Wanna learn how to play Ramattra and actually be good at him? Read this. I promise it's not just holding arms. My credentials? Champ 2 peak and 1000 hours on the hero. Sometimes I update this because the game is changed. I also stream the hero in ranked so if you wanna see live gameplay go to twitch.tv/nemesis_ibm0
Health: 425
Armor: 100
Passive: Tank passive (enemies receive 40% less ult charge from shooting you, and -150 HP in non role queue modes)
Stalwart (-40% knockback received and -40% slow received)
Shoot a stream of slow moving pellets at a high rate of fire.
Damage: 5
Headshot? Yes.
Rate of fire: 25 shots per second
Reload time: 1 second
Ammo: 100
Projectile speed: 80 meters per second
Projectile Radius: 0.15 meters
Damage per second: 125
Notes: Exclusive to omnic form, no damage fall off or spread.
Place a barrier in a targeted spot.
Health: 1000
Cast time: 0.03 + 0.5 seconds
Duration: 4 seconds
Max range: 35 meters
Cooldown: 12 seconds
Notes: Exclusive to omnic form. Hold to target. While targeting, it will place a line on the ground where it will be spawned. Targeting can be canceled by primary fire or the escape key. Only one can be active at a time and a new one can’t be next to an old one (for modes where this is possible). The shield is stationed exactly where placed. So even if put on a moving or temporary location, it will remain after such surfaces have moved or expired. Cooldown begins the moment the ability is used.
Shift from omnic form to nemesis form to gain 2 new abilities, speed, and armor.
Health: +275 armor to current health pool
Cast time: 0 + 0.5 seconds
Duration: 8 seconds
Cooldown: 8 seconds
Movement speed: +20% speed
Notes: Adds 275 armor and replaces staff and shield with pummel and block. Cooldown starts when the ability ends. Is not interrupted by crowd control. Can still use quick melee in nemesis form. Movement speed buff does not count towards the 75% global cap, meaning he can be boosted to 95% speed. Cooldown of void barrier visible while in nemesis form.
Strike your opponents with nanite shockwaves ejected from your fists that pierce said opponents.
Effect type: melee and projectile
Damage: 65
Headshot? No.
Rate of fire: One pummel per 0.6 seconds/1.67 shots per second
Ammo: infinite
Max range: 10.5 meters
Projectile speed: 105 meters per second
Projectile radius: 0.575 meters
Damage per second: 108.33
Notes: Exclusive to nemesis form. Pummels pierce enemies and shields. Damages enemies behind zarya’s bubbles but not the ones inside them. Pummel is not reflected by Genji’s deflect, but it doesn’t damage him either. Does not damage things behind terrain like constructs (tree of life, petal platform, mei wall). Quick melee cancels the pummel recovery animation.
Raise your fists in front of your body to block damage.
Damage reduction: 75%
Cast time: 0+0.3 seconds
Duration: 0.2 seconds (min)
Cooldown: 1 second
Movement speed: -50% penalty
Notes: Exclusive to nemesis form. No duration, ability lasts as long as you hold it. Block is a channeled ability; it is interrupted when Ramattra is stunned, knocked down, or hacked. Impact from Zarya’s grav interrupts the block. The impact damage from things that interrupted the block will still have their damage reduced. Ramattra blocks damage in a horizontal 53 degree arc from the direction he is facing to the left or right. Vertical view does not affect blocking. The block’s effect extends to AOE and splash damage abilities. Damage is generally blocked when facing them. Exceptions are Zarya’s grav and an enemy Ramattra’s ravenous vortex. In which the damage is blocked by facing them instead of the center of those abilities. Damage from Hanzo’s dragons or Torbjorn’s molten core is blocked regardless of the direction faced. Does not reduce damage taken from Sombra’s EMP or Sigma’s gravitic flux. Block reduces the damage of stuck projectiles. Such as Bastion’s tac grenade, Echo’s sticky bombs, Tracer’s pulse bomb, and Illari’s captive sun. Does not block damage from DOT effects (junker queen bleed). Hides head hitbox.
Throw a nanite charge that drags enemies to the ground and slows them down. Can manually detonate it to send it careening downwards too.
Damage: 70 total over a 3 second period (23.3 dps) 15 damage burst
Headshot? No.
Cast time: 0.5 + 0.4s
Duration: 3 seconds
Area of effect: 4 meter radius, 10 meter height
Movement speed: -40% penalty to enemies caught within
Projectile speed: 30 meters per second
Projectile radius: none
Cooldown: 11 seconds
Notes: available to both forms. Is pretty much just vengeful vortex. Projectile must hit the ground to activate. Projectile bounces off walls and shields but passes through enemy heroes. Slowing field and damage goes through shields. Can be negated by eat abilities (sig, dva, orisa) and reflected by Genji. Pulls down enemies caught in a friendly sigma’s flux but does not mitigate the damage or prevent the lift up. Also catches wrecking ball’s pile drive but does not prevent the slam if he initiates it. Does not affect the following abilities: Doomfist Punch, Queen’s ult, Cassidy’s roll, Tracer blink, Sojourn slide, Venture drill bash, Genji’s dash, and Brig’s shield bash. Does not affect weaver’s petal (that would make too much sense). Is actually a channeled ability, meaning until it is over, you cannot do anything else and when stunned out of it you lose the ability or it gets refunded and is ready for use again.
Transform into nemesis form and lash out on enemies in your radius, extending its duration by damaging enemies.
Effect type: AOE
Cost: 2300 points
Damage: 35 damage per second to targets affected by the tether
Headshot? No.
Cast time: 0+0.5s in omnic form. none in nemesis form.
Duration: 3-20 seconds
Area of effect: 13 meter radius
Notes: Transform into nemesis form until the ultimate ends. If activated in nemesis form, the armor granted by it is refreshed and there is no recovery time. The cooldown of nemesis form is not affected by annihilation. If annihilation is activated from nemesis form, its cooldown immediately begins as the ultimate is used. Making it possible to string nemesis form, into annihilation, into another nemesis form if annihilation lasts longer than the cooldown of nemesis form. Enabling you to have a whopping total of 36 seconds of nemesis form uptime. Tether damage is not affected by crowd control. Timer ticks down at 0.15x the normal speed when tethered to someone, extending the 3 seconds to a maximum of 20. Enemies must be in line of sight to be affected. Does not affect people behind barriers or spawned terrain like tree of life or ice wall. Does not affect invulnerable enemies, such as zenyatta during transcendence or targets affected by Kiriko’s suzu. BOB counts as a valid target. But constructs like sym turrets or torb turrets do not count. Does not affect Sombra while she is invisible, unless Ramattra enters her detection radius.
Prolonged Barrier: Increases duration and size of void barrier by 25%
Type: Minor perk
Effect: Makes the shield bigger and longer as I just wrote. Lol.
Relentless Form: Increases the duration of Nemesis form and Annihilation when you score an elim in either form
Type: Minor perk
Effect: When you score an elim in nemesis form, duration is extended by 1 second. Applies to annihilation too.
Nanite Repair: Ravenous vortex now heals Ramattra
Type: Major perk
Effect: Vortex heals Ramattra for 75 health per second for a total of 225 health over vortex’s 3 second duration
Notes: Doesn’t heal his allies, just Ramattra.
Void surge: Void accelerator periodically shoots and additional 6 pellets when continuously firing
Type: Major perk
Effect: Will shoot 6 pellets in a shotgun like formation every 15 shots out of the clip with spread increasing as range does.
Damage: 5 per pellet for a total of 30 from the surge
Headshot? Yes.
This is your main poking tool. Most of the value you find on this hero will be found on your ability to effectively use this weapon to bait out cooldowns, put pressure on lower HP targets, and to keep sniper characters in check. The pellets travel slow and in a straight line so learn to track and lead ahead of your targets to more effectively kill them.
Do not expect to hit every single shot with this thing, as it is extremely difficult to do so at range due to the slower projectile speed. But you should also practice trigger discipline so you don’t waste any unnecessary pellets in the “clip” that would otherwise confirm a kill. In general you wanna use this to either focus damage into a target for your team to pick off, or to poke the enemy from afar, especially sniper characters, or to weaken opponents for your nemesis form.
Aim between the neck and head hitboxes of those you wish to attack, this way you can hit their heads better but also maybe hit their body in case you miss. The weapon is especially useful if you keep it at head level since it makes lining up headshots exceptionally easier. Additionally, don’t randomly switch targets when you are firing upon the enemy, as this weapon excels at focusing heavy damage onto one target.
Sometimes it’s better to just use staff when 1v1ing people since it does upwards of 250 dps if you consistently land headshots, very useful against some problematic characters and for just confirming kills up close in general, especially considering your smaller hitbox and more nimble movements make it easier to dodge critical cooldowns from the opponent, for example sleep dart (fuck this ability it is NOT a skill shot if my hitbox is the size of fucking Zimbabwe). Similar to Winston’s left click, you can throw in melee frames during your staff usage to soften up the enemy more or to just do a quick burst of 40 damage. Much harder to heal through than the staff and can even soften up armored targets.
You want to hold onto this ability for key moments and to advance on important territory. Key moments could include protecting an ulting team member, soaking up heavy damage in a team fight, or reacting to specific abilities like hog’s hook, reinhardt’s earthshatter, or dva’s bomb. Don’t have a brain aneurysm when you use this as its 13 second long cooldown leaves you plenty vulnerable if you place it in the wrong spot.
Pay attention to when you use a shield and it barely gets touched, as that wasn’t a good shield. Learn from those. Additionally, if you use a shield that takes more than 400 damage, it was probably a good shield. On the flipside, however, even if all 1000 Hp is used up, that doesn’t always mean it's good. It usually means the enemy is more damage heavy and you should use it as a window of opportunity to kill them before it breaks. If they don’t die before it breaks you may need to rethink your approach to that fight.
Never just dump it in front of you when a threat presents itself, you have a decently small hitbox and thus should use evasive maneuvers, at least for a little bit, before using it. I find that some players, including myself, throw it out when someone shows up instead of when they actually start firing upon you. Ideally use it when you start taking heavy damage, or a little bit before, so as to not waste the shield. One little known thing I try to avoid is putting shields behind my team when the enemy has a character with blast radius on their abilities, like Junkrat or Pharah, as they can use the shield as a basis for the splash damage which can kill my team if I place it behind them.
In a more general and easy to read sense, the shield has many particular use cases. It can be used to react to abilities, set up on specific spots, advance on specific spots, block important chokes or offensive/healing sight lines, deny space from the enemy, covering low health or ulting team members, covering yourself in a pinch or during a nemesis form usage, hold down important areas, provide cover for rotations around the map, etc.
This is Ramattra’s bread and butter. Most of what you do hinges on your usage of this ability. Your pummels can be used to brawl up close with your enemies, even allowing you to stack damage on several as they pierce opponents. Given the sheer amount of armor you have in this form, as well as your block, you can get in the face of the enemy team and take all their fire for your team, opening up an immense opportunity for them.
Be sure to evade or at least to attempt to evade stuns, anti nade, and discord orb as those 3 things are the biggest threats to you in nemesis form. You can also use the shield before some nemesis form engages to give yourself breathing room to freely pummel. Use the pummels in conjunction with the staff and vice versa to quickly confirm kills or soften them up for someone else.
Do keep in mind in this form you have no mobility beyond the 20% bonus movement speed so you should focus more on heroes with less movement abilities, and be careful of opponents on high ground. Most of the time people will run away from you in nemesis form so use this to make them disengage or to make space for your team. Forcing enemies to run away opens opportunity for your team and enables you to catch them with the slow and pick them off with the staff.
You do however want to use your pummels against squishy targets, even if they are grouped up and pose a bigger threat to you. It is particularly your job in nemesis form to get in front of DPS characters and isolated support characters so you can wipe them out for your team. For example advancing on and pummeling an off angling soldier with his mercy pocket, you can simply line them up and pummel them both with relative ease.
The most general usage for nemesis form is to apply pressure, hold space, advance on territory, and brawl with the enemy tank during fights. You have a similar impact up close as Reinhardt does. Both of you do 100+ DPS up close and are forces to be reckoned with. Use this to your advantage. But unlike Reinhardt you have more range than he does and can stack your pummels more effectively. Like I mention in the general playstyle section, you can use your Reinhardt knowledge to supplement this hero. To put it simply, you can play like Reinhardt does whenever you are in nemesis form. Block when there’s too much damage coming in, brawl the enemy tank, punch their squishier targets, play around cover to safely apply pressure, advance or hold space when necessary, etc.
Just like with the shield, never just pop it when a threat presents itself, you want to advance on them and set up the engagement. What’s more is that you don’t want to always hold onto the ability as its long cooldown can bite you in the posterior on some occasions. Examples of either of these would be going form when you see opponents on high ground or enemies that are far away. For those examples it would be best to go onto the high ground and shift into form then, or poke them from range with the staff which is sometimes a better tool than nemesis form. As for dropping the ability, do it when a fight is won, a kill is secured, or you need to shield instead of block, among other potential reasons. More info on when to use nemesis form or annihilation to keep yourself alive can be found in misc tip number 12.
Your block is your most powerful tool and you should use this a lot. If you cannot deal damage or your damage is negligible, you can simply hold block to advance on the enemy team. They will have to use their cooldowns and focus you down to eliminate you, creating more opportunity for your team. In general, use it mostly as a parry to block random bouts of damage. Such as reinhardt left click, reinhardt firestrike, doom left clicks, junker queen axe, junkrat combo, hog left click, sig left click, dva bomb, orisa ult, reaper ult, soj right click, etc.
Additionally, if you have 5 in front of you and are anchoring point or something similar, holding block will not only ensure your survival in most scenarios but will expend their cooldowns as previously mentioned. Sometimes you wanna ask yourself what to block. Enemy ulting? Block. Enemy trying to stampede my team? Block. Full coordinated assault to focus you down? Block it. Mauga just hit me with cage fight? Yep block that too. Enemy roadhog whole hogging me in a corner? Block that. Block is one of the strongest sustain tools in the entire game and you wanna use it as such. Because whenever you block, you basically multiply whatever your health is in the bottom left by 4.
Do know that when you wanna dodge something in nemesis form and you happen to be blocking, let go of the block so you get your movement speed back and are able to dodge it more efficiently. Also watch out for when opponents are locked to your sides and facing sort of diagonally inwards as they are shooting your back and thus your weak point so make sure to turn the camera a little bit to get the block frame in.
Last bit of info: NEVER throw a vortex when you are low on health or trying to pummel someone because the throw animation cannot be canceled by pummel or block.
