Overwatch Tier List: Best Heroes After the October 13 Hotfix

Overwatch's Season 5: A Grim Doctrine launched on October 6 with two hero reworks and a new Support, then got a meaningful course correction one week later. The October 13 hotfix walked back some of launch week's overperformers and buffed the hero everyone had already started benching. If you built your Season 5 comp around the patch notes from launch day, several of those picks are weaker than you think, and at least one tank is a lot scarier than it was a week ago.

Season 5 itself is built around three big kit changes: Doctrine, a new vampiric Support tied to Doomfist's story, Sombra's full move from Damage into the Support role, and a from-scratch Roadhog rework that replaced his old hitscan primary fire with a two-burst shotgun and swapped his secondary fire for a new ability, Trash Compactor, that eats incoming projectiles and fires them back. The Watchpoint: Grímsvötn escort map and the Mystery Madness: Graveyard Games Halloween mode shipped alongside those changes, but they don't affect hero balance, so we're leaving them out of this list. A follow-up update on October 20 was bug fixes only, so the October 13 hotfix is still the current balance state of the game as of this list.

This is our opinion tier list for the current patch, built directly from Blizzard's own numbers rather than win-rate guesses, since Overwatch doesn't publish official rank data broken down by patch. We're ranking based on what each kit can do on paper after the hotfix, not claiming to have run our own competitive testing.

01What the October 13 Hotfix Actually Changed

Five heroes got touched directly. Doctrine had his Eternal Scepter's damage and healing reduced from 60 to 55, and Invigorating Drones' duration cut from 6 to 5 seconds. Sombra, who moved from Damage into Support at launch, saw her Machine Pistol damage drop from 7 to 6.5 and her Cyberspace explosion damage cut in half, from 40 to 20, with its cooldown stretched from 12 to 13 seconds.

Roadhog went the other way. His reworked Scrap Gun's center projectile now hits for 40 instead of 34, and Take a Breather got cheaper and stronger across the board: cooldown down from 2 seconds to 1.25, damage reduction up from 35% to 40%, and its max duration extended from 2 to 2.5 seconds. Outside the big three, Kiriko picked up a base health increase from 225 to 250, and D.Va had her base armor trimmed from 275 to 250.

It's also worth knowing that the Season 5 launch patch quietly shrank hitscan hit volumes across the whole roster: Blizzard's own notes describe "large" hitscan projectiles going from 0.07 to 0.04 meters and "small" ones from 0.04 to 0.02 meters, a change the developers framed as cleanup after hit-detection inconsistencies rather than a balance pass on any one hero. It's not hero-specific, but it's part of why aim can feel slightly different in Season 5 even on heroes nothing else in this list mentions.

02Quick-Reference: Where Everyone Lands

03S-Tier: Build Your Comp Around This

Roadhog. He was already a strong pick after his launch-week rework swapped the old one-shot Chain Hook combo for burst-fire damage and the projectile-eating Trash Compactor. The hotfix made his self-sustain genuinely hard to punish: a 1.25-second Take a Breather cooldown means he can duck in and out of damage reduction far more often than before, and 40% mitigation on a tank with a huge health pool is a real wall for a team to break through. Pair that with Trash Compactor turning enemy burst damage back on them, and Roadhog is the clearest answer to the dive and burst comps that dominated Season 5's first week. He's especially strong against Sombra and Doctrine specifically, since Trash Compactor can eat a Cyberspace projectile or a Deliverance volley and fling it straight back.

