out in-game. After that initial, somewhat disastrous first game I played, I started clicking with Mizuki, too.

Players still struggled with parts of Mizuki’s kit, and Kennedy noted some initial frustrations with “intentional design limitations” he and the team placed on the hero. Players seemed to want to use his Katashiro Return ability to go on aggressive flanks, but found it didn’t last long enough to successfully move behind enemy teams. That kind of larger repositioning would go against the design team’s vision for the hero, who is meant to stay near his team and use the ability to return to them quickly.

Now, Kennedy said, “players seem to understand the limitations of the hero, and that’s been cool to see.”

Mizuki has had a strong launch, and has been sitting around a 54% win rate in competitive modes since the start of the season. That’s quite high, ranking just behind last season’s top performer: the damage hero Vendetta. I asked Kennedy how he reads that data — whether Mizuki is overtuned or just a good fit among this season’s most-played heroes.

Kennedy said Mizuki was in a “pretty healthy” spot, but could get pulled down a bit in future seasons. “The numbers that he can put out in terms of healing and damage output are things that really put him above everyone else at this point. So it’s definitely something we’re keeping an eye on.”

But that power won’t necessarily translate to Mizuki being picked up in professional play, at least based on last month’s Overwatch Championship Series Bootcamp. Kennedy said the hero’s kit isn’t as good for staying alive and executing plays as heroes such as Lucio and Kiriko, who have long been must-picks in pro play.

“I could see Mizuki getting more playtime in a world in which we start playing more rush metas [centered around tanks like Ramattra or Orisa],” he said, “but with how fast the game is being played at the highest level, it can be difficult for Mizuki to keep up.”

Kennedy brought up one of Overwatch’s biggest and most inevitable challenges over its decade-long tenure: balancing heroes for both the pro level and the rest of the game, and how the difficulty lies in the fact that certain resources — such as speed boosts, mobility and burst damage — are more valuable at the highest levels of coordinated play. The design team is always working to make sure heroes are never totally out of balance at either skill level, he said.

That work has been on display since the launch of Season 1, with balance patches coming out virtually every week up through the midseason patch on March 10. Those updates mostly focused on the five new heroes but also included some changes to Vendetta, who continues to terrorize the game with a very strong win rate and the ability to cut someone down almost out of nowhere, leaving opponents very little time to react.

Still, the season overall has been a win for the game, thanks largely to the influx of new heroes and the different playstyles they add to the game.

“[I’m] definitely a little overwhelmed with how positive everyone has been with Mizuki — and honestly, the five heroes in general,” Kennedy said. “I think the reception’s been awesome. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

Technologies

Buffett’s decade-long acquisition finally pays off after years of struggle

Warren Buffett’s confidence in a decade-old acquisition finally pays off as Precision Castparts’ complex products become essential for engine turbine blades, while Berkshire Hathaway’s stock shows modest gains despite Wall Street declines.

Buffett’s decade-long acquisition finally pays off after years of struggle

Six years ago, when Berkshire Hathaway took an $11 billion write-down of its $37.2 billion 2016 acquisition of Precision Castparts, Warren Buffett wrote in his annual letter to shareholders he had paid “too much” for the company, which makes “complex metal components and products.”

While it was a “fine company – the best in its business,” he had been “simply too optimistic” about its profit potential, a “miscalculation … laid bare” by the enormous downturn for the aerospace industry, Precision Castparts’ largest customers, amid the Covid pandemic.

In a CNBC interview when the deal was first announced, Buffett admitted it was “a very high multiple for us to pay,” but told shareholders at the 2016 meeting he had great confidence in Mark Donegan, the company’s CEO, both then and now, and the company’s long-term profit outlook.

It’s taken longer than he planned, but Buffett’s purchase is now looking pretty good.

As Reuters puts it, there is currently a shortage of the “complex” products Precision Castparts makes that are essential for engine turbine blades.

They’re also used in natural gas turbines, which are in demand to produce energy for artificial intelligence data centers.

This week, GE Aerospace announced it would pay $11.75 billion to acquire Consolidated Precision Products, one of the few companies that competes against Precision Castparts.

Barron’s calls that “pricey” at 26 times projected 2027 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

Using the same multiple, Barron’s estimates Precision Castparts is worth around $100 billion. That’s well above the potential value of $60 billion to $75 billion it cited in an article last month that said the unit “probably has become one of the more valuable divisions” of Berkshire.

