Choosing Your Heroes
Before you begin a game of Overwatch, you’ll need to choose a hero to play.
Maybe controlling a cannon-toting, genetically-engineered ape from the moon appeals to you. Or, you might prefer zipping around as a teleporting, time-traveling freedom fighter. Who do you want to be?
Playing Your Role
Offense heroes are the damage dealers on their team. Your goal: seek out, engage, and destroy the enemy.
Defense heroes control the battlefield, interrupting enemy attacks and fortifying locations. As a defense hero, your job is to stop the opposing team’s advance.
Tank heroes soak damage and break apart fortified positions, like closely-grouped enemies and narrow chokepoints. If you’re a tank, you lead the charge.
Support heroes empower their allies, healing and shielding them, boosting their damage, and providing vital utility. As support, you’re the backbone of your team’s survival.
Playing Overwatch: The Basics
Before you jump onto the battlefield, we recommend that you play the short tutorial. It’s a quick, fun introduction to the basics of Overwatch.
Abilities
Abilities are the unique powers and gear Overwatch’s heroes use to defeat their opponents, protect their teammates and move around maps—they’re the key to winning a match.
You’ll fire your primary weapon (PC: Left-click; PS4: R2; XB1: RT) most commonly. Whether your weapon is short-range, long-range, enemy-freezing or projectile-firing, you don’t need to find ammo for it—just reload (PC: R; PS4: Square; XB1: X) and keep blasting away! Some weapons have secondary fire modes (PC: Right-click; PS4: L2; XB1: LT), variations on their primary weapon’s attack.
Different heroes also have diverse movement and support abilities, among them hard-light sentry turrets, sonic speed boosts, and short-range teleportation (just to name a few). Some abilities are limited by cooldowns—a short period of time before the ability can be used again.
Quick Melee
Every hero can perform a melee attack (PC: V; PS4/XB1: Right thumbstick), a quick, close-range strike that doesn’t use any ammo. Use it to finish off weak opponents or when you need to reload.
Ultimate Abilities
Ultimates (PC: Q; PS4: Triangle; XB1: Y) are game-changers, powerful abilities that can turn the tide of battle. You automatically charge them over time, but you can gain charge faster when you deal damage. As long as you don't switch heroes, your ultimate's charge level will stick around even if you die.
Playing A Match
Selecting Heroes:
Before a match begins, you’ll need to pick a hero. Consider the map, talk with your teammates, and keep an eye on your team composition when choosing your hero. If your team is on defense and your first goal is to hold an objective, you may want more defense heroes like Junkrat and Bastion.
As the tactical situation changes during a match, you may find that you’d like to change the hero you’re playing. It’s easy; in your team’s starting area, press (PC: H; PS4/XB1: D-Pad left) and select your new hero. Just remember that your ultimate ability's charge level will be reset!
Health and Death
The amount of damage a hero can take before dying is represented by their Health . Health can be recovered by collecting health packs, found in fixed locations throughout each map, or by certain heroes’ abilities (especially Support heroes). When a hero’s Health is reduced to zero, they die, but they’ll return (“respawn”) shortly. While you wait for a dead teammate to respawn, your team is at a disadvantage. Try your best to keep them (and yourself) alive!
In addition to Health, heroes can receive boosts to their survivability in the form of shields and armor, which absorb damage before Health.
Ending a Match
When one team fulfills a map’s victory conditions, the match is over, and that team’s won. All players will be able to see everyone’s contributions, vote on the most valuable players, give feedback on the match, and watch the Play of the Game. You can customize your Play of the Game pose with items from Loot Boxes.
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