If you’ve ever wondered which Overwatch heroes the people actually making the game enjoy playing, the answer is surprisingly varied. At BlizzCon 2026, GameSpot spoke with Overwatch game director Aaron Keller and associate game director Alec Dawson about their personal favorites, their original mains, and the newer heroes they think you should be playing.
Here are the best Overwatch heroes according to Blizzard developers:
Lucio
For Dawson, it all started with Lucio. “My first main, like, ‘I want to play this character all the time,’ was Lucio, he said. That’s mostly down to Lucio’s impressive movement, he explained. “When there’s a character with very fluid mobility, I’m like, ‘I’m going to lock in and learn as much as I can about this hero.'”
Lucio’s mobility is one of the defining things about his kit. He can wall ride, allowing him to move quickly around the map by chaining movement across walls rather than taking the ground approach. His Crossfade also gives him an area-of-effect speed boost which applies to any teammates within the radius. Combined with wall riding, this makes him especially good at quickly repositioning, escaping danger, chasing enemies, or returning to the point after death, as Dawson agrees.
“I think Lucio just spoke to me on a level–I was like, ‘Wait, I can do all of those things?’ This guy’s slide-sliding around walls! That was awesome from the start.”
And yes, you can count on it that Dawson has used Lucio’s Soundwave to boop more than a few opponents down the well in Ilios.
Tracer
For Aaron Keller, his original main was Tracer. As someone who has been working on Overwatch from its inception, Keller’s endorsement of the hero from the original roster is glowing.
“I don’t know if I have a main now, but my first was probably Tracer,” he explained. “I just loved the mechanics. I feel like the kit is almost perfect, the way that it works.”
Tracer’s kit is built around speed, mobility, and constant repositioning, which helps to explain why Keller finds it “almost perfect.” Using her Blink ability, she can teleport a short distance, and it has multiple charges to escape danger quickly. She can then hit her Recall ability to essentially rewind to where she was a few moments earlier, restoring her previous health and ammo. Then there are her Pulse Pistols, which do huge damage at close range.
It’s that coherence and synchronicity that Keller loves. While he ends up taking the tank role pretty often these days, when he’s playing damage, he’ll opt for Tracer, although he admits, “I’m a lot worse at damage than I used to be.”
Reinhardt, Winston, Zayra, and Orisa
When he is playing tank, Keller has several favorites rather than one definitive main.
“I typically queue flex now, which means I typically queue tank now, is what happens. So, I rotate through a few of the tanks, between Reinhardt, Winston, I love playing Zarya. I’ll play Orisa, also,” he explained.
If you’re wondering which tanks have the seal of approval from one of Overwatch’s key developers, that’s Keller’s shortlist.
Doctrine
When it comes to the newer heroes, Dawson singled out Doctrine as an example of the development team getting many different elements right at once.
“Doctrine is a wonderful example of taking an art visual archetype that we hadn’t explored yet, this techno-vampire, making it the Overwatch version of that, with all the gameplay bundled together for his drones,” he said. “I thought that was just a really perfect sandwich of things all coming together.”
He’s not alone in his admiration for Doctrine, though, as Keller agreed with him. “It’s like this amazing combination of backstory, visuals, and gameplay that really supports this, sort of, vampire fantasy,” he added.
Doctrine takes the classic vampire concept and mixes it with Overwatch’s futuristic sci-fi world. Instead of making a traditionally supernatural vampire, Blizzard created the “techno-vampire” by combining classic vampire imagery with futuristic technology.
Doctrine has the seal of approval from both developers. That’s probably as close as you can get to an official developer-certified hero recommendation.
Shion
Dawson’s personal favorite among the newer heroes is Shion. “I think the one that I personally vibe with the most, ’cause it was just over the top, is Shion,” he noted. And the developers apparently knew exactly what kind of hero they wanted Shion to be from the beginning.
“From the very get-go we were basing this off some action movies; we need to kick a motorcycle from the air. It was like we’re going crazy with this hero,” Dawson explained.
It seems Shion’s personality is something that the developers feel connects her to players. “She just had that personality that’s, sort of, villainous to her that I think also struck a really nice chord with people.”
It’s those over-the-top, action-movie-inspired, slightly villainous elements that Dawson thinks resonate particularly well with players. Her personality matches the extravagance of her concept, and she’s certainly not designed to be understated.
Emre
Keller’s pick of the newer heroes is a little less flashy, but that’s exactly where his praise is aimed. “I think the primary file of Emre feels so good,” he explained. That primary fire is Emre’s Synthetic Burst Rifle, a three-round burst weapon. That straightforward, satisfying burst-rifle shooting makes Emre easy to learn how to play.
“Overwatch is a first-person shooter, so you just want a weapon like that in the game,” Keller explained. “He might not be the flashiest character that we’ve got, but he has really resonated with a lot of players, and I think one of the reasons is that primary fire.”
While these heroes come highly recommended, they didn’t always function in the way that you see today. Tracer used to shoot lasers from her eyes, while two of Overwatch’s most-criticized characters are getting a rework.
