Overwatch 2 Season 18 will introduce a new Hero Skill Rating system and here’s everything you need to know about it.
It’ll still be a while before Overwatch 2’s Season 18 starts, but as we get closer to the end of the current season, devs have shared plenty of new details to build up the hype. From the looks of it, this upcoming season is set to bring a major shakeup for competitive play.
Aside from welcoming Wuyang to the hero roster, as well as adding a Persona collab, the next season is set to introduce an all-new feature called “Hero Skill Rating.”
So, how exactly does it work? And how is it different from the regular Skill Rating we’re all familiar with? We’ve got the details below.
Overwatch 2 Hero Skill Rating explained
Hero Skill Rating refers to a separate rating from your overall rank. It measures your performance on individual heroes in Competitive. To sum it up, this basically means that instead of being defined by one number, you’ll be able to have a separate SR for every hero you play.
This separate SR spans from 0-5000 in the game and can be unlocked after playing five placement matches for the chosen hero.
Before you get your official rating, the game will tell you your “Predicted SR,” which gives more insight or a preview while you place.
As Blizzard noted, after each Competitive match, your Top three most-used heroes will show SR gains or losses, allowing you to track your improvement in real time.
In the game, you’ll also be able to view your Hero SR in Career Profile and Competitive Overview to essentially check out which characters you perform well with.
How Hero Skill Rating could impact the game
There are a couple of ways that this system could shake things up in the long run. For so long now, Overwatch 2 has only let you retain a single rank badge for each role in the game. Because of this system, people often judge you based on that.
Things could look different once the Hero SR gets integrated. Say you play mostly Support, your Lucio might be Platinum, while your Ana might be in Diamond.
By having a separate SR for each character, your teammates can see your true strengths, instead of just your overall rank.
Let’s say your teammates looked at your profile. Instead of getting mean comments about your rank, they might say: “Your Ashe is better than Genji, let’s go with that.”
It’s also possible that this system would make smurfing even harder, or at least, noticeable to an extent, as it’ll be trickier to essentially hide the skill gaps across multiple picks.
Overall, this is certainly a huge change, and it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out when it arrives in the game when Season 18 goes live.
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