Heroes

This article is about playable characters. For the animated short, see Hero.

The hero roster, as of Overwatch's third anniversary
(Missing: Sigma)

There are currently 31 playable heroes in Overwatch. Each hero offers a unique style of play, and is classified under one of three roles: Tank, Damage, or Support. Each team can only have 1 of each hero, although some Arcade game modes allow multiple. Players can switch heroes in the spawn room.

Heroes come from a variety of national/ethnic backgrounds, and occasionally speak in their native languages during matches.

Gameplay

Heroes are controlled using a mouse and keyboard. Every hero has a unique weapon. Some heroes have multiple weapons, which can be switched using 1 and 2. Abilities are normally keyed to Shift, E, and Q (the ultimate ability). Heroes have 150 to 600 HP and move at a base speed of 5.5 m/s (execpt Genji and Tracer, whose base speed is 6 m/s). Walking backwards reduces this speed by 10%. Crouching makes their speed 3 m/s (in every direction). Also, all heroes can jump at a height of 0.98 m.

Heroes exchange specific dialogue with each other based on their character history during matches and background.

Heroes will be added over time post-launch as free updates. Jeff Kaplan has not ruled out removing heroes from the roster in the future.

The idea of classes for heroes was to make it easier for new players to get into the game, and to easily understand how each character would play. When the Looking for Group feature was added, it became possible to enforce these roles.

List of Heroes by release date

There were originally 21 heroes at the launch of the game. Since then, 10 additional heroes have been added. New heroes are released roughly every 4 months, typically in March, July, and November. The November reveal happens during the opening ceremony of BlizzCon. However, with the announcement of Overwatch 2, this tradition breaks. Multiple heroes are expected to released at once with the release of Overwatch 2, and there will be at least 1 new hero before Overwatch 2 instead of the usual once per 4 months.

No.	Hero	Reveal Date	Release Date
01	Tracer	2014-11-07 7 November 2014 (Overwatch announced)	2016-05-24 24 May 2016 (Overwatch released)
02	Reaper
03	Widowmaker
04	Pharah
05	Reinhardt
06	Mercy
07	Torbjörn
08	Hanzo
09	Winston
10	Zenyatta
11	Bastion
12	Symmetra
13	Zarya	2015-03-06 6 March 2015
14	File:Icon-mccree.png McCree
15	Soldier: 76	2015-07-07 7 July 2015
16	Lúcio	2015-08-05 5 August 2015
17	Roadhog	2015-09-22 22 September 2015
18	Junkrat
19	D.Va	2015-11-06 6 November 2015
20	Mei
21	Genji
22	Ana	2016-07-12 12 July 2016	2016-07-19 19 July 2016
23	Sombra	2016-11-04 4 November 2016	2016-11-15 15 November 2016
24	Orisa	2017-03-02 2 March 2017	2017-03-21 21 March 2017
25	Doomfist	2017-07-06 6 July 2017	2017-07-27 27 July 2017
26	Moira	2017-11-03 3 November 2017	2017-11-16 16 November 2017
27	Brigitte	2018-02-28 28 February 2018	2018-03-20 20 March 2018
28	Wrecking Ball	2018-06-28 28 June 2018	2018-07-24 24 July 2018
29	Ashe	2018-11-02 2 November 2018	2018-11-13 13 November 2018
30	Baptiste	2019-02-25 25 February 2019	2019-03-19 19 March 2019
31	Sigma	2019-07-22 22 July 2019	2019-08-13 13 August 2019
32	Unknown	Before Overwatch 2	Before Overwatch 2
33	Sojourn	2019-11-01 1 November 2019 (Overwatch 2 announced)	TBA (Overwatch 2 release)

Development

Design Process

When a hero is pitched, a group of five developers examine the concept from the perspectives of gameplay, character concept and story to see if the idea is worth fleshing out. If that's in the affirmative and the concept is settled, the team of five becomes a team of ten to fifteen, who are tasked with "finding the fun" in the hero and bringing out its "core." This includes work on art, design, engineering, audio and quality assurance. Once this is completed, the hero gains (or will have gained) forty or more developers, which build its respective content (skins, emotes, voice lines, etc.)

After the hero is fully playable, a different group is brought in to build the hero's story; by this point around eighty developers. These individuals work on material such as origin videos, comics and animated shorts. After that, the hero then needs to be publicized. By this last stage, over 150 individuals will have worked on the hero in some form.

Cut Heroes

The following heroes were cut during development of the game:

An early heroes pitch—some heroes are in the final version

• Brit
• Bruiser
• Firestarter
• Frost
• Helio
• Hivemind
• Huntress
• Jetpack Cat
• Luc
• Mama Hong
• McCloud
• Phreak
• Praetor
• Psyblade
• Rashi
• Recluse
• Rumble
• Troy
• Watcher
• Yetzi
• A female Russian hero that was pitched in the early days of development. She would be riding a bear and dual-wielding AK-47s. Her ultimate would be for the bear to also pull out dual AKs.

Heroes in development

• Echo is planned to become a playable hero in the future. Echo appears in the animated short Reunion. In early development, her name was "Iris."
• Mauga was originally supposed to be Hero 31 as a result of the developers wanting another barrier Tank and wanting to expand upon Talon lore; however, when working on the hero's kit, they found it not in line with Mauga's personality. As a result, they created the hero Sigma instead. Jeff Kaplan says the team has big plans for Mauga and is still interested in making him a playable hero someday.
• Queen of Junkertown (speculation) is confirmed to have lots of concept art, and long term plans. This could imply she is a hero in development.

Trivia

The Overwatch development team added a dummy string very early on containing the name of a fake hero: Dying Breed. This was done to identify if the game's files were datamined and uploaded to the internet. They forgot to remove the string when the beta was shipped, and it created some confusion among the team members who discovered it for the first time. The string has long since been removed.

See also

• Hit points
• Weapon
• Ability
• Passive ability
• Ultimate ability
• Movement speed