Everything I said about nemesis form applies here. The only difference is to make sure you hold onto it till after abilities are used and to make sure that you’re very careful to keep the tether attached because that’s what separates it from being a 20 second long nemesis form to 3 seconds. Sleep, anti nade, discord orb, and shields are your biggest obstacles so make sure you use it after those are gone to freely go all in with the ult.
Usually, the best way to create a use case for annihilation is to use your shield then your nemesis form and wait for the initial 275 armor from it to be spent before hitting the ult. Most teams will have used said resources by the time you hit Q. In general, you can use it to turn the tide of a fight and advance on the enemy team. Or you can use it to bait out enemy cooldowns/ults for your DPS ults later on.
It excels when used in conjunction with things like nano boost or kitsune rush. So be mindful of potential combos to enhance the effectiveness of this ult. Other uses include stacking tethers and pummels on the enemy team to deal heavy damage unto them all, or to simply use it to advance on them heavily by holding block and absorbing all their damage and abilities, opening up a huge opportunity for your team.
It is particularly useful when in OT based scenarios, usually on point. If the enemy is running out of time and needs to touch, that is when you can use your ult to force them off the objective and into a really tough scenario. They will be left with 2 choices: kill you and take the point, which is really hard to do if you hold block. Or stay away from you to run out your annihilation and go back in, which is also super hard because you can vortex and chase them down to keep it going, or it just runs out their time bank and they lose.
You can also use it as a massive stall tool. In which you use your shield, then your nemesis form and holding block, then ulting to refresh the armor and continue holding block. One major, major tip I can provide for this ability is that when you are busy solo wiping the enemy team, make sure to put a decent amount of distance between you and your pummel targets. Close enough to where your pummels land and far enough away to where you can easily get close to enemy targets nearby. I find that when you get too close to one target (quick melee range close) other targets nearby build enough distance to where you can't keep the annihilation tethers going. Thus running out of fuel and pummels. So learn to space your targets efficiently enough to keep your annihilation efficiency up.
In general, use this when the enemy is on the backfoot and dwindling their resources and health, so you can truly “annihilate” them. However, holding onto annihilation may sometimes not always be the best move, you can in some cases take cover to drop it, then immediately activate nemesis form again to refresh the 275 armor to keep up your engagement on the enemy. Vengeful vortex can also be a really good opener for an annihilation use as it halts them in place and softens them up for the ensuing onslaught.
One thing to be careful of is when you exit annihilation in a pinch, as you can’t shield or go nemesis form as quickly as you might think. One bug that occurs is when you don’t finish shifting into Omnic form and then you use nemesis form but it doesn’t actually pop and you lose the cooldown. So be sure that when you exit annihilation on low HP you have a back up plan for it, be it a support ultimate or cover or anything in between.
This ability will be used to catch people off guard and to make them easier kills. Use this to make enemies inside it easy pickings for your team or for your staff/pummels. Don’t use this to catch flying heroes or anyone with movement abilities because they won’t actually be all too affected by it. The height isn’t high enough and they can just use a movement ability to get out. So you wanna use it on immobile or targets without their cooldowns, as well as for any necessary hero matchup. Or even dealing damage to things out of sight, like sym turrets on a wall or an Illari pylon.
It can have an extreme impact on groups of people from the sheer damage it does and how easy it is to catch people inside it off guard, since they will need to use crucial cooldowns and other such evasive maneuvers to dodge it. One thing you can use it for is to gather decent ult charge off of it. Since it does 70 damage in a 3 second space and 15 on burst, you can throw it into a team of 5 people to farm extra charge for your annihilation. It can also be used to slow down or deny enemy engagements, as its damage and effect can discourage many people from entering right away, buying vital time for any potential strategies. Especially useful is when you throw it at the attacker’s spawn on any given map, because you never know when that 3 seconds of slow may save you in an overtime scenario as they won’t be able to catch up before the clock runs out but this is an extremely rare occurrence.
One major caveat to vortex is that it has many strange interactions on some occasions. The first of which is when you get stunned out of the ability, as vortex is a channeled ability meaning if you get slept, hacked, doom punched, etc. It has the tendency to either go on cooldown and not actually be used, or it gets refunded should the stun happen early enough. Like how I mentioned in the Nemesis form section, throwing a vortex means you can’t pummel, shield, block, fire your weapon, or shift into nemesis form or annihilation while the animation is happening. The earliest instance of it being channeled is when he winds his arm back, and it ends when it snaps it forward and brings it down, which lasts roughly 0.9 seconds. This windup is similar to ana’s sleep dart, so when you have vengeful equipped, treat it similarly. One last interaction that the vortex projectile itself has is that sometimes when thrown in certain spots, it doesn't hit flat enough ground and keeps bouncing which can either lead to it having a delayed reaction or it infinitely bounces and fades away. The most notable and consistent spot I can make this happen is on the front side of the barricade on push, as it has a little slope at the bottom of it. Or even dorado and King’s Row third points.
With Vengeful vortex being base kit, one of the strongest perks in the game to a degree where the devs themselves recognized its awesome power, is now part of your kit on load in. The former allowed you to skip the line ups on vortex and just toss it where you need it and then send it straight down for a quick burst of damage.
The ability to catch opponents in the air is another factor that made the former perk super strong. All you needed to do is toss it right at a flying opponent or even just near them and activate it again to get the 15 burst damage and an easy kill. Particularly useful against opponents like ulting Illaris or Emres.
In a nemesis form brawl or even up close in omnic form, this can be used to quickly pop in front of you (detonating it again is actually faster than aiming at the ground and doesn’t disrupt your aim) to get an extra 15 damage to soften up a target for the void surge or to just triple pummel them. Conversely, it can be used to confirm a kill after damage is dealt to a target, can be done rather easily as being able to just pop it again means it goes off instantly and can finish targets on a rooftop or around a corner.
In a nutshell, everything that could be said about vengeful and how to use it can now just always be applied to vortex whenever you use it. Yeah it might not do 50 damage anymore but the tradeoff is you get vastly better space control and play making from the moment you walk out of spawn. That is not to be underestimated.
For his perks it's quite simple: you should usually pick Prolonged Barrier and Void surge.
These two specific perks help you stay alive more and deal more reliable and powerful damage with the staff when you unlock it. This allows you to rely less on nemesis form and save it for more critical scenarios.
Prolonged barrier’s main usage is massively buffing shield. The shield becomes significantly bigger and that extra second of duration makes it super easy to live in omnic form and hold space even easier than you could before. It also has the added benefit of lessening the amount of time you spend without shield, going from 8 to 7 seconds. Meaning you only need to play around cover or nemesis form block for that long before being able to put it back up. If you play your cards right, you can have shield pretty much every time you need it.
Relentless form’s main usage is extending nemesis form and annihilation through the use of elims. This is pretty good especially in annihilation but the issue here is that the other perk (void surge) is far better and makes this one completely moot in terms of what to pick. In a vacuum this perk is good, it is not void surge good though so pick that. Unless you really don’t like using staff, you cannot go wrong with this perk. As for data on how to use it though, it goes as follows: if you punch someone and they die, be it by your hand or your team you will get the extra fuel for either form. This is particularly useful for extending annihilation in a long team fight as an elim grants roughly a third of the fuel back which translates to several seconds of up time. Theoretically as long as you keep getting elims, you will keep annihilation going forever.
Void surge makes the staff much stronger and gives it strong burst damage potential (having a surge go off in someone’s face does 60 damage on top of the normal pellets). It raises the damage per clip to 680 on just body shots and 1360 on headshots. This can do many things: it can allow you to pressure heroes like hog more effectively and to solo kill bob. This one allows you to spam better with staff and get ult faster, which is especially good in ranked. It’s also especially good at punishing and killing squishies, so much so that nemesis form isn’t even needed sometimes.
Nanite repair is quite possibly one of the most useless perks in the game. That 75 heals per second over that 3 second space for vortex is not going to save you or give you an edge in battle. This is QUITE LITERALLY THE COUGHING BABY!!!!!! Do not pick this over vengeful vortex if you have a functioning brain. Literally no useful notes or advice for this perk it's just shit do not pick it ever in your life. If you need more justification, ask yourself this: why should you waste your ELEVEN second cooldown defensively when you already have a shield and a really broken block ability to just not take damage at all? You can instead pick the other perk and get more kills. More kills = less enemies = nobody to damage you = no reason to heal. The logic is pretty simple.
Ramattra is very versatile and dynamic. He can do many different tasks save for diving and having stuns. As described in his ability breakdowns, you want to follow these playstyles while overall responding to various different scenarios at once and following certain logic when playing this character.
Holding territory is half the battle on this character and other tanks. Ramattra especially excels at this with his massive amount of defensive capabilities. Choosing a specific spot to set up on and holding it is a massively good strategy. You can poke from afar while shielding yourself and slowing their advancements with vortex to keep them away for longer. Then you can shift into nemesis form to either quell their push altogether and crush them with your overwhelming strength and defense. Or just hold the line while your team helps you.
Advancing on territory is the other half. You can use your shield to create cover for yourself to move into more advantageous positions. This is where you can use the staff to whittle down the opponent to make room for a potential nemesis form engagement. Think of his nemesis form as you temporarily becoming Reinhardt. And what does Reinhardt do? Protect his team with his shield (the block in this case) and take immense amounts of space by surging forward with all his health and damage potential. Or perhaps you can play like sigma and shield yourself often to poke the enemy and advance on them with tactical precision, getting out their critical cooldowns and softening them up for his team or himself.
As a ranged tank and a brawl tank in one, you can command a lot of attention from your team and theirs. You can hold the entire enemy team’s aggro by simply sitting there and blocking or walking into their faces with your shield, vortex, and block. The more you can hold their aggro while pressuring them and keeping yourself alive, the more value you can inherently get. The biggest obstacle to an enemy’s success is your tank not dying. But not dying doesn’t mean playing like a wuss, it means playing up front but in spots where you can cover yourself and cycling your cooldowns to maximize your impact and uptime. You can hold aggro while playing around corners, shielding often, and when advanced on you can just hold block to waste their time or just punch them to death. Many such combinations are possible for this task.
It is absolutely imperative you match your tempo to the given situation, map, and team comps. If you have no speed on your team (Lucio or Juno for example) then you must play slower and more methodically, as detailed in the tempo section. And conversely if you do have speed. You must treat this hero as a hybrid of Sigma and Reinhardt to better understand him and get more impact. He may not have hard CC like either of those heroes, but he has range, defense, and raw damage to match. He has an insanely impactful ult which must be used to take large amounts of space, or to hold it in critical moments.
One crucial thing to know about this hero is that playing around cover and with patience is one of the best strategies for winning. Don’t be one of those imbeciles who instantly forms and never uses the staff and only pummels. This is a surefire way of feeding and never getting real value. It’s like Ramattra himself says, tactical precision is better than brute force in some regards. Even if you have an enemy down to the last 10 HP, you can just drop form and use the “weaker” staff to quickly finish them off and start the cooldown cycle earlier. Or when you use the staff to shoot slowed or trapped enemies in the face to deal 250 DPS instead of pummeling them and only doing 108.33 DPS.
Protecting your team is as crucial as protecting yourself. Like described in the ability breakdowns, using the shield to protect your team is a large part of your job, and when you can’t use shield you get in the way with your block instead. Peeling for your team is of extreme importance since they are what even help you win the game. Try to keep various combos with other heroes in mind when you play around them on any given map, as this will also make winning much easier.
Above all else, keep the various matchups in mind when you play, and the various stratagems explored in other parts of this guide as they make interpreting this section much easier. Try to use your own knowledge and experience to fill in the knowledge gaps where I can’t. Because even if I made this doc 1000 pages long I still couldn’t cover every interaction or strategy.
This section is to discuss armor and how it affects Ramattra and how he can break past it, this is partially explored in other parts of the guide but I figured this section would be better at painting a clearer picture.
Ramattra has 100 armor in omnic form and gets a bonus 275 from using nemesis form for a total of 375 at peak HP. This helps him basically have an effective HP in the several thousands if properly utilized. What I mean is playing around your armor HP to better advance on or hold your own against the enemy team. You can maximize your armor HP uptime by properly timing your nemesis form, using the block, and keeping your 100 omnic armor nice and healthy by using the shield, movement, and cover as necessary.
Learning what each character’s damage numbers into armor are is highly paramount to ensuring you have a lot of it available. Currently, armor reduces damage by a flat 7 damage per instance up to 50% reduction in that damage source. This roughly means that any character who deals 14 damage and below will have their dmg halved. Anything above the number of 14 will simply have 7 subtracted. What this means is that characters like Reaper or Tracer or Sojourn will do half damage into you thus doubling that portion of HP. So that 375 total armor in nemesis form will be 750 effective HP.
With that in mind, this means that once your armor is gone you'll have to play extremely carefully and use your tools to your advantage to allow your supports to heal your armor back up. But this also means your staff is much MUCH stronger against enemies when their armor is removed, which leads to my next bit: breaking armor.
To break armor, you have two ways to break that armor with your kit. The first way would be your quick melee as it does 40 damage and when attacking armor, that gets reduced to 33 which is a rather high burst for the enemy to deal with. As mentioned in the staff section, you can use it in conjunction with it to break past the enemy’s armor and soften them up quicker.
The second way to break armor is to utilize your nemesis form pummels as they do a staggering 65 damage per instance which equates to 58 when attacking armor. Considering the large burst at play, the armor does basically nothing to protect your enemies from your pummels.
This stratagem is particularly useful against the various tank heroes as they all have immense armor counts and the pummels are one of the most useful tools in the game to break it and mitigate it. However, do make sure not to overly and aggressively play into the “armor breaker” playstyle when in games because you have to factor in keeping your own armor healthy.
For more specific notes on how to beat any of the armored characters, simply find their respective sections.
This section is to add different matchups versus the other tank heroes following the mid season 10 patch. Please make sure to consult the wiki and spreadsheet to calculate damage values before and after, as I cannot list them all. I will mainly describe the strategy versus these heroes rather than focusing on numbers. Key: armor change just refers to the shift from the 30% armor to the flat 7 damage reduction.
Link to the armor change spreadsheet can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZpWx7n0Zr7ga67A8BX14mBlSybYl8h3Cw4ObUzGqrkA/edit#gid=0
Taking into consideration the data from the spreadsheet above, and information from the wiki, Dva will do significantly less damage versus Ramattra due to the sheer amount of armor he has. Whereas Ramattra is barely affected at all. His vortex and annihilation tethers do not incur a damage penalty, but his staff is a rather hefty penalty so it will become weaker against D.va overall. His pummel however will do considerably more damage versus Dva than before the change at a whopping 58 damage.
