Overwatch 2’s reworked respawn timer brings more action to Season 12 matches

The Overwatch 2 devs have announced a huge new feature replacing Group Respawns in Season 12 that will make matches much more enjoyable.

Back in Season 7, Overwatch 2 introduced a Group Respawn mechanic to prevent players from respawning and immediately rushing back to the objective without the rest of their team.

According to the devs, this feature was successful at preventing lopsided matches and interestingly, had the biggest impact at the highest ranks like Champion and Grandmaster.

However, there was a problem with this feature in that some players felt “buried” when they died first followed by all their allies subsequently being picked off. While their respawns were shorter, the player who died first would be waiting around longer.

To fix this, the devs are replacing Group Respawns with Wave Respawns and it’s designed to make the process a lot quicker so that teams can get back to the battle.

Going forward in Quick Play and Competitive, the default spawn time will be increased from 10 to 12 seconds, however, when the first player on a team dies, they’ll start a new “wave” and any teammate that dies within six seconds will join it.

“A hero joining a Wave will respawn at the exact same time as the hero that started the Wave. This means that the respawn time of heroes joining the wave can be as long as 12 seconds if they died at the same time as the first hero or as short as 6 seconds if they just catch the end of the Wave,” the devs explained.

“If a hero starts a Wave and no other hero has joined the Wave when their respawn time reaches 6 seconds remaining, we subtract 2 seconds from their respawn time. This means that they respawn in 10 seconds (our default respawn time before Season 12).”

Some other factors come with this change. For one, respawns in overtime are now 14 seconds with the exception being Flashpoint maps and Wave Respawn is disabled on Payload and Hybrid maps when the cart is approaching the end of the track.

The devs say they’ll be monitoring this system for feedback and more changes going forward, but they expect respawn times to be lower on average. They also say that in their initial testing, this change resulted in more team fights per match, which should make games much more exciting to play.

Wave Respawns will be going live on August 20 when Season 12 kicks off.