A co-worker asked me if there is any way to search for issues he watches and then batch edit them to reset the watch status to a specific value (most likely the default watch if involved) ?

Reason is that he receives too many emails of issues he does not care about at the moment. For example think of a phone support agent that creates issues on behalf of customers. That person does not want notification about every issue change. Or a person that is temporarily assigned to an issue to do requirements elicitation. Once requirements are known that person is unassigned and does not care about any future state transitions of the issue until a developer mentions that person again in a new comment because something was unclear.

Basically you very quickly end up watching issues but you can only reset that status one by one as far as I can see.