Blizzard's newest game, Overwatch, officially launched last month and had seven million players within a week of release. What's more, this is a game that went the traditional sales route rather than the increasingly common free-to-play one, meaning that all those players plopped down a minimum of $40 to play.
Even before launch, there were a healthy number of professional Overwatch tournaments, populated by some of the biggest teams in esports. With Overwatch's audience growing and Blizzard's focus on increasing the competitiveness of the game -- as evidenced by the game's just-released Competitive Mode -- there's an opportunity for Overwatch to flourish as an esport. Any spectator sport, whether it's hitting a ball with a large stick or dispensing an animated fighter with a Shoryuken, quickly develops its own internal strategies and trends as players become more experienced and the sport more refined. In gaming, we refer to this as "the meta," an endlessly evolving state that forms the backbone of tactics employed in the game.
We finish our introduction to the heroes and their competitive roles with the four five support heroes. Rarely flashy and even more rarely the subject of kill streak highlight reels on YouTube, the support heroes, and more accurately, the healers, are indispensable from high-level competition to your average pickup game.
Mercy
The most straight-up healer, Mercy is an absolute staple in every game mode now that we're starting to see rules against Lúcio stacking in some maps. Situations where a team won't run a Mercy are few-and-far-between, limited mostly to last-ditch Hail Mary pushes where a player goes all-aggressive attack or the very rare King of the Hill situation in which you've gone with only a single Lúcio as the healer.
While Mercy is a fairly straightforward character, it would be a mistake to think of her as a low-skill character. What makes a good Mercy competitor isn't reflexes or amazing aim, but situational and positional awareness. Not getting killed while focusing on preventing your teammates from not getting killed requires well-honed instincts about when to cut bait in a situation.
A Mercy also shines when she has a well-coordinated team, which top teams tend to be. She's not a mass healer in the way Lúcio is, and you get the most out of her when damage is spread to as few of your teammates as possible. In a pickup game with strangers, Lúcio is arguably better, but in competitive games, Mercy's near-100 percent usage rate is for very good reason.
Best maps: Uh...Overwatch
Lúcio
And here we have the other main healer. While Mercy thrives in organization, Lúcio excels in chaos. Lúcio can't burst-heal an individual to the same degree that Mercy can (his ultimate, Sound Barrier, can probably be best described as burst-invulnerability), but he can keep most -- or all -- of his team well-maintained in a brutal firefight.
Lúcio is a regular pick as the second healer in most situations, but King of the Hill maps tend to show off his wide-ranging skills the most. With a better ability to defend himself from flankers in this non-linear map mode and the Soundwaves for a measure of crowd control, it's here that Lúcio provides something that Mercy really can't.
And Soundwaving a player off the map to their death is pretty cool, too.
Best maps: All the King of the Hills
Zenyatta
No hero saw his role fall further in the closed beta than Zenyatta. A hybrid offense/defense character, Zenyatta's Orbs of Harmony and Discord were versatile, allowing a roaming flanker to get healed far away from Zenyatta and a Discorded enemy to have a persistent debuff until Zenyatta or they died. Given this flexibility, Zenyatta was a staple of competitive play in the early beta. Blizzard attempted to deal with this by increasing the number of abilities that could remove the Discord orb.
In the end, Zenyatta got the full brunt of the nerf hammer, making it so that both orbs were removed if a player was out of the line of his sight for three seconds. Or to put it bluntly, Blizzard added a hard counter to Zenyatta: a wall.
This reduced Zenyatta's utility to the point that he's essentially fallen out of favor in competitive games.
There may be some hope for Zenyatta, though. Blizzard increased his survivability by bumping his base shields, increased the projectile speed of the orbs, and increased both his movement speed and his healing power in his Transcendence ultimate. Will this be enough to get Zenyatta back into the meta? Not holding my breath, but there will hopefully be some experimentation.
Best map: None right now
Symmetra
In pub games, Symmetra has a few interesting roles. Against less-experienced players, excellent turret placement can be annoying and her Photon Projector goes through shields and can destroy Torbjörn turrets and inattentive Bastions.
In competitive games, Symmetra has exactly one role: early in payload maps on defense, building a teleporter to help the team with the long travel distances. Without a quick teleporter, an attacker early in a payload map has a de facto numerical edge because the time required for the attacker to get back into the fight after a respawn is much less than that of a defender. Symmetra neutralizes this once she gets her teleporter up, buying the team valuable time.
Best maps: Dorado, Hollywood, Route 66, King's Row
Ana
It's far too early to tell exactly how Ana, Overwatch's first post-launch hero, will fare in competitive play. She was just officially released on Tuesday, after all. So we have to make some educated guesses.
What's interesting about Ana is her versatility. She can do long-range damage as well as long-range healing, her Biotic Grenade acts as a form of indirect crowd control in that it hampers an enemy healer from healing their team for a few seconds. The Sleep Dart can situationally hamper an opponent, so long as a teammate doesn't wake them up with damage. I expect Ana to be a lot of fun to play in Quickplay and the built-in competitive mode.
At high levels? The outlook is foggier. With only six players on a team, there's an emphasis on picking heroes based on their strongest attribute in order to cause exploitable mismatches. A team is not likely to run three healers and her skillset means she's not as strong at healing individual targets as Mercy or as strong at healing mass targets as Lúcio.
So for her to displace one of the healers, what she does outside of straight-up healing has to be extremely powerful. Pre-nerf Zenyatta's persistent orbs were extremely powerful, so he saw play. Is being like Widowmaker with a sniper rifle and short-term enemy debuffs enough? I'm not so sure, but I hope I'm wrong as it would be nice to see the Mercy/Lúcio stranglehold be released a bit, creating more dynamic team composition decisions.
Best maps: TBA