04A-Tier: Still Excellent, Just Not Untouchable

Doctrine and Sombra both drop out of S-tier here, but neither is bad. Doctrine's core identity, trading Infuse charges between his scepter, drones and Shrouded Momentum dash, is untouched by the nerfs. Losing 5 damage and healing per scepter hit and a second of drone uptime stings in a drawn-out fight, but he's still a flexible Support who can peel, heal and dash through a choke point. Sombra's move into the Tactician subrole was the bigger story of the season, and the hotfix hit two of her lower-impact numbers, Machine Pistol chip damage and Cyberspace's burst, rather than her new identity. Weaken, the debuff that replaced Hack, still turns a fight when timed on a diving flanker, and Hotfix still gives her a real healing kit. She's a support now, not a nerfed Damage hero, and the numbers reflect a correction, not a rework-breaking gut punch.

Kiriko moves up into this tier on the back of a straightforward base health buff. 25 extra health doesn't change her kit, but it means she survives one more poke shot from a Widowmaker or Hanzo before a healer has to bail her out, which matters a lot for a hero who plays aggressively around Swift Step to cleanse and reposition.

05B-Tier and Below: Reconsider Before You Lock In

D.Va is the clearest faller. A 25-point armor cut doesn't sound like much, but armor reduces incoming damage per hit before it reduces total health, so every hitscan and projectile hero now chips through her mech noticeably faster. She's still a mobility and space-control tool, and Micro Missiles still punishes anyone who doesn't respect her Boosters, but she no longer soaks poke damage as efficiently as she did during launch week, and that was a big part of her value against Season 5's heavier reliance on long-range Damage heroes.

Everyone else on the roster is untouched by this specific hotfix, so treat the rest of the cast as sitting wherever it was before October 13. If a hero isn't named in this list, this patch didn't move them up or down; it's Roadhog, Doctrine, Sombra, Kiriko and D.Va whose place in your comp is actually worth rethinking this week.

06How This Changes Your Comp Right Now

If you're a Tank main, the hotfix is a clear signal to pick up Roadhog against anything with sustained poke or a diving flanker like Sombra or Genji, and to pair him with a D.Va only when you need her mobility rather than her tankiness. Support players get a cleaner read too: Kiriko is a safer solo-healer pick than it looked at launch, and Doctrine and Sombra are both still worth learning even after the trims, since both kits are built around resource management, Infuse charges for Doctrine, Weaken uptime for Sombra, rather than raw numbers. None of the five changes here are drastic enough to force you off a hero you already enjoy; they're tuning passes, not reworks.

07How We Ranked This List

This is an opinion ranking, not a leaderboard. We read every ability change in Blizzard's own patch notes for the October 13 hotfix, weighed each change against what the hero could already do after the Season 5 launch reworks, and ranked by how much a change shifts a hero's practical power in a 5v5 match: survivability, burst potential, and how punishing the hero is to play against. We did not run our own matches to generate win rates, and we're not claiming this matches Blizzard's internal balance data point for point. Treat this as a starting point for your own Season 5 queue, not gospel, and check the Overwatch store page if you're new to the game and want to see the current roster before you queue up.

Tier Movement Since the Hotfix

1. 1Take a Breather's cooldown fell from 2s to 1.25s and his Scrap Gun's center shot now hits for 40 instead of 34, giving him far more uptime on both self-healing and burst damage.
2. 2Eternal Scepter's damage and healing both dropped from 60 to 55, and Invigorating Drones now lasts 5 seconds instead of 6, trimming his overall value without touching his kit's structure.
3. 3Machine Pistol damage fell from 7 to 6.5 and Cyberspace's explosion damage was cut from 40 to 20 with a longer cooldown, softening her burst while leaving Weaken and Hotfix untouched.
4. 4A flat base health increase from 225 to 250 makes her noticeably harder to one-shot from range without changing any of her abilities.
5. 5Base armor dropped from 275 to 250, meaning hitscan and projectile damage now chips through her mech faster than it did at Season 5 launch.
6. 6No other hero was touched in the October 13 hotfix, so the rest of the roster sits exactly where it did after the Season 5 launch patch.

Overwatch's official Season 5: A Grim Doctrine launch trailer, uploaded October 5 by PlayOverwatch, a week before the October 13 balance hotfix covered in this list.