The general strategy for Dva is to poke her with the staff, shield off her bomb and missiles for yourself or teammates, block it if necessary. Make sure to use your pummels against her if she gets close to you or dives a teammate. Keep track of her matrix to make sure your vortex doesn’t get eaten because it prevents her from making an easy escape. Overall, Dva can be easily shut down by you alone, but if she has too much sustain and plays too passively, you lose effectiveness because you can't pummel her as effectively because she will be running away before you can do meaningful damage.
I find that some Dvas like to either bait out your nemesis form and then they engage when it’s gone, as you can't fight back as effectively with just your staff and shield. Or they also like to force the objective, which means you will have to go on it to contest, which is when they use the boosters to escape and go dive a teammate. This can be mitigated by messing with her team yourself, as she will have to turn away from yours which exposes her massive hitbox and leads to an easy de-mech.
Or you can have characters like brig on your team to supplement your gameplay to counter her. If you are busy killing her team, brig can protect your team from her. Or you can both work in tandem to counter her. Remember that Dva is extremely strong in a one on one with a squishy target, so you need to mitigate her so she can’t 1v1 your DPS or support for free. When she is bombing, 2 things you can do. 1: hide like a coward or 2: shield it for your team, pelt her a bit with the staff before going nemesis form, flashing the block on the bomb itself, and then pummeling the Dva to death. In general it's best to just shield it off for out of position team members while hiding so as to conserve your nemesis form HP as going out there to just face tank it with the block is a loss of an otherwise very useful 250 health.
In all honesty though, Dvas mostly just run past you and dive your backline so you really just need to hold vortex for her other teammates (or her) and then just save form so you can turn around and punch her and get her off your team. Play too far forward and she will get free value. So either turn around or just get kills yourself. The higher up you go in the ranks, the less this hero will be on your screen. If she is on your screen and doesn’t have boosters, she can be formed on for extreme pressure. Otherwise, you gotta turn around or run at her team yourself.
For Domina, it can be either turbo aids or pretty easy as long as you keep in mind that her shield is pretty much thanos and you need to respect it.
Her shield is very big and has a ton of HP and as such you and your team need to play carefully around it. While you can form and punch through it, she can and will boop you and walk away. This forces you to walk through it yourself to deal damage. When you do this your team can no longer heal you so either need to all go in or break some of the segments to make this strategy work. So long as you have speed and you guys care the crystal charge and boop you can walk on her and maybe score the kill or force her out.
As for Domina herself, her pistol does good damage to you or your team so be careful when she’s angling and block as appropriate. But also, she has no mobility, literally none, not even a percentage speed boost from her abilities while you can slow her and walk faster with form. She also has no armor, no headshot protection, and a huge hitbox. So when you use Void Surge staff you can just spam her in the face and do really reliable damage and save your form.
Be wary of her kill combos as that charge and the boop and the shield isolating you from anything else allows her to kill you pretty easily even in form. So you have to block and play around her and everything else on the field as efficiently as possible to avoid feeding.
Lastly, for her ult, simply just shoot. Either with the staff or just punch through it because you can still damage through it. And you can also block the detonation damage if you haven’t gotten rid of it already. Also let it be known that the panopticon cuts off your annihilation tethers so keep that in mind while you’re ulting.
In general, as long as you dont get cut off or kill combo’d and you block and shield appropriately and save your form for the right moments, she isn’t too terribly strong. Just note she will stand far away and gets tons of shield HP restoration via her abilities.
Against doomfist you need to be careful of his potential ability to destroy your backline. Most good doomfists ignore you and only focus you after he kills your entire team. Considering he has no armor like ram does, you will be at no disadvantage, while he will do less damage from his pellets against you. His cooldowns can easily be dodged, shielded, or blocked.
Be careful not to charge his punch either; it only takes 25 staff pellets or 2 pummels to charge it. In general try to shoot him with the staff as much as possible, try to tank the cooldowns and hand cannon blasts for your team as much as possible. Throw your slow at him after he dives a teammate, this will force him to leave quicker.
Additionally, if you see him trying to punch his way out of a fight, you can get in his way with either your nemesis form or omnic form so you can stop him dead in his tracks, leaving him as a ripe kill for your team. Just be careful of him punching you into walls, because then you also become a ripe kill for his team. You especially become vulnerable if he punches you while blocking heavy damage from his team.
Lastly, put some pressure on his supports or DPS as you can poke them, brawl with them, slow them, or otherwise disrupt them with your kit while he does the same. If you can’t kill the doom by yourself, you may need to ask your team to make necessary swaps (Cassidy, Sombra, Ana, etc.) to reduce his effectiveness.
Doomfist has a certain, albeit predictable, ebb and flow to him. Most like to dive in with the slam, get overhealth, pew pew with their dinky little hand cannon, block your team’s inevitable damage so they can get an empowered punch and use it to fist a teammate into a wall for an easy kill. They then leap out or ult out if they have it. That’s where you come in. You can constantly get in his way, out-damage him with your staff headshots or pummels, throw your vortex at him, and overall be a massive nuisance to him to make him less effective.
You can shield his slam to deny his overhealth, you can try to vortex him when he initiates one to deny his movement, you can tank his punches, you can eat his cannon blasts, you can exude your aura over him by blocking at the same time as he does, you can shield off his meteor strikes, and you can overall fight him on a fair and equal field. Though he has more mobility than you and excels on dive maps as he is a dive character, you can match him and win if you’re good enough. This is an even matchup.
Hazard is a tough one to beat. He has a ton of armor which makes your staff weak, a ton of mobility you don’t have enough vortex uptime to deny, and too much blocking capability with his spike guard or wall to make any of your damage meaningful. His ult is also extremely strong and he gets it often, in addition to his massive kill potential against squishies.
But he’s not completely unbeatable and here’s how. For starters you wanna pressure his massive hitbox with your staff, even with the heavy damage penalty against armor it still forces him to be more careful. Second, you wanna let him get close to you, or you get close to him and then shift into nemesis form to break past his armor with the pummel and pressure out his block, this is where your team can hard focus him down to force him out or kill him. You can deny his leap disengage with the vortex if necessary.
Be careful of playing in super tight spaces or stacked with your team because his wall and/or spike guard become much more lethal and bothersome and contribute to his ult charge rather aggressively. You can further mitigate his ult charge by playing around your armor HP, as he will do half damage into armor when shooting you with his left click or block. This is especially useful in nemesis form as he won’t be able to outbrawl you without wasting his block.
One thing that enables Hazard is a strong backline so maybe you can go on them to prevent him from holding you and your team for free. Factor in the other matchups in this doc to make this easier. Also factor in the ability to shield off his heals when he leaps in, or the ability for you and your dps to poke them back or counter dive them.
His ult can be shielded off if you place it and crouch right underneath it. If you cannot leave its radius or shield it, you can preemptively block it with nemesis form to reduce the incoming spike damage and follow up. If you and your team are caught next to each other, you can block for all of you with a well placed shield.
Another thing to watch out for are his kill combos. They are various and very lethal to you and your team. You need to watch out for his wall/slash combo, and his slash/left click combos. The slash breaks through all your armor in omnic form and makes his left click much more lethal for you, this is when a shift to nemesis form can be beneficial as you’ll have 375 armor total and can block his wall and slash entirely.
In terms of a sustain war, you can easily win a full team engagement by playing around his team’s abilities and then hitting the annihilation to finish off the fight. Almost no team can out-brawl an annihilation usage and they can be vortexed to prevent a kite maneuver. Just make sure to factor the tips from the annihilation section to make this bit easier.
This is a decent matchup for Ramattra. Not only does she do less damage from her primary fire, but she also has no armor, so you are at no disadvantage. She will in general be close to you to build as many bleed heals as possible. So make sure to build enough space to avoid this as you can poke her, she cannot poke you. Dodge her knife, either block her axe swing or avoid it entirely, and absolutely (if you can help it) do not use nemesis form until she uses her shout.
She follows a very specific flow chart. She will knife you, shoot you with her shotgun, pull you in, and then hit you and possibly your team to build massive amounts of bleed damage which she can use to outlast your damage and win the fight. This is made especially hard when she uses shout as it counters your nemesis form engagement and buffs her team, so you need to make sure you space her out and shield off her shotgun spam so you can poke her back and avoid giving her the bleed damage necessary to her upkeep.
You also need to work in conjunction with your team to mitigate either her team, as they can massively enable her, or to take her down yourself, this can be achieved if you throw your vortex at her to pelt her with damage and to force out her cooldowns and possibly her team too. Then you can try to take her down after.
She will in general be played in rush comps, which you can slow down and counter with your shield, vortex, and pummels. You can also use your annihilation to supplement a nemesis form engagement on her. As you can refresh your armor and strain her team’s already meager resources. Most of the time, provided you check her support and pressure everyone equally, your annihilation can easily destroy her and her team.
She is a very snowbally hero, as once she picks up some steam she can be hard to put down. So play passively to wait to whittle down her resources before leaping into action on her. I find myself personally getting in her face a lot despite her close ranged effectiveness. Using my slow and the staff I pressure her HP and then engage her remaining health or her team with nemesis form, making sure to line up the pummels so I can build massive ult charge and build annihilation for the current or a later engagement. Then I use annihilation to keep the pressure on, shut down an engagement from her, or elsewise live through her ult if enough of my team remains alive after its usage. I usually just save it for the next fight though. This is a skill dependent but fair matchup.
Perks note: Void surge and vengeful vortex make quick work of her, a single burst from vengeful can deny an entire engagement from her and makes her an extremely volatile pick because you just have so much damage potential against her, and provided you keep distance, she can’t do her bleed healing gimmick on you to live.
Against Mauga on your own? You cannot kill him. Not with immense ease anyway, but it IS possible. You can however make it to where he cannot kill you either. Play around cover and do not ever enter nemesis form until he dies or advances on you, that way you can sit there and block. The ideal playstyle here is to crouch spam, strafe, and play around corners to mitigate as much of his damage as possible. That way he doesn’t get free sustain in his cardiac overdrive. You want to be constantly pelting him with the staff too so you can build annihilation easier and so you can keep him in check.
Otherwise it is mainly your other teammates who will end up killing Mauga, so your job is to stand there and shield and block his damage as much as possible to deny him most of his heals and overhealth, as this is how he thrives. Save your annihilation and nemesis form until after he dies or uses cardiac early, or in case he decides to cage fight you. In which case you can shield him off, then use nemesis form and block, and then use annihilation to keep blocking. Your supports will likely dump ults to keep you alive.
You also need to be careful of his overrun. It has a very short cooldown and makes him take 50% less damage and have complete CC immunity. This makes it a very good engaging or disengaging tool. For the engagements, you wanna shield off his landing spot for your team to maybe block its immense damage for them or yourself. If you are in nemesis form you will want to block when he stomps you so as to avoid taking a full 150 damage to the face. When you force out his overdrive and get close to killing him, this is when he will likely use the overrun to escape. You cannot do much to prevent this beyond maybe shooting him but if he has to disengage, you’ve likely won the fight and should prepare for the next as he will take a small amount of time to recover and come back with his overdrive ready again.
If you play like a doofus (I.E, you pummel him and stand out in the open) it’s a very one sided matchup. But you can very easily make it even or perhaps shift in your favor. Following the July 9th patch where they made his cardiac overdrive have a 3 second duration, you can merely pressure him, up close even, and shield it off to basically deny it all and then you can actually pummel him after, or staff him down. You can even throw a slow to either force a disengagement from him or to apply more damage and pressure.
First and foremost, dodge or avoid her spears. Those can be used to stun you in your block, leading to an opening in your defense that will result in your death most likely. It can be used against you in your omnic form to also create the same effect of opening up your defense and being focused down and killed. Your team will have to expend important cooldowns to prevent your death in these cases. So do your best to avoid them in critical moments.
Conversely, you can actually tank them for your team so as to avoid the long range kill confirmations from the orisa and her team that would otherwise be focused onto your team. As for the rest of her kit, the armor should reduce her damage by a decent margin in the neutral, especially in your nemesis form engagements.
Do not engage with nemesis form when she has fortify up. You should also be constantly pelting her with the staff to eat away at her armor, you additionally want to be using your vortex on her advancing team to make them play more cautiously. In nemesis form the pummels ignore armor due to their burst damage and are a useful tool when her or her teammate’s resources are dwindling.
You can get the most value against her when she has no cooldowns, look to engage when they are down. But you must consider that her cooldowns are rather short and deny most of your kit so it's imperative you execute your engagement onto her in a swift manner as she can immediately shut the effort down if you aren’t quick enough.
You can use annihilation to go all in on her team or her specifically as her massive health pool provides ample fuel for it, but be sure to dodge the spear and spin as it knocks you away and denies the tether due to the radius being exceeded. Overall, in the neutral you want to poke her back as well as her team. shielding off, dodging, or tanking the spears for your team. And biding your time by playing slow before you ramp things up by engaging on her or her team with nemesis form after her cooldowns are expended. With most tanks, if you cannot kill them directly, you go for their team. This is especially applicable to Orisa. Try to combo with characters that can mitigate her effectiveness too.
Alternatively just ban her ass. Because despite what I just wrote, all you can really do is stand in front of her face and do barely anything to her. She, however, can run past you or just shut you down completely. If you can catch her without CDs, she can die. That is kinda your only win condition. I would also recommend trying to run past her yourself and get between her and her team if she is deep enough into yours, just be mindful she will turn around and push you out of position and get you killed really easily. On the entire roster, she is one of Ram’s hardest counters.
In general you wanna be the second guy using the cooldowns in the neutral. Try to hit as many pellets on his head with your staff as possible as his head is usually locked in a static motion unless he crouches in his strafe movements. Shield off his vortex as he can use it to melt you, especially deadly if his team follows up. Look to shield your team if one of them is caught in it on their own.
On the flipside, you want to throw your vortex at him to force out the shield more effectively, so you can then ideally shield after. If you see him go nemesis form, either kite him or stand your ground as you and your team can easily force him to block if enough of you shoot him. And then you wanna pelt him with the staff after he shifts, again to force out the block, making sure to shoot behind his shoulders on his big arms to inflict more damage since the block doesn’t cover him there. This is only applicable up close however.
After his form expires, you go all in with yours and focus him down whilst lining up any potential pummels on his team next to him should they be near him, a very easy way to speed up your annihilation. If the other ram advances on your backline with his form, you have two options. 1: Advance on his with yours, being careful to keep using cover, your other tools, and to keep various hero matchups in mind so you don’t instantly die. 2: shield in front of you and turn around so you can start to pelt him with the staff or throw a vortex at him and then pummel him yourself. He will either have to turn to face you to block your damage, or turn to face your team, either way he is in a pickle and becomes either a free kill or a drain on his team’s resources.