It’s also nearly three times the 2016 purchase price.

In the Barron’s piece, Andrew Bary said Berkshire, and its share price, aren’t “getting much credit” for the subsidiary’s rising value, in part because CEO Greg Abel, like Buffett, doesn’t do analyst conference calls or investor events that could draw attention to the unit’s performance.

His recommendation: “Without Warren Buffett at the helm, Berkshire may have to start telling its story if it wants to attract a new generation of investors. This year’s trading action suggests that something may need to change.”

Berkshire bounces a bit as Wall Street sells off

Berkshire Hathaway shares managed a modest gain this week even as Wall Street’s major averages declined, a small departure from the 2026 “trading action” Bary cites.

Both the Class A and Class B shares gained almost 0.9% while the S&P 500 fell by 0.8%.

Until Friday’s bounce, that benchmark index, along with the Dow Industrials and the Nasdaq Composite, had dropped four days in a row as oil and bond yields moved higher.

Even with this week’s outperformance, Berkshire’s B shares still trail the S&P 500 by more than 10 percentage points so far this year.

Nebraska candidate moves to replace ad that included Buffett’s image

The campaign team for the Republican running in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District accelerated the deployment of a new campaign ad after Susie Buffett complained about a previous commercial that briefly included an image of her father, Warren Buffett.

In the ad, a picture of Buffett and his name appear on screen for roughly two seconds as candidate Brinker Harding says, “Here in Omaha, we know a thing or two about the stock market, some more than others. But we do it without insider information.”

He then goes on to highlight his call for a ban on Congressional stock trading, saying some lawmakers “trade on secrets you’ll never know,” as they “get rich” while “we barely get by.”

In a report that led its 10 PM CT newscast Wednesday evening, ABC affiliate KETV in Omaha reported Susie Buffett had asked Harding on Sept. 2 to remove the ad.

She told the station, “I think it’s worth it to say that Warren did not give Brinker his permission to use his face or name in his ad.

“It implies that my dad endorses him. He did not have permission to use it.”

The KETV report quoted Harding as saying in a statement, “In Nebraska, we work hard and support each other, and we do it honestly. Warren Buffett exemplifies that, and that was the point of my ad.”

The report said Harding did not comment on whether the ad would be taken down but noted “it does look like new ads from his campaign are beginning to run on some stations.”

A Harding campaign spokesperson told me the campaign did not think its ad implied a Buffett endorsement, but to be respectful to the Buffett family, it responded to her concern by accelerating the rollout of its next planned ad by several days, although its effort was hampered by the Labor Day weekend.

The commercial now running does not show or mention Buffett.

BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE AROUND THE INTERNET

Some links may require a subscription:

Best’s News and Research Service: 2026 Best’s Rankings: Berkshire Hathaway Takes DPW Top Spot Among Accident & Health Lines
Financial Times: The day Warren Buffett saved Salomon Brothers

HIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC’S BUFFETT ARCHIVE

The effects of 9/11 on Berkshire and the insurance industry (2002)

Warren Buffett shares his thoughts on the 9/11 attacks and explains how Berkshire’s insurance companies have started taking terrorism into account when writing policies.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I know you lost a lot of money as a result of 9/11. But I would like to know how 9/11 changed your life and your investment strategy?

WARREN BUFFETT: It made everybody, I think, in the country aware, I mean, we’ve gone through world wars and all of that, and essentially felt quite protected within these borders.

And I have been quite worried about — Charlie can attest to — you know, the possibility, particularly of some kind of nuclear device in this country, by — probably more likely by terrorists than by some, at least, declared act of war by another state.

And 9/11 made everybody realize that as humans have not progressed, particularly, in terms of how they behave with each other over the years, they have progressed enormously in their ability to inflict damage on those they hate for one reason or another…

In terms of the business aspects of it, in your question, obviously the area at Berkshire that it effects most significantly, by miles, is insurance.

And prior to 9/11, even though we recognized that there could be huge monetary damages that flowed from the activities of what I would call deranged people, we hadn’t really written the contracts in such a way as to either get paid for taking that risk or to exclude the risk. In other words, we were throwing it in for nothing.

We had excluded risk for war. I mean, we knew that we’d seen what had happened in England in the 40s, and so we had taken account of something that some of us had seen with our own eyes, but we didn’t take account of something that we knew was possible, but we just hadn’t seen. And that’s, you know, that’s the human condition, to some degree.

