Climbing the competitive ladder in Overwatch 2 is a lot like climbing a mountain. It’s a herculean task, and there’s danger around every corner with the chance that all your hard work might be for nothing. But like professional climbers have all manner of kit to help themselves up their actual mountains, we’ve got tips for you to help you climb your virtual one.
There’s a lot to learn on the path to Top 500, and there’s (of course) much more to it than a few tips, but fundamentals are always important. So, in this article, we’ll give you our top 5 tips for climbing the competitive ladder in Overwatch 2.
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1. It’s Dangerous to Go Alone
Your team got wiped, and you’re running back to the fight. Up ahead, you see the outline of a lone Lúcio. He charges forward, him against the might of the full enemy team. You cry out in game chat, “Lúcio, fall back. We have to group up!” and you start spamming the ‘Group Up’ ping, but it’s too late. And it doesn’t even seem like he hears you.
Lúcio falls just as you’re getting there, and since the team is split again with half of you now staring ahead at the motionless corpse of your healer, well, you get wiped again.
Don’t be that dude. Before you charge ahead into battle, look behind you. And when you’re fighting, before you move on to the next kill, look around you. One of the most important things you can do in Overwatch, from Bronze through Top 500, is to play with your team.
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Outside of dedicated flanking heroes, like your Tracers and Sombras, there’s little reason for anybody to venture out deep into enemy territory alone. Whether you’re overconfident when you have the advantage or desperately trying to avoid defeat, you won’t accomplish your goals by trying to go at it all by yourself.
2. Stop Focusing Tank
There are 50% fewer tanks in Overwatch 2, but it can feel like there are around 9000% more bullets being fired at tanks. Don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution.
The problem being that tanks have been buffed pretty significantly since there’s only one in Overwatch 2, and when you couple a hero with tons of health and crowd control with a pocket healer, they quickly become nearly invulnerable if not outright immortal.
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So, dumping clip after clip into a tank just isn’t worth it. Sure, if you catch one separated from its healers, or if you can push the enemy back by lowering tank’s health enough for a retreat, that’s one thing. But in a teamfight with tons of other targets, unless you’re a tank yourself, you should be focusing on the healers.
If you kill a team’s support heroes, you effectively kill their tank, but if you just endlessly damage a tank that gets immediately healed to full, you’re wasting time and resources that could be better spent actually killing other folks.
3. Try to Communicate, Just a Little Bit
Some folks out there disable chat, turn off the mic, and unbind ping functionality to really focus on the game at hand. Don’t be like that. It’s a fine way to be if you’re playing Quick Play, but if you’re playing Competitive and you’re just not a huge fan of losing games, you’ve got to communicate with your team.
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Now, some don’t feel comfortable on the mic, especially with how toxic other gamers can get during Competitive matches. While you will benefit from a team making ample use of voice comms, Overwatch 2 has a fairly robust ping system for this exact reason.
With just a couple of button presses you can alert your team to where an enemy is, call for a grouping up, show off your ultimate ability charge, and much more. If you aren’t going to hop on the mic, at least use the ping system now and then to communicate important stuff.
Plus, if someone’s in game chat, at least listen if they’re talking, and when somebody pings, make sure to pay attention to what’s being pinged. It could save your life.
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4. Remember Overwatch Isn’t a Team Deathmatch
Overwatch is an objective-based game, outside of a few silly Arcade modes. The point of the game is to win, not to amass kills. It’s Overwatch, not Call of Duty.
It’s easy to forget this, though. If you’re getting spawn trapped by the enemy team, don’t waste time dying and spawning back in endlessly. Switch to Sombra and start capping the point, routing the enemy team and giving your teammates a chance to push.
If you finally manage to wipe the enemy team who made it nearly all the way to your spawn with the payload, don’t take the next fight on top of the objective. Push up, and try to take your engagements where if one thing goes wrong the enemies won’t be able to instantly win the game. Make sure to keep an eye on whatever the objective is in the game you’re in.
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Don’t be the team that forgets nobody was on the point, causing you to lose. Especially in Competitive, the most important thing is winning. If you can get less kills but win instead of losing, that’s what you’ll want to do, every time.
5. Don’t Waste Your Ultimate
Depending on who you’re playing, your ultimate ability might be the most important part of your hero, and a correctly timed use of it might not just turn the tide of a fight but the tide of an entire game. Considering you get a few chances at ulting throughout a game, you’re going to want to make sure you try and not waste your ults.
First, you’ll want to make sure and keep track of your ult as it’s charging, and when you’re nearly there, pinging your ult status so your team can see is a great move. If you ping your ult is almost ready on the way to a teamfight, your teammates can prepare for you to ult.
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Then, it’s important you do the above because you’ll want to try and use your ult as soon as you can, because then you to work towards charging up another ult. However, it’s more important to use your ult at a key moment rather than simply waste it to get a random kill.
In general, you want to use ults to turn the tide of teamfights, not take down a stray enemy or two. If you’ve routed an enemy team and there are only a couple of stragglers left, don’t feel pressured to ult if you’ve got other options.
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