If you both use nemesis form at the same time, you can use the pummel techs explained in a different section of this doc, and you can use hard cover to dodge some of the damage as his pummels pierce shields but not the map geometry. When he uses nemesis form his team will usually push in so you should look to line up pummels on them at the same time. Even if he blocks, the damage dealt to them is not reduced as his block only affects himself.
If he uses annihilation, shield him off, and slow him and immediately kite his ult, you can play around cover too, even if he still catches you with the tether, he will still lose several seconds of fuel when not keeping someone in the radius. If you both use it at the same time, you can either advance on his team with it, or get in his face and block to create a stalemate. 90% of the time the enemy ram will either keep pummeling or block himself.
Ideally, even if he uses it first and you die, you can then use your annihilation next fight to guarantee a fight win most of the time. One thing I like to do against enemy rams is that I do the previous tip of waiting for him to use nemesis form first and waiting for it to expire, then I bully him for a bit with mine before hitting him with the annihilation to kill him and his team.
This can sometimes boil down to a team diff. If your team can support you and follow your command, winning the mirror should be easy. But obviously without support you kind of just lose. You can easily challenge his team on your own while your team deals with him themselves. If you keep everything else in this doc that isn’t this section in mind, you will stand a far better chance against him in the mirror.
Your ability to challenge Reinhardt will swing on how his team, and your team play. But for rein himself, you can block his attacks or otherwise space them out, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
The strategy against rein is to space him out, melt his shield, slow his team’s advances, and brawl him when necessary. Ideally you poke his team hard enough before he closes the gap to get their resources out and to lower Rein’s HP. As he runs you over even with nemesis form if he has a lot of resources and health to spare. Make sure to block his swings and firestrikes when applicable, since his attacks are super slow and are easily blocked. The best way to deal with him is to BREAK. THE. SHIELD. Once he is without his shield, he becomes extremely easy to exploit and so will his team. You can then focus him down with support abilities and DPS characters looking at him and hitting left click.
Another really easy way to deal with him is to wait for him to pin in and then, if nobody got one shot, you can shield his incoming team, vortex him or his team, and then transform and start punching him to death. This strat is really good because you can use your full engagement tool when he has no disengage tool. If he can’t pin out then he’s really easy to either kill or otherwise force out critical cooldowns.
When he has shatter 2 things will happen. 1: either he permanently holds it to make you scared to go nemesis form. Or 2: he will use it regardless, in which case you may be able to block it, either by shielding right in front of him, or blocking at your feet as it provides the most time to protect yourself before getting knocked down. Since you need a really fast reaction time to block the shatter from the source. Whereas you have half a second or more to block it when you place the shield at your feet. If you swing your mouse down fast enough you may not be fully covered so make sure to jump backwards while you shield to make sure you’re safe from the shatter.
Another way to dodge shatter is to go nemesis form and jump on higher terrain next to him, jumping between them if necessary, maybe even touching the floor to further goad him into the shatter. When jumping up on higher ground you can dodge the vertical hitbox of the shatter more effectively. While doing this you can pummel him back while blocking his hammer swings at the same time.
If you do get shattered, try to jump behind cover while the wave hits you, meaning you must strafe to the left or right to do this. You can also do this to get behind hard cover, like a box or a pole so he might run into them instead of you when he tries to pin you. But in general, getting your team to either stun him for you, or otherwise help kite or mitigate his shatter is another good strategy.
Do not be afraid to get in his face often, but do so depending on the team environment or map. One last thing to be careful of is his pin, as most reins think they’re hot shit and will do their best to pin you off the map.
An extremely uphill matchup. You do basically nothing besides tickle damage to him, while he can hook you and hit you with big damage. The armor should mitigate some of this, but don’t count on it if you are lower health.
Be sure to play cover, care the hook, shield off his hook or the follow up shot on your teammates. One little tip that applies to Ramattra and other heroes is that if you peek a little bit out of cover and get hooked, you can use the small window of time left before you get pulled in to go back into cover to break it. Furthermore, if you shield before he hooks, make sure to dodge the hook after it goes down because some hogs wait till shield abilities expire before tossing their hook out.
Additionally, if he has whole hog, do not use your annihilation until he uses it or dies early. Watch out for hooks off the map too. In general, just pelt him with as much staff damage as possible to draw out his heal and apply pressure to him. He’ll be more concerned with hiding and staying alive rather than hooking you or your team.
Roadhog is one of those tanks where he’s damn near impossible to kill with any of Ramattra’s kit. You can sort of pressure him with well placed vortexes and void surge but in general, you kind of have to run down his teammates to dismantle his comp. This is extremely difficult though because Ramattra is even bigger than Roadhog when he shifts into nemesis form and his only protection against hook is his super long CD shield. Waiting the hook out and then speeding in when it's not up or simply shielding it then committing is the best idea I can come up with to deal with his team.
Roadhog gets tremendous value from just waiting you out and hooking you. He doesn’t even need the kill (which he can easily get all things considered) he just needs to disrupt you. You cannot disrupt him back like other tanks. So playing around the hook is the optimal way to beat him. Above all else though: DO NOT MIND CONTROL YOURSELF INTO SPAMMING HIM ALL GAME. If you need to shoot him, do so with the staff. You want to save nemesis form for when he hooks you or to deal with his team.
Beating hog is doable with the right coordination and counter play but I can tell you right now, dear reader, that I have lost to Hog more than I’ve won. This is arguably one of Ramattra’s biggest counters on the roster.
Map dependent. Armor change makes this a bit more in his favor but in general, shielding him off, blocking, and playing cover and employing erratic movement can help mitigate his poke damage. His poke is better than yours, his ult is better than yours in most circumstances, and his rock is waaaay better than the vortex. So you are at a disadvantage in that regard. But your staff is also good versus him.
Use it to pressure his shield, his massive hitbox, and to poke his team too. If you are caught by his ult, immediately drop nemesis form if you are in it so you can lower the 50% hp threshold for your team to heal (half of 525 is 267.5 which is way lower than 800’s 400) and shield the ground the second you hit it to mitigate as much dmg as possible, but if you weren’t in it beforehand, you can use it AFTER the slam goes off so you can get half your HP back and either hold block or pummel him back.
One obscure thing I like to do against Sigma is to throw a vortex at him in his flux form, as sometimes when he casts the ult the circle of activation is brought way lower in front of him when he gets tugged to the ground, which can usually save you or your team.
Lastly, if you’re close enough to him, use your pummels to bypass his shield and grasp, and use your block to mitigate his left click. Make sure to care the rock as they will usually save it for your nemesis form engages. Sigma has a lot of sustain and can be sometimes unkillable if your team doesn’t challenge his supports. If his team has his back, you don’t do much to him besides challenging him slightly with the pummels.
But one on one, you have the advantage. In general, when you aren’t in nemesis form, which is his biggest counter, you wanna play at a decent distance with cover or evasive movement when not using your shield so you can simply poke him back and close the distance. Sigma is usually played in poke comps, and you know what happens when you advance on a poke comp? They back up. Use this to create space for your team to breathe while also taking the brunt of their long range damage ideally.
The strategy against Winston when he wants to engage is to poke him with the staff before he dives in, shield off his heals after he does dive in, pummel him a few times and then hit him with the vortex inside or outside his bubble before he dives out. To avoid some of the unnecessary damage on his dive engagements, I preemptively shift into nemesis form so I can simply block his leap damage and the melee animation cancel on it, as that 100 or so health can sometimes be critical to surviving the encounter.
Additionally, if he does leap out, do not chase him with nemesis form and instead drop it to start the cooldown early and instead poke him out from a distance. You can maybe snag a kill should you land the pellets on him on his way out.
He can be very tricky to deal with sometimes but it is an overall even matchup. You mostly want to tell your entire team to look at him with you as even with his low cooldown on the jump pack, bubble health, and his armor, he can be easily taken down if you combine your firepower. For me personally in many team fights I find myself punching away his armor as the burst of the pummels eats through the armor, and then using the staff on his head after as the headshot DPS is much higher than the pummels and also helps me save time on the next nemesis form usage.
If you can’t actually kill him or deal enough damage to him when he dives in, you must simply dive his team instead since they don't have a tank to protect them. But do be careful of him diving yours as he can be a handful for your other teammates and your input is crucial to dealing with him. You must also consider that you cannot get your job done if your team is being pressured by him, so make sure you protect them by pummeling him and shielding your team from the rest of Winston’s.
In nemesis form, you can challenge his primal rage if he is close enough, it also provides a massive opportunity for ult charge. Or you can simply look at his advancing team as they tend to follow up on his primal rage usage.
This one makes my head hurt. Neither of you do anything to each other. I just trade backlines or focus his DPS as he will do to mine. Ignore him. At most all you can do is toss a shield, vortex, and pummels into his minefield to clear it up.
Catching his piledriver with the vortex also does not work unless he is brought below the activation threshold. Meaning if he starts the windup, it will go off regardless of anything you do. You can shield it preemptively to prevent the damage on you or your team, or you can block it.
It is more in your team’s power to deal with him as you merely damage him a little bit. The biggest tool in your kit that affects him is vortex as throwing it in his path can sorta cancel his fireball and make him extremely vulnerable to your team. Do not count on this though because he moves extremely fast.
If he is still somehow a problem for you then a swap may be in order.
Due to her having the bruiser passive, she will receive less headshot damage and will also move faster when below half hp. Aside from that, the general strategy is to count her bubbles and to not give her energy if you can help it either. When she is without bubbles she is a massively free kill. So be sure to constantly aggro her to draw out her bubbles but without feeding her energy especially since her team also becomes much easier to deal with when she can’t protect them.
Another really effective strategy is to simply count and avoid the first bubble and then hard shoot her second one. If she uses both bubbles on her team, then you and your team can focus her down provided you slow her and shield off her heals too. I find that a lot of zaryas really like to walk in so you must do your best to punish that. In a nutshell, all I really have to do is just push up, shield, shoot her a bit and get the first bubble out. Then I can vortex and pummel her immediately after and break the second bubble with my team to force her team into helping her with critical resources or to otherwise kill her. When zarya has no bubbles you create an extremely favorable field for your team to do what they want. You get to punish her for free, and your team gets to go on squishies when they want without them randomly receiving 225 hp.
Be extremely wary of her bubbles on her teammates, as they are used to counter your advancements, or to enable her team to do extremely aggressive plays (vendetta, reaper, genji blade, emre ult, etc.). So use the other sections in this guide to more effectively counter those heroes as well.
If she has high energy, shield her off if she is up close, or use the slow to bait out any subsequent aggro bubbles (ones used to keep advancing and apply pressure) and to keep her from closing the distance so you can shield after. Blocking her beam damage with nemesis form if you must.
Use your staff to try and eat away as much of her health as possible and then use your pummels when she has no bubbles, try to line up the pummels for extra damage too as she probably won’t be able to bubble the targets being pummeled. Remember always that her bubbles have a decently long cooldown and can therefore be exploited easily as a result.
As for her ult, her grav is a little hard to avoid so just shield it off when you get caught in it. Or you can maybe reactively (or preemptively) block it as it comes out of her cannon. This is mostly in Ramattra's favor, but just be extremely careful if she has high charge and deal with her swiftly as she can easily snowball a game in her favor instead.
The general rule of thumb is that you can live her damage far easier than she can live yours. If she uses her bubbles sloppily you can get a free nemesis form engagement on her, especially if you shield behind her to cut off heals. On the flip side, if she lives your nemesis form then you have to play carefully and defensively until it's back online. Her biggest threat is form so use it wisely.
General note: The combo to quickly finish a kill is 4 pummels and one quick melee, make sure to employ this on 300 hp heroes (mei and reaper). It only takes 4 pummels to kill a 250 Hp target due to the 65 damage buff. For the support sections, do be aware that if and when I suggest focusing on any one hero in particular, the enemy team at large is likely to turn its attention to you so plan accordingly.
For Anran she can be somewhat of a tricky one depending on how the enemy Anran is playing. She can spam you with decently high damage from her left and right clicks. It builds up fast and can be a real nuisance. But Anran is less of a tank buster and more of a backline assassin or space maker.
Anrans very often use an inferno rush to get in, use her AOE ability on your team to ignite them all, spams some right clicks, and then rushes back out on repeat. Similar to other flankers who show up to disrupt your team. Since Anran doesn’t do too much to Ram, you can very easily throw a vortex at her while she is near your team as the lingering damage can help your team score a kill on her or otherwise force her out or her team’s resources out. Additionally, you can actually look at the ring on the ground beneath her while she’s in her AOE ability and line up a pummel for when she gets out of it. She isn’t too fast and is very easy to track and kill. Using nemesis form really forces her to play carefully, so don’t be afraid to leverage that against her.
As for her two ults, her regular ult where she flies at your team and blows them can be avoided or defended from with a well placed shield. But unless you guys are playing front to back, it's best to use it on yourself as the ult doesn’t one shot. Do be very aware that she will usually stick around and use the rest of her kit to score kills so a vortex is very much required there. Her other ult where she rezzes herself isn’t the best as its very predictable and can be shielded off and you can usually kill her out of it. She will usually use it and then get out so you don’t need to worry about her too hard. This however works on a case by case basis. Look at how the enemy Anran plays and then plan around it.
Against Ashe you must simply poke her and her stupid hat with your staff. Keeping pressure on her prevents her from headshotting your team for free. Her lighting you on fire with the dynamite is an inevitability, so do your best to avoid it but don’t get upset when she does light you on fire. If you shield, she will throw it above and detonate it when it’s behind the shield, so you can try to walk forward to maybe avoid it. Don’t count on that though.
If you want to engage her with nemesis form, get close, poke her with the staff, shield off her coach gun so you don’t get booped, and throw the slow at her. Then you are free to pummel her. In general it’s easier to just pummel her and chase after her with the vortex while your DPS come help you.
If Bob gets thrown at you, block his damage and keep your back turned to him, whilst walking backwards to put him in front of you. You can then ask your team to sleep him or melt him. With void surge you can take away 90 something % of his HP away when you land all pellets on his head. It is unfortunately not enough to kill him though. In general, against Bob you wanna shield him off and play out of his LOS if you can. But if you can’t, you can take his aggro from your team and hold block through 80% of his duration and live the whole thing.
Bastion can easily melt you if you aren’t careful. In general you wanna poke out his massive hitbox with the staff, and wait till his turret form expires before going on him with pummels. This can be achieved by playing cover and melting him with the staff, but do keep in mind the reduced effectiveness of the pellets.
