Background

Blizzard announced at BlizzCon 2023 that they plan to release a new support hero (working title: Space Ranger) in Season 12 of Overwatch 2. Of the two support heroes released in 2023, one of them was really strong (Illari) while the other was really weak (Lifeweaver). There are several factors which can affect how the Overwatch 2 development team decides to balance the new hero:

• They want to keep the overall game balanced and fun

• They don't want one role to be too good

  • Some have accused supports of having too large of an impact in matches

• They want new heroes to drive engagement and revenue

  • New heroes are locked and can be accessed either by playing the game or paying money

Resolution Criteria

Let Season X be the season in which "Space Ranger" is added to the game.

This question will resolve according to the method that has been used by /u/Donler in Season 2.2, Season 3, Season 6 and Season 7. He aggregates several different tier lists by Overwatch 2 content creators and produces a numerical value that represents how good each hero is. They would get 16.0 if everyone gave them an S, 8.0 for A, 0.0 for B, etc. See his posts for a more detailed description of his method.

If he makes multiple posts about Season X, I will use the first one. If he does not make any post about Season X during the season, or if he has changed his method substantially, I will do it myself. If I do it myself, I will only include content creators which have been included previously.

Notes

• Only one alternative will resolve, as none of the ranges intersect.

• Some ranges are larger than others, as the heroes haven't been distributed uniformly in previous tier lists.

• I may trade in this market