D.Va

D.Va
Overwatch character
Artwork of D.Va alongside her mech suit
First game	Overwatch
Voiced by	Charlet Chung (English)

D.Va is a fictional hero appearing in the 2016 video game Overwatch, a Blizzard Entertainment-developed first-person shooter video game, and its related media. The character, known by her call sign D.Va, is of South Korean origin, with her real name being Hana Song (송하나).

D.Va was first announced in October 2015; along with Genji and Mei, she was one of the last heroes introduced into Overwatch prior to its official release. Voice actress Charlet Chung provides both the English voice for D.Va, as well as her Korean dialogue. D.Va is designed as a tank character who uses a pink exoskeletal mech suit in battle. Mobile for a tank character, D.Va was also designed as "skirmisher."

Soon after the game's release, D.Va was noted for having a low damage output; the game's principal designer, Geoff Goodman confirmed that "D.Va's damage is definitely on the lower side, much like Winston's. They are this way for a similar reason: They are both very mobile and hard to kill." D.Va was also noted to take more damage than other tank characters when facing multiple opponents in the game due to her lack of a shield. Goodman attributed this along with her low damage output to the character balancing developed into Overwatch developers, stating, "every character in the game has strengths and weaknesses, it's part of what makes the teamplay work well." Goodman revealed that early in her development, D.Va was able to deal more damage, but that this damage output was lowered because "the way that played out is that she would fly into someone's face, destroy them, and fly away. There was little that person could do because [of] her mobility." Despite agreeing with feedback calling D.Va underpowered, Goodman expressed that improvements to the character "are unlikely to take the shape of increasing her damage output significantly," adding that "the goal is that she should be a viable aggressive initiation tank, much like Winston can be." The discussion of buffing D.Va came at the same time as a discussion on nerfing the character McCree, who had been noted to eliminate tank characters too quickly; game director Jeff Kaplan explained that D.Va buffs would take longer to develop and implement. Kaplan did however detail that the development team would be exploring improvements to her damage output and survivability, although would only "probably pick one direction or the other." Eventually, her ultimate ability was buffed, with the cost and explosion delay being reduced, in addition to the removal of the possibility for the activating player to be killed by their own ultimate ability. Her "Defense Matrix" ability was also changed to be toggled on and off at will with a resource meter, rather than being a single-use ability with a cooldown.