Overwatch Characters for People Bad at Video Games: Part III

A Guide for Players Who Don’t Shoot Good

Hello friends! Since I posted my guides to Overwatch (For Dummies), I have continued playing. The ensuing practice time has not made me any better at the game, but it has given me the opportunity to try even more characters for morons.

If you are looking for the best place to pick up tips for Season 11 and how to get up to Platinum or Diamond, this guide is not that. Below are three more Overwatch characters that are easy to play if you are an old who sucks at video games.

Also, I’m not going to bother renumbering the original five, so, just try and figure out how all of these fit together. Don’t worry about it. Don’t @me.

#-10,000. Torbjorn

Ugh, I feel so bad about this. Guys, when I first posted this I said that I didn’t include Torbjorn, because I have some self-respect. He’s on the list now because it turns out I have no self-respect.

I have played Torbjorn, and I feel awful, because Torbjorn is the literal worst.

Here’s how you play Torbjorn:

1. Play “Defense”

2. Pick Torbjorn

3. Win

If you pick Torbjorn, your team will win, and you will win a card. No one will vote for you, no one will endorse you, no one will like you, you won’t like you. But you’ll win, and that’s all you care about. Because if you cared about anything else, you wouldn’t be playing Torbjorn.

What makes Torbjorn so insanely powerful? Let’s start with the obvious thing — that goddamn turret. Torbjorn’s turret is powerful, accurate and, when you hit it with your hammer a few times, a damage output machine capable of wrecking entire teams. Watch as tanks get whittled to nothing, squishies get annihilated and supports vanish in a cloud of smoke.

Torbjorn’s turret is the fun killer. Anytime people are doing anything fun (charging forward! blowing stuff up! flying around!) the turret will murder them, pluck them out of the air and grind the match to a halt as everyone slowly plots out how to take on this awful little drone of death. All while you do nothing and stand next to your turret, watching it shoot faster and more accurately than you ever will in your life.

Now, there are effective counters to turrets. But remember — you’re bad at this game. That means the people you are playing against are also bad. They have no idea how to counter an auto-aim deathbot raining fire on them with all the precision and personality of an Excel spreadsheet.

But let’s say they do, somehow, manage to coordinate enough to focus down your turret, and painfully claw forward on the map.

Do you know what you do then? You slip back a few paces and slap down another turret, and the WHOLE THING HAPPENS AGAIN. At least with Bastion, when you kill the ridiculous turret machine, it stays dead for a while. Torbjorn you just move a little bit back, like the cowardly little dwarf you are, and unleash hell again.

The rest of Torbjorn’s kit is also nuts. Torbjorn has a ridiculously powerful rivet gun that can basically take down a D.Va and an insane ultimate. There are a lot of things that mean certain doom in Overwatch. “Fire in the hole!”, “Nerf this!”, anything in Japanese. But for my money, those aren’t nearly as bad as “Molten COREEEEEEEEE!!!”. Because when you hear there’s a Riptire or a Self-Destruct, you don’t have much time to react. Either you’re screwed (you are) or you’re not. But, when you hear Molten Core, that gives you justtt enough time to realize that you should run for your life. Then you die anyways, torn apart by a psychotic orange midget and his BULLSHIT turret who is ridiculously overpowered.

Now, you might be asking, why is this different from Junkrat (my favorite character), another low-skill character able to rack up massive amounts of kills on better players? Two reasons. First of all, with Junkrat, this stuff is fun, glorious and chaotic. Also, Junkrat’s schtick fails all the time, which is hilarious. Torbjorn’s turrets don’t cause chaos, and they aren’t fun — they just slow the game down and chew apart players like they’re nothing. Torbjorn also never fails. You just slaughter everyone and win. Play as Torbjorn and watch as the eliminations pile up in front of you, coldly and joylessly.

Now it’s true, Torbjorn requires a bare minimum of teammate coordination to succeed — offensive characters that can harass the enemy, a tank to pop the turret behind, a healer to patch him up occasionally. But really, none of that is a big deal if you pick Torbjorn on “Defend.” The maps for Defense and Escort are constructed to deliver natural chokepoints, and as the map progresses, those chokepoints get closer together and nastier and nastier. That means no matter how stupid and incompetent your teammates are, the map forces them to at least group up, and that minimal amount of cover is all the space Torbjorn needs to truly wreck everyone’s shit.

