Hi there!

Curious if anyone has any tips/suggestions for someone (like me) who's brand spanking new to Overwatch. I'm already having a ball trying out different characters, but actually want to become GOOD at it.

Love to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

-Bunny

Turn off all forms of communication, as the majority of Overwatch players are disgusting.

Keep up to date on patch notes so you know which character(s) will be brokenly overpowered for a few months, as per Blizzard's usual balancing strategy.

If you see teammates rushing off one by one to die without waiting for the rest of the team, go and get a nice cool beverage, as that won't be changing.

Plan out your bathroom breaks to accommodate the large amount of fluid intake you'll soon be experiencing.

If you've foolishly disregarded my first tip and you hear/see someone talk about "the meta", block them immediately. They're stupid and being exposed to their stupid will make you stupid in turn.

Never spend money on loot boxes.

Never spend money on Overwatch.

Always try to position yourself on high ground, whether it's attack or defence. You become much harder to hit and you can drop down to contest an objective if you need to.

Don't trickle in to the point one by one when you die, wait 10 seconds for the rest of your team to regroup and then attack together - you will always lose 1v6. The only exception is during overtime when you need to immediately stand on the objective to contest it.

Don't defend too close to the enemy spawn room. Even if you kill a few of them, the value of those kills is minimal as they respawn literally right there and can walk back in seconds. Chances are you will die and they will snowball onto the objective where your team no longer has any defenses. You want to defend in choke points which make it a lot harder for the attacking team to break through your defense.

Generally you should have tanks in the front, DPS close behind them and healers in the back of a team.

It's a good idea to try to kill the the healers before everyone else, especially a mercy because they can rez their entire team. Unless you can confirm a kill on someone healers will just heal them back up to full health and gain ult charge.

Play aggressively. The best way to learn what works or doesn't is to try things out. If you see someone, shoot at them.

Number one tip is to walk forward, especially as a tank - your team will follow you in. Nothing worse than a team standing in a chokepoint and absorbing all the enemy fire. If a path is too fortified find a different route or all rush in together to overwhelm them.

Stay away from competitive, at least until you get more confortable. Stick to Arcade and Quick Play.

Try some matches of "Mystery Heroes" (you respawn as a random character every time you die). It is a great way to experiment and get a feeling for characters you don't often use... and since all people are on the same boat, they are not going to insult you for "not playing your character right".

When you are new, I would advice you to play with characters that have to stay in the back of the action (Widowmaker, Mercy or Hanzo, for example). Watch not only the enemy but your allies to get a sense of the game and the characters. That skill can only be acquired with practice, but it is great for characters like Lucio or Winston (enablers).

Watch lots of videos of pros on YouTube, it's the best way to learn.

On top of the aforementioned tips, learn which characters suit your speed of play.

There are characters with fast movement that require a lot of dodging and juking and quick defensive ability activations (Genji, Tracer, etc.) to not die because they have low max HP. There are characters with a slower pace that encourage working with the team more (most supports, Reinhardt, etc.). Then there are lots of more specialized roles like the snipers, builders, etc.

You don't have to be good at all of them. I know I lack the Counter-Strike skillz to ever be good at Widowmaker and after repeated attempts I have completely abandoned the idea of ever playing as her again. I'm a better help to my team spending my time as other characters that play to my strengths. Try out all the characters, read up on how they're supposed to work, and feel out which ones work well with how you can play games.

@sfbaybunny: Getting on and staying on the point is much more important than kills. So if someone is retreating, don't follow just to kill them.

I would tend to agree with all these point except the first. I have put 350 hours on the Pc version and most of my experiences with other people have been a positive one (about 80% I'd say). I've really enjoyed the community atmosphere, and even made friends in the game, so don't assume everyone will have the exact same experience. There are definitely nice people out there that want to have fun and will reciprocate kindness in hand. Turning off text chat can actually hinder you, since plenty of people will use it to relay info. For instance, letting the team know what enemies have their ults, who is flanking, etc.

Of course not everyone's going to do that, but it's helpful when it happens. If certain people prove to be abusive or a problem, then I would encourage you to mute/block them. (Even report if necessary) But the idea of someone just blanketly turning off text chat altogether is a little disheartening to me. More so than any other online game I've personally played, people will do more than spout obscenities (outside the general chat at the menu of course) and at the very least joke around. I recall one comp match where everyone was in voice chat but one hanzo player. No one chastised them for playing that character, but we kindly asked them to join voice chat and listen. It made it easier for us to call out info that helped everyone survive.