Since September 11th, everybody in the insurance business recognizes that they had exposures that they weren’t charging for, and they either had to exclude those exposures or they had to charge for them.

We have written — first thing we had to do, of course, is we had lots of policies on the books that left us exposed to this, and most of those policies ran for a year, starting at different points. Those have run off to a great degree, but they’re not entirely run off.

The other thing we did was on new policies. We have sold a fair amount, quite a large amount, of terrorism insurance that excludes what we call NCB, nuclear, chemical, and biological, as well as fire following nuclear.

And, we can take a fair amount of exposure to that sort of terrorism, because it doesn’t — it won’t aggregate. It aggregated at the Twin Towers in a way that — World Trade Center — in a way that just about was as extreme as you could get for non-NCB-type activities.

I mean, that was a huge amount of damage done without nuclear, chemical, or biological.

But we can have tens of billions of dollars with NCB excluded throughout a greater New York area, or something, but we can’t have hundreds of billions of exposure that would be exposed, say, to, nuclear activities, because there an act or two, or three, coordinated, could cause damage that would destroy the insurance industry.

And if we had coverage on that, it would destroy us as well.

BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH

Four weeks

Twelve months

BRK.A stock price: $766,000.00

BRK.B stock price: $510.37

BRK.B P/E (TTM): 12.83

Berkshire Cash as of June 30: $365.5 billion (Down 8.0% from March 31)

Excluding Rail Cash and Subtracting T-Bills Payable: $359.2 billion (Down 3.8% from March 31)

Berkshire repurchased $4.5 billion of its shares in Q2 2026.

BERKSHIRE’S TOP EQUITY HOLDINGS – Sep. 11, 2026

Berkshire’s top holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the U.S. and Japan, by market value, based on the latest closing prices.

Holdings are as of June 30, 2026, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on August 14, 2026, except for:

Mitsubishi, which is as of April 30, 2026

The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS

Also, Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are highly recommended reading. There are collected here on Berkshire’s website.

— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch

Technologies

Houthis reportedly advance to key Red Sea island, further threatening crucial oil choke point

The advance raises the threat to shipping near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a waterway that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden to global markets.

The Iran-backed Houthis reportedly advanced to Yemen’s strategic Perim Island on Friday, delivering a major boost to the militant group’s push to take control of one of the world’s most important shipping choke points.

The capture of Perim Island, which was reported by several news agencies, citing multiple Yemeni government sources, comes just one day after the Houthis seized Yemen’s port city of Mokha on the Red Sea coast. CNBC could not independently confirm the report.

The rapid ground offensive is seen as a severe setback to Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni forces it backs and puts Iran and its proxies on course to exercise control over two critically important oil choke points on either side of the Arabian Peninsula: the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Strait of Hormuz.

Perim Island is a small and rocky area of land that divides the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a waterway that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and to global markets.

There are concerns that the Houthis’ advance toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait could have significant ramifications for global trade, particularly if the militant group ratchets up threats or attacks on Red Sea shipping.

The Houthi advance prompted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to personally press President Donald Trump for U.S. military intervention, MS NOW reported later Friday, according to a person familiar with the conversations.

The crown prince spoke with Trump twice Thursday and urged him to strike the Iranian-backed group as it closed in on the Bab el-Mandeb. Trump declined, saying the U.S. does not plan to widen its regional military campaign to include the Houthis, according to the person, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the conversations. Axios first reported the calls.

A senior administration official told CNBC the U.S. remains focused on protecting core national security interests, including freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, “while empowering our regional partners to take the lead in managing and resolving regional security challenges.”

The official added that the U.S. is “in continuous dialogue with Saudi Arabia.”

The capture of Mokha marked a “major blow” to Saudi Arabia as it raises the possibility of the group exerting a tighter grip on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, according to Hamish Kinnear, principal Middle East and North Africa analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft.

Mokha is situated about 75 kilometers (46 miles) north of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

“The Houthis were already threatening Saudi shipping from previous positions, but their capture of Mocha opens up the possibility of further advances towards the Bab el-Mandeb coastline and a tighter grip on the chokepoint,” Kinnear said in a research note.

As the war continues, Kinnear said both Tehran and Washington believe time is on their side, making a new truce unlikely for now.

“Oil and gas prices, and more specifically refined products such as diesel, will continue to tick upwards while that remains the case – even if US convoys and Strait of Hormuz export alternatives cushion the price impact,” Kinnear said.