Are the opponents steamrolling through your incompetent team at the first checkpoint, cutting you down before you can even put down a turret? Don’t worry. They’re just getting closer to the next two checkpoints, where tight corridors and closer spawn rooms means you’ll have just enough space to set up a turret, load up your rivet gun and slowly grind them to paste.

(Don’t pick Torbjorn for “Attack.” Then you’ll get [deservedly] rolled.)

In a game that embraces joyful chaos, Torbjorn is slow, methodical destruction. Torbjorn is cold, hard arithmetic. He is the ever-present creeping onset of death. He is the worst thing in the goddamn world, and you should feel terrible about picking him.

Except for the armor packs he throws down, that’s pretty cool. People like that.

Strengths: Winning, destruction, victory

Weaknesses: You’re a terrible person

So, if you need a win, and you’re a bad person, pick Torbjorn. But what if you want to pick the exact opposite of Torbjorn, who makes the game more fun, and who everyone loves? Then you pick up:

#2. Mercy

If picking Reinhardt signals to your teammates that you are a good person, selecting Mercy signals that you are their best goddamn friend in the entire world. Reinhardt buys you a drink at the bar and gets a cab for you at the end of the night. Mercy bails you out of jail, gets you a job at your dream company and plans your whole goddamn wedding— that is how much Mercy rocks, and how much she should be appreciated. And lucky for you, even incompetents can play Mercy.

When you pick Mercy, you get a staff that either boosts damage or heals people. So use it! Boost your flanker’s attack, and watch as they rack up kills. Heal up your tanks, and watch as they become basically invulnerable. With you and your auto-aim beam that instantly locks onto the nearest friend, your entire team turns from the disjointed group of lunatics you know they are at heart into an unkillable, soul-destroying team of badasses, capable of rolling through any obstacle with absolute confidence.

Even better is Mercy’s ability to fly around the battlefield. Target a friend and click a button, and Mercy jets across the map, almost instantly arriving at their location. This makes it easier than ever to respond to your teammates’ cries of “medic!” as you jet back and forth across the battlefield, patching up wounds, boosting damage-dealers and generally being the glue that keeps everything together. This also makes it easy to escape danger — pick a faraway friend and click on them to jet away when the heat gets too real.

Finally, when the enemy team finally manages to focus down one of your teammates, that’s when Mercy gets to play her ultimate trump card — Resurrect. That’s right, when your good players are eventually eliminated, all you need to do is jet over to them and hit a button to bring them back to life. Then step back, fire up your staff and watch as they continue wrecking the team.

If you play as Mercy, you will get extremely good at flying across the map, boosting your teammates back to full health, occasionally reviving them. Unlike Torbjorn the fun-killer, Mercy is the fun-enabler — you help your teammates have more fun by giving them more health, more damage, more lives, and just more MORE!

Because of Mercy’s excellent healing capabilities and game-changing resurrections, she is often the top target of pro and elite teams. But, keep in mind — you’re not playing pro and elite teams. The scrubs you are playing against are probably aiming straight for the biggest (Reinhardt) or most dangerous (Genji) target, and completely ignore the player making Reinhardt invincible or Genji a terrifying god of death. This also means that you can often get off way more kills than you ought to. Mercy’s secondary weapon is a stupidly weak and bad pistol — but since almost no one pays attention to you, it can be easy to line up a quick burst headshot and quickly take down an unsuspecting (and extremely embarrassed) opponent.

The downside, as you might have guessed, is your teammates. Oh, your teammates. When you play as Mercy, you will truly stare into the Heart of Darkness. “If you stay with me,” you will protest, pointlessly, staring into the Void, “We’re unbeatable!” Your teammates will ignore you, sprinting forward into certain doom and getting instantly shredded. The enemy team then descends upon you and completely wrecks you in seconds, but not before one of your idiot teammates, shrieking from the pit of Hell itself, calls out “I NEED HEALING!” Your only recompense, as your doom swiftly approaches, is that at least that idiot is going down with you too.