It is imperative you care his turret form, as he can easily catch you off guard, especially if you are without your cooldowns. In general, wait for him and his team to advance with his turret form, then you immediately hide. If you’re out in the open, you shield it off. If you have no shield, block it for your team, but don’t always default to just nemesis form blocking as that reduces your effectiveness overall, so do so only when necessary.
Also keep in mind the armor change, as he will do considerably less damage to you after it than before. Against his ult you either wanna shield it, or face the center and block it. Last thing is to hold block if you get stuck, as the block mitigates the damage.
Bastion comps are usually slow tempo and then shift into a high tempo when his turret form is up. You can slow this down with your shield and vortex and return the high tempo aggression with a nemesis form usage. When Bastion is out of his turret form then you wanna go all in on him. In certain scenarios, such as when he is turreting me in my nemesis form block, I save my annihilation until he breaks through the 275 armor granted by it so I can refresh it and buy more time until his form expires so I can go in on him. So be sure to watch out for specific moments where you can shift a fight in your favor with it.
Against Cassidy you want to poke him with the staff, and when you get close you wanna shield off his first fan the hammer, throw a slow behind him (that’s probably where he will roll) and then pummel him. Make sure to block his right click and flashbang. You can easily flash the block and go back to pummeling, keeping in mind my tip in the first section to use block as a parry.
Lastly is to either hide, shield off, or straight up block his high noon as you can survive the whole thing. In general, he will try to right click you as often as possible to melt through your health so you must block this if you are in nemesis form, do be careful of him rolling around you to right click your back where the damage is not reduced.
Up close it is your job to deal with him, be it with the staff and shield or your nemesis form. I find it particularly easy to check his effectiveness by getting in his face on off angles, but be careful if he is too far as you can simply staff him down instead.
Hope you have an iron mental because holy shit this character is irritating. You don’t really do anything to her while she does everything to you, especially with the very likely to exist Mercy pocket.
Shield off, dodge, or block her sticky nades. Shield or block her beam if she has you at less than half HP, and immediately kite or kill her if she dupes you as her using nemesis form makes her almost unkillable and gives her a free annihilation if she lands a few pummels. Other than that, it’s more in your DPS’ power to deal with this flying demon.
At best you can try to poke her with the staff and 4 pummel her if she gets close. I do find myself almost never vortexing her until after her flight has expired as it makes tracking her head with the staff exceptionally easy. But again, it is very difficult to effectively deny her by yourself.
You can maybe do more to force her out/kill when you have void surge and vengeful vortex as that burst damage can wipe her out instantly, but I wouldn’t count on it as most echos worth their salt are far away enough to deny even this strategy.
Emre isn’t actually too much of a complex threat to Ram. He’s simply the guy throwing nades and shooting him sometimes. All you need to do is shoot him back and run at him.
His gun does semi decent damage especially if he lands consistent headshots on you. So like with the other hitscans, don’t just play in the open and make sure you shoot them back so they can’t look at you for free. Since it's a burst rifle some good movement can help here depending on who you’re playing against. So as long as you don’t straight line and just look at his huge hitbox and shoot it.
The rules of engagement are pretty simple for this hero. Close the distance. Shoot him while you do so. And run at him with form and a vortex and kill him. Takes maybe 5-6 pummels if he doesn’t get healed. His nades can be somewhat decent burst damage especially if he sticks them but if they’re not too close they don’t warrant much concern unless you’re low HP. What you really need to worry about is his pistol and ult.
His pistol without the heatsink perk doesn’t do much but when he does have it, killing him becomes much harder as he can spam it infinitely on you to retain his hp, and i find he can sometimes burn your hp instantly so it forces you to block. Thankfully he doesn’t get too much HP so if you have ample resources like health or heals, you can just punch him and he will die.
His ult can be sometimes dangerous if he flies above you but you can mostly shield and block it pretty easily. It’s almost always a non threat to you in nemesis form. However, it’s a threat for your team. So if you see him nade the ground i would throw a vortex at him while he does that so he doesn’t lift off with the ult. You can also chuck a vengeful vortex at him too so he gets pulled back down to earth and is nullified.
Overall, he’s good but not a turbo Ram counter. Not much to worry about here. Just punch him.
Against Freja, you don’t really do too much to her but she can’t do much to you under most circumstances. For starters, a good freja will almost always be on high ground or super high in the sky with their abilities, similar to pharah.
She will usually be spamming from off angles with normal and explosive arrows. It is up to your teammates to avoid her spam and poke/force her out of aggressive angles. You can shield it as necessary, just be sure to keep in mind the guidelines from the shield section.
Her ult is built extremely fast and either does nothing and zones or literally kills 4. However, it has an EXTREMELY long windup, so you can usually just shield it before it even hits to completely block it. Furthermore, if she sticks you with it, you can block it with nemesis form.
Additional counters to Freja are tossing a vengeful vortex at her to catch her while you can either spam her in the face with void surge staff or just 3 pummel + 1 melee combo her.
Similar to most DPS, she is hyper-mobile with lots of burst damage so you can’t really do much to her on Ramattra, but you can try to force her out with aggressive poke, vortexing her, and spamming her with well placed pummels. If she’s really that much of an issue, you can simply ask for a hitscan or just go D.va.
Overall, I typically find myself either ignoring her and her spam damage as it doesn’t harm me too much provided I shield and block as necessary. Or I just spam her out in return. The most I die from her is when I’m already low HP and she’s hitting me with explosive arrows.
Poke him with the staff, throw a vortex at his feet to prevent him from wall climbing or moving too fast during your staff usage or nemesis form. Bait out his deflect, and then hit him with nemesis form pummels for an easy kill. Additionally, you can use a vengeful vortex on him to deal unblockable damage if you pop it next to him, very useful when he’s low.
Your vortex doesn’t affect his dash (that would make too much sense) so don’t bother trying to slow a blade engagement with it. But if he dashes in and doesn’t get a kill, then you can throw it at him.
This matchup is mostly in your favor. Especially in nemesis form as you can block his shuriken and sword swings. He is typically played in high tempo comps so you can either kill him yourself, or focus down his team with your kit. In short, you only really threaten him in nemesis form, so use this to your advantage and play next to vulnerable team members if necessary.
Poke him with the staff from a distance during neutral poke wars, throw a vortex at his feet to prevent him from climbing, and pummel him if you are close. Shield him off if he has an aggressive angle on your team. You can block his entire dragonstrike if necessary. This hero is not much of a threat to you. Especially considering that you can very easily encroach on his territory and kill him with relative ease.
I find dealing with Hanzo particularly easy since you can get close to him with either the staff or just moving from cover to cover and then hitting him with a few pummels for an easy kill. Just be careful of his arrows up close as they basically become hitscan and thus very hard to block if you don’t anticipate them. You can easily read them if you see him draw the bow a bit, this is when you flash the block and go back to pummeling him. It only takes 4 to kill him. Or you can just use the staff on him instead, which is also a sound strategy.
Poke him from a distance, where he cannot really affect you. Shield off his spam in choke points, break his traps, and throw a vortex at him during your nemesis form engagements. Make sure to weave in a block for his mines while you pummel him. You can block his tire if it’s in front of you but we all know he’s gonna detonate it inside your hitbox and kill you anyways, especially after the armor change where it no longer blocks 30% of the damage.
Overall, Junkrat follows a simple ebb and flow. Do not enter confined spaces when he has his sights on them, go in while he reloads as this provides a brief period of respite from his damage. You can then go in on him with the staff or pummels. Just be careful of his trap as you basically become a free kill 99% of the time you are caught in it. It only takes 20 pellets to break it. Up close he will want to make distance by throwing mines at you, these can be blocked/shielded, and he can be vortexed to prevent his escape.
Make sure to care her wall, if she holds it till she’s absolutely sure you’re walking in, then just walk in, and then break the pillars with your team. Otherwise, in most other instances where you get walled off, back up with your block into the wall while your team breaks it to get out. Shield first to block her ice spray and her team’s follow up damage. Poke her massive hitbox with the staff to force out the ice block and pummel her after. If you get caught in her freeze, just shield yourself and hope you can live.
Her freeze is one of her biggest counters to you so it is imperative you anticipate it and plan accordingly. Mei players usually telegraph it by playing extremely close and greedy, this is when you can either try to brute force kill her or try to evade the coming ult. When you know she has it you MUST play around cover because even the slightest LOS break can completely stop her entire freeze process and save you from it, the higher up you go in rank the harder this is to achieve. If you are in the open, you might be cooked. Or if you play near little rooms or with boxes and other obstacles around, you might be safe.
Her freeze perk is kind of unavoidable but you can make it to where she or her team can’t capitalize on it. This can be achieved by playing aggro to goad the Mei into wanting to freeze you (it takes roughly 40-50 ammo from her gun to freeze you) so you can time the freeze with your defense, which can be in the form of walking back behind cover or shielding before getting frozen or just being in front of your whole team as they can make it too dangerous to take advantage of your frozen state. In the middle of a nemesis form or ult usage, you can call for team resources like suzu to prevent the freeze and reset it or things like nano to prevent you from being killed. In general, always expect to be frozen but just make sure you’re safe whilst frozen as it doesn't last long either.
If you want to ult, make sure she is without either of her abilities as her slow speed will give you ample fuel to go chase her team down. It is particularly easy to force her out by focusing her and making her dump her abilities, this then makes her a free kill usually. The most common logic Mei players follow is them getting damaged a bit, using the block, and then walling herself away after she comes out. Depending on where she is, you and your team can catch her and get an easy kill.
She has a pretty big hitbox but it’s not really your job to deal with her. If you see her landing to refuel her jets, throw a vortex at her and poke her with the staff or you can pummel her if she is close to you as her massive hitbox enables you to pummel her with ease. If she is close to you while flying you can either pummel her to death, or make sure you shield then pop nemesis form block to try to block her ult, as most pharahs like to ult at point blank range.
The armor doesn’t do much against her rockets either. She has a lot of kill potential against you so must be careful of her by employing the usage of cover and evasive movement as it can mitigate a decent amount of damage.
You both counter each other but you can make it much harder for him to do so against you. Play around your armor HP and use the staff to track his head and either kill him with ease or force out his wraith.
In nemesis form you have 375 armor which gets multiplied by 2 when he shoots you due to his damage being cut in half by the armor, so you can very easily 1v1 him up close and win, especially when he doesn’t have wraith form.
When you are without armor you wanna be extremely careful since he will do full damage to you and get more healing off of you. You can use your vortex, shield, and block to mitigate his damage and fight him off.
His ult is super easy to predict and can easily be shielded for your team and blocked by you. To make his already subpar ult even worse, you can throw a vortex at him and shoot him in the face with the staff to kill him. However, do be wary that his teammates will likely provide him with help and resources when he ults so it won’t always be a guaranteed kill.
Overall, you want him to constantly be 1v1ing you since that protects your team from his sneaky flanks and provides his team less value.
Sierra isn’t too complex a threat. For once, your vortex is actually extremely effective in denying her mobility. If you haven’t shot her drone the moment she puts it up, you can throw a vortex at or slightly ahead of her to deny her movement entirely.
Make it a priority to shoot her drone whenever you can because half of her kit hinges around her moving into various positions, it takes like 8 pellets which is a fraction of a second on this hero.
Then for the rest of her kit: Her gun and nade can do a ton of damage to you, especially when she hits you with the tracking shot. To evade her constant spam and even her tracking, play around your armor HP (it almost halves the damage you take) and use your shield to absorb the brunt of her spam.
Her nade isn’t too crazy but it does do a ton of damage especially against armor. So shield or block it when you’re 1v1ing her or otherwise getting spammed by her and her team. Additionally be careful of when you turn your back to it as it has a big area of effect and can catch you off guard if you’re not careful.
Lastly, for her ult, her biggest to you, do not stand in the middle of it because the damage will affect you from behind as well even if you block. It takes a long time to go off so just move to the side and shield if you can, or turn towards it (so all the bombs are in front of you) and block it. If you get caught in this while she’s nano’d or you’re low or something, you are almost certainly going to die so kite to the side immediately upon its use.
My rules for engagement? Simple. Shoot her drone or vortex her down, shield her spam while you close the distance, and then finally hit the form on her for a clean triple pummel and melee. She’s overall not too crazy so long as you check her mobility and respect her damage.
An extremely strong pick against you. You need to shield off her spam and railgun shots and back away from her disrupter shot too.
She will most often be spamming you for charge and then railgunning your squishier teammates in the face, sometimes at a distance on top of that. Poking her back is effective in making her play more carefully. You should also be playing around your armor HP to reduce your damage taken. Be sure to mark her more aggressive angles and to not excessively use nemesis form in the open as she can spam you easier.
Up close you want to pummel her and use your 375 armor to your advantage to force her to back away. In the likely event of her sliding out, you want to vortex her after she jumps as she can easily slide out of it. She will be pulled to the ground and is a mostly easy kill after.
She has rather snappy movement so you should be looking at her thighs as they don’t move as aggressively as the rest of her body.
Overall her rail will be used to break past your armor to make you an easier kill for her team, it will also be used to completely destroy yours. So shielding her off and having competent enough dps is the best way to beat her.
Dodge his missile. Don’t shield it because trading a 12 second cooldown for a 6 second one that does 120 damage isn’t worth it. Exceptions to this rule can be follow up damage on squishies next to you. Shield him off if he’s on a highground. Especially if he is with a mercy pocket.
The general strategy is to get up onto his territory and force him off, a job mainly reserved for dive heroes but is possible on Ramattra. You can block his entire ult if necessary. On low ground throw a vortex at him if he’s close or in his healing pad so you can pummel him. He already wasn’t good versus you before the armor change, he will be equally as bad after.
Really all you have to do is just check his angles, shoot him up close, and don’t get bursted down. Pretty simple stuff. If he’s on sneaky flanks way far away from the front line let your team deal with it. If you really wanna chase him down go pick a dive hero.
She can easily disrupt you if you aren’t careful. You can spy check her with the staff because of the high rate of fire. If you catch her, look where she throws her TP and throw a vortex at her if possible. Up close she will do the same if you are trying to pummel her. In general you wanna try to keep tabs on her and play around whatever she does.
Come to a team member’s aid if you see them getting targeted by her, try not to play in areas where her hacked health packs are, and be careful facing the enemy team with her around, she can disrupt your team or you when they try to make a play. Also make sure your team marks her when you are blocking heavy damage in nemesis or annihilation form as the 1 second duration will give the enemy team more than enough time to kill you. For her EMP just pray to whatever deity you believe in because you won’t be able to shield or block for 3 seconds after it goes off.