"Sombra, is behind us!", "Mcree/Reaper is on a perch about to ult", "Sym has a shield gen around the corner", or the most important call "Mercy is hiding over there, she probably has rez". So many times has information like that saved a situation. Of course, that was in comp and if you just want a chill experience then none of that is necessary I suppose. But it still feels wrong to swear off text chat altogether. To each their own though. I just wanted to make a case for leaving communications available.

Alternatively, if we're talking about the console version, I've seen/heard horror stories when it comes to the community there and I would recommend treading carefully.

@themanwithnoplan: I had one game with my team getting stomped because they kept running one by one into the point and dying, so I was making jokes whenever I got killed. Three people (some from each team) said they reported me because I wasn't taking the game seriously.

There was another game once where a dude was informing us that we should run two healers and someone should definitely pick Lucio because he's "high tier" and my friend shouldn't play the character he wanted because it was considered "low tier". Later after running off on his own and getting murdered a bunch, that dude started yelling in all caps about our team being terrible.

@bocckob: I remember one game of comp on Dorodo that had started off okay, but quickly declined as the enemy team railroaded us to the 3rd point. When we went on attack, we couldn't even get past the first section. Everyone was laughing and we decided to play our mains regardless of composition. We didn't get much further but we all laughed about it.

We all will have different interactions: some negative and some positive. I'm especially sorry that that happened to you, but neither of our anecdotes our indicative of the millions of people at large that play the game. I fully recognize there are shitty people out there, but there are also people on the flip side of that coin.

The Overwatch community is a fairly friendly bunch. Admittedly, this is measured against the toxic swamps of other online shooters. But you'll mostly have a good time chatting if you choose to. I mostly don't because I like to listen to podcasts and exercise.

• Always look up. There somebody hiding on a ledge or balcony on the top section of the map.
• If your entire teams dies. Don't straight back to the objective by yourself or you will get picked off again. Wait for everybody to respawn to regroup.
• Follow map objectives. You get more exp doing map objectives and winning the match. It's super annoying when it's an capture the point or escort the payload and nobody is there.
• Pick a character that fits your play style. Pick characters that complement other player's skill sets. Reinhart's shield with Bastion's turret. Mercy's attack boost with D.Va or Attack heavy characters.
• Hold off on Competitive matches until you are comfortable or in a group with friends. Most likely you end up getting paired with players who don't know how to play or trolls.
• If you are a healer and a person on your team is spamming the "I need healing" when they are too far away from you or constantly getting killed. Heal everybody else but that person.

Overwatch is kind of a mixed bag on tips and advice depending on what you're doing, what mode you're playing, and who you're playing with. So here's my advice.

I think the most basic thing you should do is just try to find a few characters that you find really fun and most important, are good at playing. Stick to those characters, but also try not to pigeon hole yourself into one particular role, because more often than not, you might not be able to play that role in a game unless you are constantly playing with a full team stack that knows and respects your role. If you're playing without a full stack team, you want to be as flexible as possible with what role your playing, but you also want to be able to be good on your own without having to rely on your team.

Ults are super important in this game. It may seem like pretty trivial advice and it goes along the same advice of being actually good with a handful of characters. Understanding how the whole roster's ults work is so important to winning games though. Arguably more important than how well your aim is. Depending on the character, it has to be like an unconscious reaction when you see an opportunity and that's just going to take practice with a bunch of missed/miss timed ults along the way.

Please use communication. I'll be honest... Overwatch isn't the best community. It's chock full of the saltiest and most toxic people I think I've played with in a really long time. But callouts are still really important in this game and being able to communicate some form of a strategy is better than just silently assuming what your whole team is doing.

Last piece of advice... Keep your expectations extremely low when playing with friends. Within my own friend group, we're scattered when it comes to competitive placement and it's obvious when we all play together. Not everyone is good at Overwatch or is going to be at the same level of play as you . Unlike other shooters, it's a bit more difficult to be carried in this game so the weakest link in your team, suddenly becomes the weakest link for everybody individually in some way if they're not doing their role properly.

When I first got it I found playing the random hero mode in Arcade very usefull for finding out which characters I did and didn't enjoy playing.