Unexpected Overwatch 2 hero is big winner in Season 14’s new Hazard meta

One Overwatch 2 character is an unexpected winner of Season 14, seeing a surge in play during the aggressive Hazard meta.

Overwatch Season 14 saw the release of a brand new tank hero, Hazard, who was designed as an aggressive dive tank who could safely weave in and out of the enemy team. Hazard was released in an intentionally strong state, and as such, has dominated the tank meta.

With this new meta, one Reddit user u/ImFate73 collected approximate play rates for all characters in Top 500, which often dictates the meta and strongest heroes. While the data for most characters is to be expected, there are a couple of surprising losers, and one very impressive winner who saw a sizable surge in play rate.

Hard work pays off for this Overwatch character

Torbjörn, infamous for his pesky turrets and cheeky hammer kills, saw a jump in play and became the seventh most picked Damage character, beating out other characters such as Pharah, Echo, and Soldier: 76.

u/ImFate73

While his play rate is not as high as some of the other big Damage characters this patch, coming in at 5.75%, it’s a respectable increase from Season 12 where he sported a 2.50% pick rate. According to ImFate73, the three most picked Damage characters in Season 14 were Sojourn, Genji, and Tracer.

Torbjörn is historically a decent pick into dive comps as his turret can redirect enemy fire and damage clueless divers. With Genji and Tracer seeing a significant amount of play time, Torbjörn’s increase in play rate makes sense as an occasional counter pick.

Blizzard

ImFate73 collects this data by scanning the top 500 leaderboard and recording the play time of each player’s top 3 most played heroes. Therefore, this data isn’t exactly foolproof, but should be a generally accurate representation of what is being played at the highest level.

While most of the other data is expected (Hazard is the most played tank while Ana, Kiriko, Juno, and Brigitte remain some of the most popular supports), some characters saw an unfortunate decrease in play rate. Baptiste was the biggest loser, dropping from a 16.66% play rate to just 2.64%, making him the second least played support character for the season. (Only Lifeweaver is played less than Baptiste.)

A recent hotfix patch handed out some heavy nerfs to Hazard, Widowmaker, and Sojourn. It’s yet to be seen whether or not these nerfs were able to impact the meta in any way. Regardless, if you’re a Torbjörn main, this may be the meta for you to dominate the ladder.