Blizzard addresses future Overwatch 2 hero releases—with a continued focus on supports

Blizzard provided Overwatch 2 fans with its hero release plan for the near future in a blog post today by game director Aaron Keller, suggesting there will be a continued focus on adding more supports to balance out the roster. 

Even with the upcoming release of Lifeweaver, Keller confirmed that the next hero release will be a support. This means that there will be 10 supports in the game soon before we see another DPS or tank hero.

Keller talks about the roadmap for OW2 hero releases

Today’s blog talked about season four and all the details within. But when it comes to information about upcoming heroes, Keller went into detail about Blizzard’s plan of attack.

“Lifeweaver is the fifth new hero for Overwatch 2. The following hero, slated for Season Six, will also be a Support,” Keller said. “Before Lifeweaver, there were eight Support heroes in the game: three less than the Tank role and a lot less than our Damage role. We think that this gap is too large, and we’d like to start correcting it. However, we don’t want to abandon either of the other two roles. We probably won’t stick to an exact formula, but we’ll be shooting to release roughly 2 Supports to every 1 Damage and Tank hero.”

With this news, it looks like there will be a new DPS or tank hero after the next support. Then, two more supports are expected to be released before another DPS or tank hero is added. As Keller mentioned, this has to do with the fact that the support category has had the fewest heroes available.

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Not only that, but it makes sense to slow down the DPS and tank hero releases. With the team changes in Overwatch 2, there is now only one tank per team. Even though tanks are second in terms of options in their hero pool, having only one per team means that there still are a lot of different choices. There are still two DPS and supports per team, and DPS players have 17 heroes to choose from. Supports will only have nine once Lifeweaver is added, with 10 on the horizon after the following hero release.

So while it might feel like there are a lot of supports on the way in Overwatch 2, just know it was a long time coming with the team changes. Plus, if you talk to some of your fellow support players, they’re probably just excited to have more heroes to choose from.