For Symmetra you need to be really careful. She will set up turrets in important chokes or around specific areas to get extra damage in and deny entry. You can break them by throwing a vortex at chokes where they will likely be broken by it. You can also shield areas to cover the enemy fire and break them before entering.
However, it is more effective for one of your flankers to break them for you. Against Sym herself, you can poke her with the staff, aiming at her thighs as they don’t move much when she A-D strafes will yield reliable damage. You need to space her out and break her hold on specific chokes or areas so you can engage the rest of her team. Her beam is her most lethal tool against you and you must be extremely careful of it. Do not randomly shield her as she will use it to build a free level 3 beam on you, same goes for nemesis form engagements as you will be forced to block to stand against her insane damage. If you get lucky, you can kill her in 4 pummels and 1 melee. This is made easier if you vortex her for extra damage and poke her beforehand.
Against her TP, if she does one in front of your team you can melee the turrets in it, or if she and her team come through you can vortex it for easy ult charge followed by a shield to protect you and your team from the incoming damage. This is when you can nemesis form to try to get rid of her, or her supports first.
Against her wall you must hold onto your ult as the tethers are broken by it. Try to vortex the spot where the enemy plays the most, and pummel them from behind a shield. Once it is gone you can ult if they are still alive. This character is more easily countered if you work as a team to get rid of her so you can play more freely. Lastly, do not bother trying to break her tp because it has 300 health and she will escape before you can actually break it.
Poke the turret with the staff, then poke him to force his overload and make him an easy kill for the next 10 seconds thereafter. You need to be really careful of his poke in the neutral as it mostly ignores armor and does a lot of damage if he gets your head. If he gets close, try to vortex + pummel him or melt him down with the staff as his head is super easy to track. If he overloads and spams right click just hold block because it destroys you.
After the armor change it will be less of an issue but it’s still too much damage so it’s better to just block while someone else kills him for you. Against his ult try to avoid putting a shield in it because it will just melt instantly. If you are caught in it then you must block with nemesis form. And as an obvious note, do not stand in it. This is made especially worse when you consider it does more damage against armor.
I ain’t got much for this borderline server admin hero. Poke her if you can to maybe force recall, shield off her pulse if she misses and it's near a teammate, or block her pulse if you are stuck. You can also shove your arms into a wall while blocking to muffle the explosion if she sticks your face and not your rear. The opposite must be done if she DOES stick your rear, so basically back into a corner with the block. If a teammate is stuck, then either hope they get a support cooldown spent on them, but if they don’t then shield them off to protect the rest of your team.
Pummel her if you know she has low blinks to get her to recall, you can very easily tell when she has none if she lets out a voiceline after blinking. You can maybe read her recall and pummel her where she lands as it sends her back to the position she was 3 seconds ago.
With the armor change she will do considerably less damage to you so use this to your advantage as you only need 3 successful pummels to kill her, whereas she needs several clips to kill you. Make sure to weave in a block for her clips so she doesn’t get nearly as much damage off. But overall with the armor change she will already do 50% less damage, so it’s easier to just keep pummeling her instead of relying on another 25% damage block.
You can also try to use your staff to kill her straight up, as it only takes 35 body shots or 18 headshots to do so. You need to be extremely careful of her if she is near a teammate as she excels at being a backline menace, so it may take more than just your effort to keep her in check.
Against Vendetta, you gotta watch out for when she wants to fly into your backline, assassinate one of your squishies, block a million damage, and get out. That’s usually the number thing she does. This is especially made useful when she has a Zarya or other people going in with her. For the heroes with her, refer to their sections to better understand how to counter Vendetta.
When she isn’t flying at your backline, she will also sometimes be seen spam slashing you until you die. She will build stacks and get sustain off of you if she has the healing perk so killing her can be very hard because she does a ton of damage and has insane levels of sustain. Thankfully, in nemesis form, you can simply make it take where you aren’t a worthwhile target by spam pummeling her which forces her to block and deplete the resource. The pummel also acts as an armor breaker so she will take considerably more damage than if you just used the staff.
Beware that when you are out of nemesis form you are a really prime target for her since you have no way to protect against her slashes. Also be wary of the fact that your vortex does jack fucking shit to her in any reasonable capacity. The literal only use vortex has against this hero is dealing 15 damage to her when she’s in with no abilities. I’d go as far as to say that saving your vortex so you can chuck at the enemy squishies that aren’t Vendetta is far more worth it than wasting it on her.
Her ult is also something that heavily counters you since if you are caught by it, nothing in the game will protect you from the 400 damage to your face. This is especially lethal if she has damage boosts or you are in omnic form. To counter her ult is pretty simple: hide behind a wall. This has a reasonably high likelihood of protecting you from that damage. Overall, she genuinely might as well be Thanos when she flies into the air and hits Q.
TLDR for this section: if she is on backline, look at her other teammates. When she is disengaging, try to throw some pummels or staff spam her way to help your team kill her. If she is looking at you, block her overheads and just punch her. This will force her to block or disengage or otherwise get off of you for a brief period. But very aware that she will probably come back after she recovers and you don’t have nemesis form. She might feel unkillable but respecting her damage and just simply shooting her can beat her. Hide from her ult and don’t waste vortex.
This hero is extremely easy to counter one on one. Poke them with range, shield their ult off (or flash block it), weave in blocks between pummels while you focus them. If you see them use dash or are coming out of a burrow, immediately vortex them and pummel them for a super easy kill. Just be careful of being drill bashed off the map in some spots. This is otherwise a very one sided matchup. But in the middle of teamfights, I find that they like to burrow in, burst out, then dash out, after taking a few potshots, similar to DPS doomfist from overwatch 1.
The key is to vortex them out of that burrow as it pulls them back down and can then maybe be an easy kill. Considering the amount of health and shields this character creates when using their abilities, pummeling them sometimes isn’t a good option as they just burrow out or dash away. I also find that in active team fights they try to attack you from off angles or indirectly, so be sure to keep a close tab on them. This character can be a huge menace to your backline or DPS so you should try to coordinate where they are and when you catch them with the vortex.
FUCK THIS HERO!!! Just poke her with staff, shield off aggressive angles, and throw a vortex at her up close for when you pummel her. You only need 3 pummels and a melee to kill her up close. Otherwise hope to god you can either swap monkey or have competent enough DPS.
Poke her with staff, try your best to care her cooldowns, reactively shielding them if necessary. Up close she can be a super easy kill with nemesis form provided that you dodge the sleep, but considering your hitbox is the size of Canada, I would NOT count on that.
Beyond trying to be skinny, the best way to counter sleep dart is to intentionally be affected by enemy damage while you are slept. Like damage over time effects or the enemy unintentionally shooting you including but not limited to: Mauga burn, Anran burn, torb turret being in your LOS, Soj disruptor shot, Junker Queen bleed, Ram vortex, Silver bullet from Cass if you’re late in the game. When these abilities are damaging you, they will wake you instantly. Note that if they damage you while the sleep got applied, it will last a minimum of 0.5 seconds. Additionally, if you are in the LOS of enemies with projectile weapons, the lingering bullets coming out of their guns might still be flying at you so you can count on those to maybe wake you up too.
She has a wonky hitbox and animations when strafing, so use her short height to your advantage and aim the pummels towards her feet to make hitting her easier. Ana is very vulnerable so she will likely get peel from her team if you engage on her. So be sure to pull out when necessary.
Against nano’d targets you can get up in their face and shield and block their damage for your team. Also be sure to avoid getting slept while blocking heavy damage or during your ult as she can completely shut you down. Overall, poking her forces her to play more carefully so be sure to constantly do this in fights. Her cooldowns will almost exclusively be saved for you so be prepared to be anti’d or slept for a decent majority of the game. But if you play carefully and around cover, you can mitigate this.
Just remember that one on one, when she nades herself, that is another pummel and melee needed to kill her. Also remember that in most cases, she will either be in the back to heal her team from long range risk free, or she will be within a close distance to the fight so she can shove her cooldowns up your metal ass, so that is when you can either hide and play cautiously to avoid this, sic your DPS hounds on her, or go beat her ass yourself. Be extraordinarily careful of fixating on her as this just works to her advantage because she will use her gun to not only skip your armor and damage you, but to also soften you up with her abilities, making you an easy kill for her team.
The higher you go in the ranks, the less likely you’ll be able to 1v1 her and kill her often.
Poke with your staff to maybe force out his cooldowns. If you are facing against his window, shield behind it to prevent amplified damage or just hide. Blocking it with nemesis form will not help. Overall this character has a ton of sustain, and basically 3 health bars. So his effective HP is in the 400-500s when you factor in his lamp and regen burst.
Obviously if you spot the lamp, focus it down with the staff. He has a big hitbox so you can do the same to him. I find that when you try to pummel him he really likes to jump around so it’s imperative you save a vortex for that. Extremely up close i’d honestly just use the staff and get headshots instead, as your dps shoots up to 250 when connecting with the head. Makes it much easier to kill him. Also factor in his lack of horizontal mobility, meaning if you run at him and break his lamp he’s all but a free kill provided his team doesn’t turn into the avengers and eat you alive.
You can easily counter her. You can melt her shield with the staff and throw a vortex at her to quickly keep melting her down as she won’t be able to escape it without using her bash. Or you can get up close with nemesis form and pummel her. Do be mindful of her flail and bash as she will use these to create a gap.
Against her ult you simply want to pummel her or wait for her shield to go down so you can ult her instead. But do watch out for her ult stun when you’re blocking lots of damage in nemesis form as that creates an opening for her team. If she’s rallying all 4 of her teammates, it may be a wise idea to vortex them and kite as you cannot out brawl that with just nemesis form or annihilation.
This character sacrifices massive amounts of burst healing for sustain in its place. She will usually be there to protect her other support, usually Ana, Bap, Juno, or even Kiriko. You can use this to your advantage by either focusing the tank as he will be getting less healing, or you can focus the Brigitte herself to goad the other support into helping her, which will then make their DPS or tank slightly easier to kill for your team.
Poke her with the staff, break her pylon wherever possible as it only takes 25 pellets to do so, and throw a vortex at her while you pummel her as she will not be able to jump away from you. Sometimes she likes to throw up the pylon next to her in a 1v1 after jumping but the vortex should prevent the outburst from having an effect, and you can pummel her and the pylon simultaneously.
Try to shield off her ult when it flies at you or just block the burst damage from it in nemesis form. An obscure thing I like to do is take a step back, shield myself, and vortex her down so she either shoots into the shield or can't fly up past it to debuff my team. This is made especially easier with a vengeful vortex. As for the explosion itself, I’m not sure if this interaction is bugged because sometimes I take the full damage even despite the block. I’d recommend holding it anyway.
Her beam heal is rather strong when she helps nemesis form targets because she does 115 healing per second which just barely surpasses your 108.33 dps with the pummels. So focus her down instead of your original target or just line up the pummels instead. She has a lot of sustain so she must be kept in check by either you or your DPS, since she can keep many team compositions healthy, which can be especially problematic with heroes like Sigma.
Where do I even begin on this hero….. Well, for starters, good luck ever landing a kill on her because if this hero dies to anything that isn’t a hitscan or dva, it's because it was likely on purpose.
Let’s get her main util out of the way: Her ability to drag whatever teammates/ults she wants to places that have no counter play. Like a BOB, or sky noon, or a dva bomb, or an Orisa terra surge, among other things. Usually, shielding these for yourself or blocking like usual is the best strategy. As for your other teammates? I don’t know. This is a Ramattra guide. Anywho, when she isn’t dragging ults, her ability to scoop her team up isn’t too crazy. As long as you watch potential flank points and pay attention, her dropping in teammates shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Her healing isn’t too crazy but she can be kind of annoying in the damage department because she can shoot you from places you can never touch as well as her claws out perk which just allows her to do 80 dmg to you when she feels like it.
But what is a genuine real problem is her ult. Her ult pretty much is a guaranteed kill on you 99% of the time. There is little counterplay to it beyond trying to shield but even that is inconsistent since you have to look at the ground to place the shield and she can just fly past it and grab you anyways. About all you can do is frantically pummel her so you can maybe kill her and save yourself from being dropped off the map but chances are that’s not gonna happen so your best move is to drop form so she gets less ult charge from killing you.
If she is low to the ground and not moving too much you can maybe shoot her a bit with staff and a few pummels but don’t even think of wasting your abilities on her. Even a well placed vengeful vortex does nothing to stop her from being in the stratosphere.
Juno is very weak against Ramattra in a 1v1 due to his armor and overwhelming damage. His vortex can easily tug her out of the sky from her glide boost and slow her way down if she doesn’t have a ring to speed her out. She dies in only 3 pummels and 1 melee so she is extremely weak in that regard.
However, in an overall team environment, she will be in the back where she will only be able to be poked by your staff and her fast regening health will negate most of your damage. Use your vortex on her team’s advancements with the ring, I find throwing the vortex at the ring location itself to be particularly useful for this. And just pressure her team to force her to pocket them which leaves her open to your flankers or other teammates.
Her torpedoes are a little annoying when you wanna pummel someone but overall she isn’t too strong if you simply hit all your shots. Especially given the 30% healing reduction.
Her orbital ray however is extremely strong against you as the extra damage increase can easily melt you even with the shield and block. While all your damage can normally be heavily negated by its 85 healing per second, you can actually ult to reduce its healing massively. The ult’s 35dps tether on all the enemies, as well as the 30% damage reduction, can reduce the total healing per second down to 24.5 healing per second. 85 - 30% is 59.5. The tether takes another 35 off of that to make 24.5 healing. This is when you can block and back up to hold your space and nullify their push.
Despite that, your team has way better tools for dealing with the ray themselves. Ana can nade it so nobody gets healed at all, and widow can headshot people in it. Whereas you mostly just stand there and take the damage or hold the line. BUUUUUUUT: you can also just run the hell away and not be on the enemies screen if the moment allows it. Then go back in with all the resources you have stock piled. They now have no ray to save them.
Not much to go over here. Just use the stratagems from the other hero matchups and wait for her to panic and suzu TP in. In which case you can vortex her and pummel/staff her down. Shield her kitsune off and throw a slow at it so you and your team can run away. You can try to vortex her before she climbs too.
Never chase her as she can slip away with ease and waste your time and cooldowns. So it is paramount to take her own advice and lure her out by attacking her team, then she becomes an easy kill. Just try to avoid her kunai as they do a lot of damage especially when connected to your head and poke her when you can, but considering her hitbox, good luck with that.
