Overwatch 2 Devs Reveal Mauga's Role in the Meta, Best Character Pairing

This weekend with BlizzCon, the Overwatch 2 development team not only confirmed the new tank character for the game, the Samoan hero Mauga, but actually made him playable. Attendees of BlizzCon weren't the only ones that could get their hands on Mauga but Overwatch 2 players around the world were given the chance to try him out early for this weekend only. Mauga will officially arrive in Overwatch 2 with season 8, kicking off in December of this year. ComicBook.com was on hand for a group interview with a member of the Overwatch 2 development team, speaking with Hero Design Producer Kenny Hudson who offered details about Mauga's place in the game and how confident Blizzard is with his release.

Overwatch 2: Mauga's role in the meta

"So he's a rush down, kind of brawl tank, but he's also a tank that can hitscan and hit flying targets and a lot of those faster enemies. So we'd like to see him in comps where he can get boosted by Lucio or Lifeweaver can heal him a lot because he's a big target. But he can use his overrun to get into fights. Healers can heal him up, save him a little bit, but he can also take down those you know, pesky Pharahs or Echoes or something like that and pick them off like a Junker Queen couldn't or a Roadhog couldn't. "

Some Overwatch 2 players have already expressed a little bit of concern about the arrival of Mauga in the next season of the game, specifically because many of the hard-counter characters are in such a good play. Characters like Ana, Sombra, Symmetra, and Orissa are all good counters to Mauga that happen to be in good spots overall in Overwatch 2, does that deflate the arrival of Mauga when his counters are also great? Hudson responds:

"Well, we feel like we're dropping Mauga into a place where he's always he's also in a good place. He outputs a lot of damage. So I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with having a good counter to a hero. But Mauga;s upside is that he is going to output a ton of damage and we feel like that's okay for tanks too."

Overwatch 2 characters that pair with Mauga

Overwatch 2 remains a team based shooter, meaning Mauga's design and kit puts him in a place to work with some characters better than others. In development one of the first characters that it became clear would pair well with him was Ashe, since both can ignite enemy characters with fire, but one pairing that came as a surprise and wasn't considered at first was how Mauga plays with support character Lifeweaver. 

"I definitely think Liveweaver pairs well," Hudson said. "Being able to rush in and kind of have that save waiting for you and a healing output sent on the way to your destination felt really good. And then I would say the Ash interaction once we figured out that that's what we wanted. We wanted to keep Margaret's theme of fire. We wanted, obviously Ash is going to keep her theme of fire for dynamite. And we didn't want players to have to learn two different visual languages for almost the same thing. When we put those two things together and figured hey like what if you got the bonus critical strike from Ashe dynamite like it kind of seemed like a match made in heaven while we were play testing."

Overwatch 2 will continue to drop new characters every other season

Since Overwatch 2 began with its season roll out, the development team has consistently released a new hero with every other season (starting with the even numbered seasons). When asked if Blizzard had any intention of revising their plans of a new hero every other season, Hudson was quick to note that they'll definitely stick to this because they have more heroes in development right now than they've ever had.

"Interestingly enough with the team the way we have it structured now and we're structured for Overwatch 2, this is actually the most amount of heroes that we've ever had in simultaneous development at one time. So I'm pretty confident looking at the schedule, which is my everyday thing, that we're pretty comfortable with where things are and pretty confident that we're going to hit our targets for releasing a new hero every other season."

Is Overwatch 2 free?

Since the launch of Overwatch 2 in October of 2022, yes, Overwatch 2 is now a free to play game.