As with any competitive, hero-based game, players are always going to wonder who is most-picked, least-picked and all in between, and this goes double for Overwatch and its 30 million+ players all arguing over which of its 25 heroes is better or worse than the others. For anyone fighting that battle, game director Jeff Kaplan has just given everyone a decent benchmark to bolster their arguments.
Posting on the forums, Kaplan made public internal rankings of the most- and least-played heroes in both Quick Play and Competitive for previous seven days. The rankings are below, but Kaplan said the only outliers were Genji at the top of quick play and Mercy and the top of competitive, both of whom are in the top spot by a significant margin.
Quick Play
- Genji (by a long shot)
- Doomfist
- Hanzo
- McCree
- Soldier: 76
- Mercy
- Widowmaker
- Junkrat
- D.Va
- Pharah
- Tracer
- Ana
- Reaper
- Lucio
- Zenyatta
- Torbjorn
- Winston
- Mei
- Symmetra
- Bastion
- Sombra
- Reinhardt
- Zarya
- Roadhog
- Orisa
Competitive
- Mercy (by a HUGE long shot)
- D.Va
- Lucio
- Genji
- Soldier: 76
- Winston
- Ana
- Zarya
- Reinhardt
- McCree
- Zenyatta
- Reaper
- Doomfist
- Pharah
- Tracer
- Hanzo
- Junkrat
- Mei
- Symmetra
- Widowmaker
- Torbjorn
- Roadhog
- Orisa
- Bastion
- Sombra
Kaplan did say that the playtime is “pretty smooth from one hero to the next,” meaning that anyone hero is only a step down from the next, and he also clarified that “Stack rankings are really misleading to look at if you’re not careful,” adding that these numbers don’t “make someone better or worse, more OP, etc.” And, since these are only the rankings for the previous seven days, it’s likely the rankings would vary here and there, but the overall order would be mostly the same.
Of course, Roadhog’s pickrate has been plummeting anyhow, so it’s not surprising to see the once-must-pick hero circling the drain, and we’ve all played enough Quick Play to know there’s always a Genji. Kaplan also reiterated that Orisa would be receiving small buffs in the future, which could boost her up from the bottom tier.
