Overwatch 2’s newest competitive mode will frustrate one-trick players

Flex on the haters.

Screengrab via Blizzard Entertainment

Overwatch 2’s weekly update today included the addition of a new competitive game mode, and it’s not for the faint of heart—or players with a limited hero pool.

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That’s right, competitive Mystery Heroes is on the menu, and players can collect some competitive points from indulging in one of the game’s more chaotic modes. With many players firmly entrenched in their rank for the game’s primary competitive modes, mystery heroes will certainly be a quality way to spice things up ahead of the upcoming reset in season four.

Screengrab via Overwatch

For the unindoctrinated, Mystery Heroes was originally an Arcade brawl in which players are not allowed to select their hero at the start of the game. Instead, a hero is selected for each player at random, regardless of role. This means that the game could randomly give a team multiple tanks and no healer, or more likely, all DPS heroes at one time.

Whenever a player dies, they again cannot select a new hero. Instead, they are respawned as a completely different hero. The strategy of Mystery Heroes that comes into play is when teams intentionally let themselves die to change characters, or play especially cautiously in order to stay on a character that they’re particularly proficient at.

This competitive season was originally announced in the game’s midseason patch last week, but it didn’t officially start until today. The end of the season was not announced, but one would imagine it will have a natural conclusion in just under a month when season three ends on April 11. That gives players four weeks to try to optimize their play on all 36 heroes in the game.

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Image of Max Miceli
Max Miceli
Senior Staff Writer. Max graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a journalism and political science degree in 2015. He previously worked for The Esports Observer covering the streaming industry before joining Dot where he now helps with Overwatch 2 coverage.