Overwatch: 8 things to know before you play

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Don’t bother with the tutorial

At best, Overwatch’s tutorial is pointless, but some players might even find it detrimental. The playable section teaches you remedial basics like how to move, shoot, and look around, but for some inexplicable reason it also suggests that each of the game’s heroes has a sprint option. This is true for Soldier 76 — the gun-toting cyborg you control for the tutorial — but decidedly false for the other 20 characters in the game, who have their own personalized abilities.

Players who try "sprinting" as the tutorial informed with these other characters will find themselves plopping down turrets, or launching themselves into a forward roll, or firing out a hook, or something else that might not be so useful in a combat situation. Save yourself the time, then, and jump straight into a game with bots.

Know your role

Overwatch’s characters are split into four categories: assault, defense, tank, and support.

• Assault characters can dish out large amounts of damage with powerful weapons in short periods of time. They’re the tip of the spear in any attack, and when deployed correctly, can clear a path through bottlenecks and choke points. They’re not blessed with huge pools of health, however, and usually can’t weather a full-frontal attack. Instead, most assault heroes are best played by dashing in, inflicting a big burst of damage, and disappearing back behind your team.
• As the tag suggests, defense characters are good at stopping the advance of an enemy team, and many of them work best when used to lock down specific portions of the map. The pool includes snipers and characters who can either build, or turn into stationary turrets, along with two champions who can block off paths entirely either with a vast wall of ice, or by filling them so full of timed explosives no one would want to go near.
• Tanks are designed to be the big and noisy distraction for the enemy team. Their number includes heroes with the most health, able to absorb damage through their powerful shields or self-healing abilities. Canny tanks pull the attention away from more immediately lethal team-mates, allowing them to operate unmolested.
• Three of the four support characters are healers, each capable of replenishing an ally’s health bar, while the fourth can build teleporters to help speed your team’s advance to the front lines. Support characters tend to be the flimsiest available to players, and are best played behind the rest of your team, but they have some surprisingly powerful weapons as their disposal, too.

Start as an easier character

The tutorial might be lacking, but it has the right idea in starting players as Soldier 76. He’s the easiest character for new players to understand, as his basic abilities will be familiar to anyone who has ever played a first-person shooter before. In addition to his sprint, 76 carries an accurate and powerful assault rifle that can also launch rockets, and he’s capable of healing himself — and allies — with a medkit that he drops on the floor

His only real complexity comes in the deployment of his ultimate ability, earned after a certain amount of time spent playing a match. Press Q and 76 will flip down a tactical visor that marks enemies, allowing you to automatically aim and shoot at them by simply holding the trigger. The execution is easy, but the skill comes in using it in a target-rich environment.

Similarly solid beginner characters include Reinhardt, whose near-invulnerable shield and huge health bar make surviving a fight easier; Bastion, who can turn into a turret and spew out a withering hail of bullets; and Lucio, who heals teammates simply by being near them.

Try everyone

With that said, new players should try every hero as soon as possible. Putting down an enemy hero is as much about understanding their set of abilities as it is about accurate shooting: you need to know that Reaper can temporarily turn into an invulnerable ghost, or that when D.Va vacates her robot exoskeleton, it can sometimes self-destruct in your face.

It sounds mightily daunting, having to learn the multiple abilities, weapons, and passive skills of 21 heroes, but the best experience is trying them yourself. That way you’ll get a feel for how long you can maintain Reinhardt’s shield, or when a Tracer has jumped too far into enemy territory, or where a Symmetra is likely to have placed her teleporter.

Change your hero

You’ll probably find your favorite character pretty quickly, but don’t get too attached to them — at least not so obsessed that you can’t switch out in the middle of a fight. At the very least, change character if someone else selects your favored hero to widen the skills available to your crew. But changing character can also break down problems your team had been having before — all too often fights feel unwinnable in Overwatch until one player swaps character to one better suited to the problem at hand.

Defensive bottlenecks stacked with turrets and shielded tank characters, for example, are absolute murder to attack head-on for flimsy heroes like Genji or McCree. But swap out to Pharah, and her rockets can easily clear out static defenses, firing from odd angles high in the sky thanks to her jetpacks. Or if your team is full of high-damage heroes, but you can’t sustain a push outside of your home base due to your low health pools, consider switching to Reinhardt and hiding your allies behind your giant shield.

It’s difficult to say if Overwatch is balanced at this point, but it almost always feels like you have the code for whatever lock you’re facing in one of its characters’ skill sets. The players willing to try a few combinations will usually open the way faster.

Do your job

Whoever you’re playing as, remember Bill Belichick’s mantra: do your job. If you’re a tank like Reinhardt, that means soaking up bullets and protecting your friends, not singling out speedy solo targets and chasing them down — his slow speed and lack of ranged attack options mean you’ll usually be wasting your time. If you’re Tracer, that means completing hit-and-run attacks, dancing through the enemy’s flanks and tearing them up before flitting back again. If you’re Junkrat, that means firing an endless stream of pipe bombs into contested areas, scoring free kills, and irritating the enemy team to the point they quit the round and uninstall the game.

Trying to make frontal assaults with characters like Reaper is usually suicide, and you’ll hurt your team for doing it, but remember most characters have skills that give them a second battlefield role. Tracer’s best used to pick off solo stragglers she can gun down quickly, but her ultimate — a proximity mine — is most useful chucked at the largest concentration of enemy forces. Reinhardt can usually absorb turret bullets with his shield, but his secondary ability fires a flare that will also disable the automated guns for a short time, switching his role from defensive to offensive.

Keep your ears open

Each Overwatch ability comes with its own soundbite. You’ll start to recognize which audio clip goes with which skill after a few rounds, but as a rule of thumb, the louder the shout, the more dangerous the ability. Play with your speakers turned up, and if you hear one of these yelps, it probably means it’s time to vacate your current position.

Reaper’s Death Blossom ultimate — in which he spins around pelting nearby enemies with lethal shotguns — is one of the loudest shouts, the masked killer snarling "die, die, DIE" as he starts the move. Similarly noisy is Junkrat’s RIP-tire, an explosive rubber death wheel that telegraphs its arrival with the sound of a motor being kickstarted, and Hanzo’s Dragonstrike, which fires two giant, green dragons alongside his Japanese war cry.

Don’t save your ultimate

These "ultimate" abilities are Overwatch’s most powerful moves, and they can take out multiple players if deployed correctly. But waiting for the perfect moment at which to deploy them — when the entire enemy team is arranged in a line, or clustered together, or distracted by a teammate — isn’t always the best idea. It’s usually better to use your ultimate liberally, securing a few kills or clearing an objective point, allowing it to build up again over time. Five sub-optimal uses of your most powerful skill is always better than finishing the game with your ultimate meter full, but the monstrously powerful skill left unused.