The strategic importance of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait has grown significantly since the start of the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran in late February, with the waterway emerging as an alternative route for crude moving toward Asia.

What next for oil prices?

Oil prices traded sharply lower on Friday, but both major benchmarks could still end the week above $100 per barrel for the first time since mid-May.

International benchmark Brent crude

The resilience of the oil market is being tested by a clearer recognition of the mounting threat to regional supply, strategists at ING said, with energy market participants seen repricing both the duration and severity of the conflict.

Even as flows continue through the Strait of Hormuz, ING’s strategists said flows remain well below prewar levels, underlining how fragile the situation has become.

“Saudi energy infrastructure and crude oil exports from the Red Sea are increasingly at risk, with the Houthis in Yemen targeting Saudi Arabia,” ING’s Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey said in a research note published Friday.

“As the Houthis have taken control of the Red Sea port of Mokha in Yemen, recent events increase the threat to shipping around the Bab al-Mandeb Strait,” they added.

— Luke Fountain contributed to this report.

Technologies

Wall Street firm believes the AI stock market boom is ‘nearing an end.’ Here’s why

Stretched earnings expectations, extreme concentration and surging equity issuance point to growing bubble risks.

A range of equity market bubble indicators show that while the S & P 500 ‘s rally has further to run this year, its medium-term prospects look poor given how frothy the market has become, according to Capital Economics. “Most indicators suggest the AI equity boom is nearing an end,” Capital Economics’ senior market economist James Reilly said Thursday in a note. Capital has been more bullish than most on the stock market since mid-2023, reflecting a view that AI will be a transformative technology. Its year end-2026 S & P 500 forecast has consistently been above consensus. But the firm has also maintained that the AI-driven rally is a bubble that will eventually burst. To assess and spot a late-stage market bubble, Reilly looks at eight indicators including valuations, earnings, index concentration, equity issuance and foreign interest in U.S. equities. Some of those measures are already at or near levels that preceded previous stock market peaks. The analysis shows that while market variables such as earnings expectations look consistent with a market top, others such as volatility and leverage look slightly less alarming. Earnings stand out as the biggest warning sign. Expectations for S & P 500 earnings growth are around levels seen only at the peak of the dot-com bubble, while long-term EPS growth forecasts have surged to a record high. According to Reilly, the heavy concentration of this expected growth in the tech sector means that any signs of weakness in the tech firms’ earnings will weigh heavily on the index. Other indicators are also flashing warning signs. Index concentration is around dot-com-era extremes, net equity issuance has turned positive and foreign ownership of U.S. stocks is at a record high. Reilly said another wave of IPOs and share sales could be particularly significant, since similar issuance booms have historically coincided with market peaks. “On past form, this suggests that the end of the bubble is just months away, rather than years,” he said. Measures of leverage are not yet alarming compared to other factors, though the analyst warns that they are heading in a “concerning direction.” While volatility metrics look consistent with a mid -stage bubble, Reilly notes that constituent -level volatility isn’t as extreme as it was near the end of the dotcom boom. “While we continue to think that the S & P 500 will rally from around 7,650 now to 8,250 by end-2026 , we ultimately forecast it to fall back to 6,500 by end -2027,” he wrote. Those assumptions would equate to 8% upside this year and a 21% slide in 2027.

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– Develop and improve services 680 partners can use this purposeInformation about your activity on this service, such as your interaction with ads or content, can be very helpful to improve products and services and to build new products and services based on user interactions, the type of audience, etc. This specific purpose does not include the development or improvement of user profiles and identifiers.

– Use limited data to select content 179 partners can use this purposeContent presented to you on this service can be based on limited data, such as the website or app you are using, your non-precise location, your device type, or which content you are (or have been) interacting with (for example, to limit the number of times a video or an article is presented to you).

These Cookies and SDKs are used to collect data about your browsing habits, use of the Services, your preferences, and your interaction with advertisements across platforms and devices for the purpose of delivering targeted advertising content, both on our Services and on third party sites. Third-party sites and services also use Targeting Cookies to deliver content, including advertisements relevant to your interests on the Services. If you reject these Cookies or SDKs, you will see less relevant advertising.

Data collected under this category through Cookies and SDKs can also be used to select and deliver personalized content, such as news articles and videos.

Consent Leg.Interest

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