Among the oldest of Overwatch compositions is Dive, a fast-paced, highly aggressive style of play that relies on coordination, mobility, and burst damage. Dive excels at picking off isolated targets and punishing uncoordinated play from the enemy team. However, by no means is Dive an easy composition to play as the six heroes typically utilized in it all have relatively high skill caps.

In its ideal form, Dive features Winston, D.Va, Genji, Tracer, Ana, and Zenyatta. In the following sections, you will find a breakdown of how each of these characters contributes to the composition.

Winston:

As the main tank, Winston forms the spearhead of Dive. This character should be at the front of each engagement, closely followed up by his D.Va. The most important thing to remember as Winston is that your main role is to create space for your team. Not to deal damage, but to make space. Using his jump ability, Winston can easily access high ground or close gaps on the enemy. Once at his target, dropping Winston’s bubble creates a zone of engagement for your team. Essentially, it occupies space on the map where your team can focus on the targets inside while not taking damage from the rest of the enemy. In an ideal dive, your team will be able to kill the target inside the bubble before the bubble itself breaks, then use their movement abilities to either get out of harm's way or move onto the next target.

The key to surviving your dives as Winston hinges on two main factors. The first is being conscious of where your sources of healing are, both from your supports and from health packs around the map. Many Winston players will foolishly engage onto a target, die and then blame their supports for a lack of healing. However, the real reason for their dying is typically due to their inability to play in the line-of-sight of their healers. For example, if your Ana is the main source of healing, you need to take engagements where your Ana can still heal you. All it takes is a quick glance behind you before you dive to see where your Ana is positioned to ensure that she will be able to heal you.

The second factor is your ability to track your own cooldowns and play around them appropriately. Winston’s Jump Pack has a relatively short cooldown at six seconds and the cooldown triggers the moment after you start jumping. Therefore, taking into account the time it takes to get to the target, you only need to survive for approximately five seconds before you can then use your Jump Pack again to reposition yourself. Being mindful of when you have Primal Rage is also important as having it allows you to take riskier dives due to the health restoration you can get from it. Waiting until you have around 100 health points remaining before using Primal Rage is optimal, however, using it earlier is not necessarily a bad thing as it is a common pitfall to wait too long and then die before being able to use it.

D.Va:

Although D.Va can output a respectable amount of damage via her Micro Missiles, Defense Matrix still remains the most vital part of D.Va’s kit in Dive. When your Winston jumps in to engage, there is a small window of time (while he’s flying through the air) in which he cannot protect himself from damage. It is the job of the D.Va to use her Defense Matrix during this time in order to ensure that both Winston and herself get to the engagement as healthy as possible. Once at the target, D.Va should balance dealing damage with eating damage.

She should also constantly be on the lookout for area of effect abilities that she could negate as well, such as Ana’s Biotic Grenade or Ashe’s Dynamite, because her team is fighting so closely together. Ultimate tracking should become second nature for a D.Va player as well because of her ability to eat them with her Defense Matrix. For example, when you know an enemy Zarya has her ultimate, you need to constantly be shadowing her, waiting to negate her Graviton Surge with your Defense Matrix. This task becomes even more necessary when your Zenyatta does not have Transcendence as there are typically no other defensive ultimates in a dive composition to stop a Graviton Surge.

Genji and Tracer: Both of the damage heroes are lumped together here because they operate in very much the same fashion within Dive. Although their kits are vastly different, Genji and Tracer both excel at mobility and burst damage, the hallmarks of Dive. Their biggest challenge, besides landing shots, is having the patience to wait for their tanks to go in first. When Winston and D.Va engage, they tend to draw out many of the enemy’s cooldowns that otherwise could have been used to stop Genji or Tracer. With those abilities now unavailable, it makes the job of these two damage characters all the easier. One more thing to note is the devastating combo that Genji can make with Ana. Dubbed the “Nanoblade,” combining Genji and Ana’s ultimates allows Genji to deal 180 damage per swing while also taking 50% less damage. This combination can single-handedly win teamfights, making Dive all the more deadly.

Ana:

While the tanks and damage characters in Dive are among the most mobile characters in Overwatch, just about the exact opposite can be said of the two supports, particularly Ana. Nonetheless, she does not need mobility in order to make an impact in Dive, all she needs is a line-of-sight on her team. The beauty of Ana is her ability to pump out a large volume of healing from a safe distance. While her team engages onto the enemy, Ana can sit far away but still keep the team from dying. Her Biotic Grenade is particularly useful in fights as she can throw it from long range on the target her team dives onto, stopping them from being healed, leading to faster kills. The one downside to Ana is her lack of self-peel, meaning that if the enemy team dives onto her, there is little she can do to save herself. While she does have a Sleep Dart, it is among the harder skill shots to land in the game and is thus unreliable. Along with using Nano Boost on an ulting Genji, another recommended target for her ultimate is Winston. Doing so can either to make him more durable during a dive or deal even more damage with his multi-target Tesla Cannon.

In a mirror matchup (the other team is also playing Dive), swapping Ana for Lucio is an option as having both supports be relatively squishy targets without much self-peel poses a risk. Lucio’s boop ability can be used defensively to push away an enemy dive, giving your backline a few more seconds of survival. In that space of time, you can then call for your team to perform a counter-dive, which is essentially a dive in reverse. Instead of being the initiator of the fight, you wait for the enemy team to dive onto your backline and then you dive onto them. With Ana instead of Lucio, the time your team has to counter-dive is much shorter because of her lack of self-peel.

Zenyatta:

Although some Dive compositions opt for a Lucio in this spot instead of Zenyatta, the omnic monk helps his team accomplish the most basic goal of Overwatch more quickly: kill the enemy. Without a doubt, the Orb of Discord is the most useful tool in Zenyatta’s kit for Dive. Causing enemies to take 25% more damage, a dive target with Discord on it shouldn’t stay alive for long. In a very systematic way, the Orb of Discord allows Dive to go from target to target until none are left standing. Zenyatta also finds great value through his healing ability, Orb of Harmony, which he can throw onto a teammate and allow it to continue healing him throughout the duration of a fight. Prioritizing Genji and Tracer for healing is recommended due to their low health pools and the natural tendency for Anas to heal the tanks more. Keep in mind, however, that both the Orb of Discord and Orb of Harmony will return to you if line-of-sight is broken on the recipient for longer than three consecutive seconds. Therefore, maintaining a line of sight on the fight becomes a priority in order to get the most value out of both orbs.

Zenyatta’s ultimate, Transcendence, also brings a great degree of value to the Dive composition. Particularly useful against teams that have hard crowd control abilities, such as Graviton Surge or Blizzard, Transcendence can effectively negate the effects of these typically teamfight winning ultimates. Transcendence is also useful against Nanoblade, Tactical Visor, Barrage and Death Blossom, assuming you react fast enough to use it before too many of your team members die.

Like our content? Support us by getting our merchandise in our shop