For this hero he will hide in the back and constantly pump really high potency healing into your targets and pull them away before you can snag a kill. I find myself employing 2 strategies with room for variance in between.
1: I simply bruteforce the target past his healing and before he can pull them by staffing them in the face as the 250 DPS cannot easily be outhealed and can maybe kill squishies before they can be pulled. For tank heroes I just sit there and staff/pummel like I normally do to just build ult and put pressure on the Weaver by forcing him to heal the tank. This makes him open to my other teammates.
2: I engage him myself by constantly poking his platform down when I see it, and just using my staff on Weaver himself as he has a rather big hitbox and predictable movement. For when I’m close enough to pummel him I try my best to vortex him and then hit as many pummels as I can before he can platform away. Try to leap onto his platform so you can keep hitting him and maybe snag the kill.
Weaver gets a lot of peel from his team because of his inherent value brought to the table by the pull, high healing and tree. So playing around his teammates that aren’t being healed by him, or getting yourself or your squad to bruteforce his team or just Weaver himself is the best strategy. Weaver exists purely to deny all value so you must play in accordance to this. Sometimes he has bad pulls or bad platforms so you can use these blunders to your advantage if necessary.
For when you want to ult, DO NOT solo ult anybody when he is alive and has line of sight of them as he will just pull them and waste your entire ult in the process. For any other instance where you have actual targets near you, prioritize the squishier ones as they will be the most likely to be pulled away. If you track his ult properly you can kill his team with your ult before he can tree as that is his biggest counter to it besides the pull.
If your team is with you in an all out fight and the tree goes off you can do many things in response. You can play defensively around the tree as it provides cover for both teams, which entails shielding, blocking in nemesis form, etc. Or you can break it with coordinated fire by your team to completely deny it. Or in extreme cases you can even ult and kill the targets not in its radius, and when that maybe fails you can just sit there and block. As long as you have targets in your radius you can outlast the entire ult and still have fuel left to get a few kills or make space.
You can try to hit him with the staff or pummels but he has too much mobility and sustain to reasonably kill him in most circumstances. Throw a vortex at him and then try to kill him with your team’s help if he is caught.
If the enemy tank is in your face and the lucio is behind trying to beat, you can reactively shield the tank off so they don’t get the beat health.
I find that in some spots they hover for a bit and are easily pummeled. Made even easier with the vortex usage. Aside from environmental kills, he is not much of a threat to you and should be dealt with to deny his utility.
Just keep in mind that if you use the combo on him, you must hit all pummels and the melee as quickly as possible to ensure you secure the kill. Otherwise his ambient healing will mess with the breakpoints and he will live.
The best general strategy against Lucio is to pressure him as this will force him to play more carefully and maybe even force him to use his amp as that is one of his most important bits of utility for his team. Lucio can be easy to read at times. Watch out for environmental hazards, make sure you space him out so you don’t get tossed around during a fight, and when he goes for a backline assassination, that is when you either kill him or shut him down and force him to leave.
She will usually be attached to someone else so use this to your advantage to pressure the enemy tank. In general mercy comps are not very good, especially for the enemy tank. Just keep in mind that Mercy empowers people with her staff and makes your more difficult matchups harder, so you must use the other stratagems in this doc for that.
Against Mercy herself, you want to just staff her up close or from afar and vortex her if possible to deny her some of her movement. She isn’t worth the nemesis form usage on her own as it is best served for her other teammates, or when she is low in a team fight. Otherwise she is more than killable with just the staff. And unless you’re trolling her, absolutely do not solo ult her either.
She will likely use her more advanced movement techs to avoid you so try to predict her flight path to land more hits on her. In general, provided I didn’t take too much damage before getting near her pocket targets, I can simply line up pummels on her and the pocket target to kill both of them. But focusing on either, provided you use your block and have ample amounts of armor, is a viable strategy.
Mizuki, unlike other support heroes, isn’t actually a nuisance to play against. (unlike fucking Ana…..) His healing isn’t egregious to play against, his damage isn’t too unreasonable, his hitbox isn’t microscopic, and he doesn’t move like a mosquito would.
For his abilities, really only one of them does anything to you and it's the binding chain. In short, when you wanna walk with form, you get held in place by a chain for 1.2 seconds. Then it’s over. That small window can be useful to help his team rotate away from you but in general, it’s really not too much of a problem. I find my main problem with this ability isn’t what it actually does but rather that it's literally a better vortex but that’s neither here nor there.
As for how most people play this hero, I find that I can just walk on them and force their movement CD and if their return beacon is in my sight, a simple vortex and pummel use completely obliterates them. I found that a lot of people on this hero will place the beacon, run in for a few seconds, do some damage, and back out. You can be cheeky with this and camp the beacon and just kill him out of it. Or if they miss the window, they just die because he has barely any self healing nor does he have a small hitbox to make it easy for himself to dodge damage.
His ult does quite literally nothing against Ramattra. 50 heals per second gets completely nullified by an annihilation tether and you can punch through the barrier. The literal only thing you need to do is walk into it to ensure you get a vortex (if you throw it from the outside it gets eaten) and to just make sure you play on the right side of it so the healing you need doesn’t get eaten.
Moira is not a very strong support in many circumstances. She is extremely weak against you in a 1v1 as she can’t really kill you with ease. But unless you’re hitting all your shots and pummels and get a good vortex in, you probably won’t be able to kill her either before she fades out.
She can be very easily caught when she is without her fade so watching for when she uses it is paramount to mitigating her already meager presence on the field. She also doesn’t provide the best utility to any of her teammates. Her healing isn’t the most potent and it is finite so you can simply pressure the enemy tank to force her hand into healing them. And she can’t damage you very well to help them secure the kill.
I find the best general strategy on her is to just look at her team and use the various stratagems and tools at my disposal to mitigate them and then get her after, as she is mostly an afterthought in many scenarios. Her orbs aren’t the most useful for damaging you or healing her team and thus they aren’t a priority to play around. When she ults, I either wait it out, or just ult in her face because the tether damage mitigates her self heal and she will be an easy target for yourself or your team. Overall she isn’t much of a threat. Just keep your listening ears on for her fade and make sure to peel your team if they are getting drained by her.
Against this hero it’s a little bit difficult following the removal of momentum seizure for the vortex. He has insane mobility, health, and sustain for a support hero with crazy damage potential too. If he is without either ability then it is possible to kill him with staff spam or 4 well placed pummels.
Beyond that, he will usually be far away spamming orbs and buffing his team with splash and water heals and is largely unaffected by you or your kit period since he is near impossible to engage on due to his mobility and self healing potential.
Be very mindful of your HP while blocking since he does 100 damage per orb and he can curve it around your block to hit you in your weak spot (your back). Against his ult, you wanna try shooting whoever has it on them with your team, perhaps even trying to vortex them to slow them down a bit. If they are next to you and they are about to pop, you can block its damage but know that you will be knocked down and vulnerable as a result.
Overall: one of ram’s toughest matchups in the support roster since he cannot be very much affected by ram and he does a lot to disrupt him. About the only tips I can give are the following; he is killable when without his abilities especially when considering vortex and void surge usage. Do not go out of your way to kill him because he can and will outrun you. And lastly, try not to take infinite poke from him and face towards where the orbs are going if you’re blocking because they more often than not inflict full damage to you.
Poke him with the staff when he is in line of sight. Shield yourself off when his discord is on you so you can hide to break it off out of his line of sight. Block his 5 (sometimes 6) orbs if you are in nemesis form too. You also wanna shield long sight lines where he is likely to be spamming.
Up close you can pummel him but watch out for the boop on his melee. You wanna stand a decent bit away and maybe shield yourself as you enter the 1v1 in order to live the insane amount of damage he can do to you, even in form. Also factor in that his team will absolutely turn around and peel him so either get the kill quick or get out if you can. You do NOT wanna be caught in enemy space with a discord on you.
You can either wait out his ult and then use yours. Or you can ult at the same time as yours lasts way longer. Just be careful if you are discorded as he will be invulnerable and can keep you in his line of sight for free to keep the pressure on you. In general with the slow, staff rate of fire, and pummels this character isn’t too insane. But just make sure to be careful of his discord. Poetically, it is your biggest counter.
This section is to discuss the various Nemesis Form techs. (Update for season 18: this section is pretty much mostly impossible to incorporate now because of the 1 second cooldown on the block ability, i am too lazy to delete this section and like having my word count high so it is staying.)
This is probably Ramattra’s biggest form of skill expression outside his staff usage.
There are three forms of pummel tech.
This tech is when you pummel someone and animation cancel the pummel with a melee. The plus side of this tech is for quickly finishing off a potential kill. Like for example where you pummel a 250 HP target 4 times and finish them off with 1 melee if they get healed a little. Relying on it when you’re actually pummeling someone just leads to your DPS falling off a cliff because the next pummel is delayed. Only use this as a finishing move.
This tech is when you pummel and weave a block frame in between them. Doesn’t decrease your attack speed and gives you frames where your damage taken is massively reduced, at the cost of you moving slower. Particularly useful versus another brawling tank like Reinhardt.
Downsides are that you can very easily mistime it and either pummel again or keeping block held up too long resulting in your DPS again falling off a cliff.
In accordance with his new block cooldown, the new pattern to replace the one above would be to simply pummel twice between each block frame. Shooting 2 pummels takes roughly 1.2 seconds which is just enough to finish the block cooldown and use it again. Not quite as effective as the old method but it still works. For more info on how to more effectively make use of the block, simply refer to its section.
By far the most complex tech on this hero and possibly many others. Is extremely prone to mistiming or straight up not working. But how does it work? How it works is, when you shift into nemesis or annihilation form, you pummel at least once, then you block, while holding pummel still, then letting go of the block and hitting a quick melee and then alternating back and forth, being careful not to mess up the timing.
Might not make much sense but let me explain it like this with button prompts:
Ult or form → pummel (at least once) → block (holding pummel still) → let go of block and melee → swap between block and pummel
Example video can be found here: https://youtu.be/T-MGdVoBi0o (old video but it still works the same way)
You can go into custom games and enable infinite annihilation so you can more effectively practice it.
This tech has its uses but it’s high risk and high reward. It makes you slower because of the blocking frames and it's prone to mistiming which results in no pummels being fired. The optimal usage for this tech is to use it extremely up close on isolated targets or people with no movement abilities. On occasion, it’s better to just pummel normally. It’s up to you to decide when to use this tech. In terms of damage numbers, let me put into perspective what one full usage of nemesis form and annihilation do with and without the tech.
Without tech and all pummels hit in nemesis form: 910 damage
With tech: 1350 damage
Without tech and all pummels hit in a full annihilation usage: 2680 damage
With tech: 3780 damage
So it can be extremely rewarding but it’s an overall very situational but cool tech to master.
I recommend tweaking your keybinds to enable yourself to move and use the tech. It can be extremely taxing on your brain to focus on moving and worrying about the enemy team and actually pulling off the tech, so practice the tech, then your mechanics, and then your awareness, etc. before employing this in your games.
Nemesis form has a strafing bug with the block. The idea is to block, and then the second you unblock you press the input again to enable yourself to strafe from side to side at abnormally high speeds. The usage of this is limited but it has its place. Particularly useful against poking characters since your movement makes you harder to hit while simultaneously making yourself a brick wall. Example video can be found here: https://youtu.be/w1dIXjB5xIk
Video example provided by fellow Ramattra player Arciax.
More nemesis form techs can be found in this brilliant video from YT user Oops. He does an adequate job of explaining them and has his own written guide for them in the description. Video link can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA2dm6ztZLs&lc=UgxceSl6T093QHbiz8p4AaABAg.AHXF0U2e9NuAH_6WSW7CGN
Ramattra excels with and against certain team comps. But fares worse with others. The 4 main playstyles for any given comp in this game is Brawl, Dive, Rush, and Poke. This section is to break down how Ramattra plays with and against these comps.
Ramattra excels in brawl comps. Especially with heroes like Symmetra, Mei, Lucio, Moira, Kiriko, Baptiste, and perhaps Ana. With his nemesis form, vortex, and shield, on flat, brawl based maps, Ramattra can advance on and hold key territory extraordinarily well. Especially when you play around cover. Keeping in mind the knowledge detailed in the hero matchups, you should be able to handle most maps and team comps very well.
An example comp to go against would be Reinhardt, Lucio, Kiriko, Mei, and Bastion. The ideal plan would be to care the Mei wall, and bastion turret form with cover and your shield. Then you have your lucio speed you on the bastion as he will be vulnerable once his form expires. The Kiriko will move to suzu the bastion, while the Reinhardt will undoubtedly swoop in with a pin to shut you down. The plan is to dodge the pin, kill the bastion, and then vortex and kill Kiriko. While then focusing on Lucio. Your team should be able to focus on the resourceless Reinhardt and kill him, while it is your job to focus on the squishies with your pummels. Being sure to block the heavy damage this team comp has to offer.
The possibilities in this comp, with and against, are endless. So it’s up to you to learn what to do in accordance with what you see. Just remember always that brawl is extraordinarily damage heavy and you only have 8 seconds of brawling capabilities when you use nemesis form. So it’s imperative you win the fight otherwise it may not end well if you don’t have the backup strategy of kiting the enemy when your nemesis form expires. This is where the staff comes in extremely handy to help set up brawl engagements as you can use it to whittle down the armor and resources of the enemy before you engage.
Ramattra is not a mobile tank and thus does not fit into a dive comp. But against dive, he can slow or even outright deny engagements with his vortex. His long range staff can help put pressure on dive teams before they jump in. When they do, you can employ your pummels to deal devastating damage to any dive comp provided you and your team coordinate which targets to focus.
No specific example comes to mind, but using previous knowledge of matchups versus enemy heroes can help deny even more value from these comps. But this is absolutely a defensive sided thing, as attacking on dive maps on Ramattra is quite literally an uphill battle due to your lack of mobility.
Dive comps can be a little hard to deal with sometimes because you cannot always deny them with the slow or your staff. It becomes especially difficult when your supports are the ones getting dove on then it becomes extremely difficult to counter a dive comp without making swaps. The ideal stratagem in this scenario is to focus down the squishier targets as they enable everything to run smoothly, be it a lucio or someone else. Once you get rid of one, the pressure is immediately alleviated and your supports can do their job easier, which cascades into the whole enemy team being wiped or having to disengage. If your backline is constantly getting dived on you must play next to them or they must play next to you to make it less of an issue.