Strengths: Teamwork, good vibes, helping, assistance, charity

Weaknesses: Your teammates, their stupidity, their arrogance, their insane death wishes

So, by picking Mercy you are selecting someone who can provide game changing support, but you’re also making a huge bet on the sanity of your teammates. But what if you wanted someone who can provide the same healing power, but also deal a lot of damage and work well on any team? Then you should pick:

#1. Moira

Oh man. Huge thank you to Dygo for recommending that I start playing as Moira, because my god. She is so much fun.

Moira is built for people who are bad at aiming! (That’s me! And you!) Her damage beam hits whoever is straight in front of her, and also has the benefit of healing her and recharging her biotic energy. She also can fire off bouncing orbs that are extremely easy to aim and drain a huge amount of life force from whoever they run into.

Moira isn’t just a damage machine though — she’s technically a healer, and an extremely effective one! Moira’s one of the best healers in the game, easily capable of extending a fight by herself. Fire a beam that heals allies right in front of you, or chuck a glowing healing orb into the middle of the fight to help your friends.

Similar to Reaper, Moira can really be whoever you want her to be. She’s excellent as a backline healer, capable of patching up injured players and chucking healing biotic orbs into the madness from a safe distance. She’s also extremely good at dealing damage, especially for a healer! With her self-heal and auto-aim damage, she’s very good at snuffing out fast but fragile flankers like Genji and Tracer. Normally, as a support, if Genji has you 1v1 you’re already dead. But Moira can just buckle up, put on her damage gloves and go toe-to-toe with the ninja.

However, Moira really finds her true potential when she’s in-between the two, a character mixing it up on the very edges of the melee. She doesn’t have quite enough health to be a true frontline monster like Reaper, or enough speed to be a complete 1v1 killer like Tracer. But, if she’s on the very fringes of a chaotic melee, Moira is extremely powerful. She can quickly patch up damage happening around her, and then lash out at attacking enemies with her damage beam. She can chuck a damage orb right into the middle of the enemy team, or toss a healing orb into her own team. By flitting around the fringes of the melee, picking off wounded enemy targets and patching her own side’s wounds, Moira can rack up massive kill combos and heal a ton of damage, quickly charging her ultimate. When Coalescence is ready, go nuts and spray a gigantic beam everywhere that does a ton of damage and heals your own team. And just think — you can do all of this without ever aiming a goddamn thing.

The other move she has that is so good is Fade Step. Fade Step is essentially a get-out-of-jail free card. Using this move, Moira turns invisible and invincible for about five seconds. This is amazing — it means that whenever she is threatened and cornered, she can simply disappear and vanish to safety. If you’re being hammered by a flanking McCree, or a Roadhog has hooked you, simply disappear. Slink back, get a health pack, take another look at the battlefield and then jump in somewhere else.

Because of her auto-aim and self-heal, as well as the contributions she makes as a healer, Moira will make a positive contribution on almost any team. Maybe the only weakness Moira has is she’s too good, and too easy to feel overconfident with. If you attempt to play Moira like a true damage-dealing hero, you will almost certainly get rocked — she can’t take on a tank by herself, and if she lines up against a very good DPS, you will probably die.

When you inevitably get too cocky playing Moira, you will run forward, thinking that you can take on the entire team. Then you will be headshotted by Widow, see your beam bounce uselessly off Winston’s shield, and get lit up by Bastion, because Moira is not actually a front-line character. Hopefully you saved your Fade Step — then you can disappear into the shadows, reemerge seconds later behind the cover of your teammates and continue wrecking everyone in your path.

Strengths: Chaos, shadows, darkness, opportunism

Weaknesses: Overconfidence, arrogance, having too much fun

So if you need to pick a healer — Mercy is the pick that everyone will appreciate and shows that you are a good teammate. But if you want to really have fun, take a good hard look at the insane anarchist Irish separatist, pull on your creepy gloves and prepare to annihilate some players who are absolutely better than you.

Géill do mo thoil!
Jefferson