Ramattra excels in poke comps too. His staff is one of the best poking primaries in the entire game and his shield is an extremely helpful tool in mitigating long range damage traded in neutral engagements. Ramattra pairs really well with heroes like Widowmaker, Ashe, Sojourn, Kiriko, Ana, and Zenyatta. On longer range maps like Circuit Royal, Junkertown, and Rialto, Ramattra can use his shield and staff to put massive pressure on enemy snipers and other such aggressive sightlines.
If poking long range isn’t working the best, using your shield and cover to advance on key positions to use your nemesis form to quickly pick apart enemy poke comps, as your pummel and block heavily counters pretty much anything they do. Caution however the massive headshot damage and debuffs like sleep dart, sigma rock, and discord orb, as heroes like Sigma, Ana, and Zenyatta are fairly common in poke comps. You should again use the matchups mentioned earlier in this document to better counter poke comps.
These comps are mainly played around lucio and an AOE healer, heroes like Baptiste, Brigitte, or Moira. It is essentially brawl but faster, and Ramattra excels in both playstyles due to his shield, pummel, block, and vortex. For this playstyle however, you and your team will be advancing directly into the enemy team with full force and lethality, so you want to use your shield and vortex to protect your team and to hold the enemy still while you and your team inflict heavy damage onto them.
Sometimes not every surge forward into the enemy team will work out the best so you can use your shield and block to protect yourself and team while you disengage. Popular characters on tank and support that are seen in rush comps are Lucio, Kiriko, Junker Queen, Baptiste, Moira, and Reinhardt. So keep in mind the hero matchups explained earlier to make playing into rush comps easier. Popular DPS heroes that get played into rush are Tracer, Sojourn, Reaper, and Mei. So work in conjunction with these heroes to isolate enemies and pick them off with ease.
Do keep in mind that not absolutely everything can be described in great detail so it’s up to you to determine the best playstyle to engage with, as stated before, this is an extremely dynamic game and those who use more logic and critical thinking are the ones who usually win. Usually. Be sure to refer to the Misc knowledge section to fill in any potential gaps, but take those with a grain of salt as those are periodically added and not fully foolproof and applicable to everything.
Ramattra, like most heroes in this game, has a bit of a learning curve on how to properly aim with his weapons. This can range from how to use his staff, pummels, vortex, or even your shield. I will attempt to provide some basic tips for these, and a general tip.
Having a higher refresh rate and higher frame rate with as little input lag as possible is the easiest way to remove any technical bottlenecks. This will help you focus on the human error aspect of aiming. I know it’s expensive, but that doesn’t make me wrong either way.
Nevertheless, putting in a little practice every day can help. Lowering your DPI and in game sensitivity, and tuning your crosshair can tremendously help you hit more shots on not just this hero, but many others too. As usual, DPI, sens, and crosshair can all be fine tuned to YOUR specifications. There is no right or wrong way to do this (except for using 1000+ dpi and 10+ sens. You are going to break your wrist. Turn it down.)
The way I aim with the staff, and the weapons on any hero in this game, or most games for that matter, is by using my eyeballs to lock onto my target directly. I then use my mouse to move my crosshair ahead of them to lead my shots onto them. Up close I move my mouse directly over them while slightly adjusting ahead of their movement to make up for any adjustments they themselves make.
Now, given the nature of this weapon’s slow moving pellets, you can actually use this to predict enemy movement and place pellets in a spot where you can snag an easy kill. An example of this can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTftzWqm95c
As seen in the example, I saw the enemy doomfist was low HP and was going to jump out. I tried to reactively aim ahead in the beginning but I knew he was going to punch into the wall and hit it. This resulted in him falling straight down and into the stream of pellets ready to kill him.
At range, the pellets will probably not hit, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it as pressure. So look to strafe a little bit so you don’t aim with your mouse to more evenly disperse the pellets.
The pummels are massive and they fly extremely fast. But sometimes not fast enough to catch enemy strafe movements, such as a sojourn or tracer crouch strafing in front of you. So you want to lock eyes on them and then move your mouse AROUND them to counter movement such as this, as they will likely walk right into it. Another thing you can do is flick the pummels. To do this you want to stop firing and to take the time to aim the pummel before firing. If you hold the pummel fire down, you may run the risk of the pummel being fired before it can be placed on or ahead of its target. In general against most nimble targets, simply placing critically precise pummels on them is better than holding it down and hoping it will hit.
However, most of the time, especially at medium range, the pummels are rather easy to hit, just aim for the center of their bodies while accounting for your movement, as well as theirs. If you move to the right for example, you wanna compensate by slightly aiming to the left, as your crosshair placement will have also moved to the right. Against smaller targets in really close range, a really nifty trick you can do is to aim at their feet and the floor to utilize the massive hitbox of the pummels themselves to basically skip the aiming part. This has varying degrees of success but I find it particularly useful against heroes like Ana or Illari. No example provided for this one.
Not much to go over here. It has a sorta long rather than tall slope when it moves through the air, so you don’t need to aim too high to lob it across vast distances. One easy way to catch enemies off guard with it is to toss it above them, bouncing it off a piece of terrain so it falls straight down and into them. An example of this can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbVNVJBhIFk
Not much to go over. It’s rather self explanatory.
I don’t know if you could necessarily call it aiming, but the shield has a bit of technique to it. If you need to quickly turn around to shield something, you need to pay attention to when your screen roughly reaches the direction that you want to block stuff from. That way you don’t overshoot.. An example would be a shatter, which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPoEcgUaZzA
As seen in the example, I kept my listening ears on and my head ready to reactively turn around and whip my mouse in the direction of the shatter to block it. I made sure to keep a firm grip of my mouse with my hand so I don’t push it too far to the left.
With all that being said, aim improvement is a never ending quest for many of us. And it ain’t any easier on Ramattra due to the lack of hitscan in his kit. But with constant practice, you can expect to hit more shots. Ideally of course.
Tempo is a term used for heroes that have an option of playing really slowly or really aggressively. All heroes have this capability, but it is more pronounced in characters like Bastion and especially Ramattra, as he was literally described as being a tempo tank in his unveiling. I will get into how one can play with a slow tempo, or a fast one, and how to appropriately use both.
Slow tempo is when you play further back, less aggressively, and more patient and methodically. You constantly use your staff to dwindle the enemy’s health down, get their cooldowns out, and use your shield to slowly advance and set up in specific spots to then leap into a nemesis form engagement. This tempo is mainly used on defensive positions, or when you must attack but avoid high damage spam comps or to simply play safer.
While it is safer, it ultimately spends extra of the limited time resources one has, and is thus mainly used in critical scenarios or the beginning of a round. However, your slow tempo can actually be used to your team’s advantage because it allows them to leap into action at random, which can catch the enemy off guard or otherwise make space on their own due to the enemy having their resources and health chipped away by your usage of the staff.
Do keep in mind that if you play REALLY slow, the enemy can simply use it to bide their time and recoup their strength by the time you leap into action. Slow tempo can be supplemented by high healing capacity heroes like Ana, Kiriko, Baptiste, and perhaps Lifeweaver.
High tempo is when you kick things into overdrive by playing really aggressively and using the staff and shield to setup nemesis form engagements in a really short amount of time. You quickly use the staff to whittle down an opponent's health, and with the help of your team, steamrolling them.
This playstyle can be really hard to beat on certain comps and due to your high health, shield, block, and general threat level, you can steamroll opponents easily with this stratagem. But it comes at the cost of it being extremely volatile if you don’t play carefully enough or don’t have enough sustain. This playstyle excels when you get into key territory quickly while neutralizing key enemies swiftly. Be it a support or DPS character, as this vastly cuts down on the resistance you will face and make winning fights much easier.
To make this playstyle work you must watch out for high damage output heroes, enemies in advantageous positions, disruption abilities, and to also keep the various hero matchups in mind when planning your next move. I find that when I go all in, pummeling and weaving in blocks or holding it, it makes the engagement even more lethal and harder to deal with. Lastly, use map geometry to plan out high tempo strats too.
The rate at which you play is vastly determined by the map and what the enemy comp and play style is like. If you go against opponents that are far away you may wanna play slower to get close via cover and shielding and then turn it up when you get near them. Or if you go against fast moving opponents then you play slower and let them come to you.
I find most of my success by playing aggressively on control maps and slower on payload maps. So be sure to learn map layouts and key interactions on them to find better success in your games. Going fast and slow is never too easily clear cut or easy, so you must employ trial and error to learn how best to approach your games.
Ramattra can be a significantly resource heavy tank, more so than the others. Sometimes you can have a Ramattra on your team that can’t shield, block, or use cover worth a damn. Or maybe you are the Ramattra in question and simply don’t have the ability to at times. Whatever the case may be, this section is meant to showcase stratagems, hero matchups, and general tips on how to support Ramattra and how to not die as easily.
The main 3 stratagems you can use to not die as easily are as follows: shielding appropriately, blocking, and playing cover. If you do not regularly employ these things then you will never get value on this hero. Considering that shielding and blocking were already explained in previous sections, I will give a detailed explanation on how playing cover can provide you the reprieve you need to live.
Firstly, remember that cover has unlimited HP and is more often than not more useful than your block or your shield. It is especially useful if you jiggle peek from behind it (poke your head out for a bit and go back in after returning fire on the enemy). It is mainly useful in poke heavy scenarios with your staff on long sightlines. Or when you are brawling up close with your pummels. Beyond just cover usage, you can use your armor HP to your advantage and play around it, especially against heroes with small amounts of damage rather than burst damage. Your supports should be looking to keep your armor HP topped up when necessary.
Many matchups can be made with your allies to help support you. Not every single hero will be discussed, at least in the DPS section, but the biggest ones from DPS will be. Support will be explained in full detail.
Most DPS can help you by simply laying damage into the enemy or using their various abilities to help you do your job better. Characters like Hanzo, Ashe, Cassidy, Soldier, and Widowmaker can be used in poke scenarios as you can weaken targets for them with your staff or they can weaken them for you with their long range capabilities. This makes confirming kills with the staff much easier in addition making the 3 pummel 1 melee combo possible again.
Some abilities on the DPS roster, such as junkrat’s trap, or sombra’s hack, can make it super easy to melt targets with your staff.
Examples being an unarmored tank target like Junker Queen being caught in a Junkrat trap, which then allows you to connect your staff pellets on her head and kill her in extremely small spaces of time because of the 250 dps your staff does to the head. Or perhaps a hacked Sigma since his rock gets interrupted by Sombra’s hack so you can then pummel him without having to worry about his 1.2 second stun. Other things your DPS can help you with is dealing with some problematic matchups for you. Such as Ana or Zen in the backline who make your job much harder. A character like Tracer can go out there and kill them for you so you can do your job much easier.
But for some more specific DPS matchups, there are a few in mind.
Bastion can help Ramattra with poke or brawl based scenarios, or perhaps even Anti-dive or rush scenarios. His long range poke can help him with staff or pummel targets in addition to completely destroying the enemy tank for you. Ramattra can help support Bastion by slowing people with the vortex and shielding him or blocking in front of him when he is in turret form.
Bastion’s sticky grenade has massive burst damage and the Ramattra should ideally look at whomever gets stuck by it as it does a hefty 130 damage and this can allow him to double pummel squishy targets. Ramattra’s ult and Bastion’s ult can work extremely well together. Since Ramattra can push people out of position by advancing on them with annihilation, and Bastion can follow up with artillery strikes where they currently stand.
Mei can help Ramattra with poke scenarios with her right click, and in brawl with her left click and wall combo. Particularly useful against tanks like Reinhardt, Sigma, and Zarya. Ramattra should be looking to either staff headshot walled targets or to pummel them, depending on his next strategy or if he has shield for after the wall goes down. Her ult can make getting kills extremely easy, so be sure to use your staff on frozen targets when possible as it does way more DPS than the pummels do.
Sym can help move Ramattra around the map into crazy offensive positions, or to put up an extremely good defense. Her beam and turrets make destroying the enemy tank particularly easy and her TP can help Ramattra kite specific engagements with ease. Her wall is also an extraordinarily powerful tool for large scale fights as she can segment a fight and make it extremely easy to win a fight with a well timed nemesis form engagement. It makes an annihilation usage particularly easy too.
Sombra can help Ramattra by hacking his pummel targets so they can’t escape him as easily, hacking the enemy tank also enables him to exploit certain matchups much easier too. Her virus and overall backline menace potential make her particularly valuable against support characters who cause him too much trouble, like a Zen for example.
Her EMP is the most powerful ultimate in the game as her ability to deny the enemy their abilities for 3 seconds makes her immensely powerful when executing a massive strat with her. She can make annihilation a free fight win when she EMPs the enemy as they will have no access to the abilities that counter Ramattra or his ult. Be it shields or stuns or any other ability that counters annihilation.
As the name suggests, these characters all have their own respective tools to help you succeed. All of them offer something in one way or another and thus they will all be discussed.
Ana offers Ramattra immense single target healing, able to keep him up in extremely damage heavy situations, as well as her nano boost which makes his annihilation usage a free fight win when it's used in combination. Her anti grenade is extremely powerful against his enemies so he should immediately turn his attention to whomever is the squishiest and lower HP as they will likely not survive.
Do make sure he does not wake up her sleeping targets, but to instead throw a vortex at them when they wake up or to pummel into melee them for a quick 105 damage burst. Do make sure he supports her by occasionally turning around to make sure she is safe, and that he is in her LOS so he doesn't make her job harder.
When he blocks, she can easily outheal the incoming damage on her own, but this can be made even easier if she nades him, as he will start to receive 105 healing per shot for a few seconds.
Baptiste can help him by giving him raw damage on his own, similar to a DPS, so he can help him kill staff or pummel targets much easier. His raw healing output is also crucial to surviving in high damage situations, such as when he is in a nemesis form engagement and he isn't blocking. Do keep in mind his nades are a little slow so some healing may be a little delayed.
His regen burst can also help Ramattra get out of sticky situations and his immortality field is an immensely helpful tool for when he is in a pinch (no shield, low HP, blocking too much, etc.). His last tool that can help Ramattra is his window. When using his staff with it, hitting headshots consistently yields 500 dps. Higher than mauga’s chainguns with nano boost and bastion’s cannon by itself. His pummels also deal 130 damage when going through, so make sure to use this on armored targets or squishies as he can 2 shot them with it.
Brig can help Ramattra by protecting the other support or the DPS. Her raw healing on its own and her damage potential don’t really allow her to be in the fray with Ramattra. So she herself can’t do much in the way of helping him with poke or brawl engagements. But she can help him with anti-dive support, as her flail is easy to hit and can proc her inspire on him.
Her ult is where things change, she can block damage for him with her empowered shield and her healing output and movement speed bonus can help him brawl more efficiently. Particularly useful against an enemy ultimate engagement or to help your annihilation usage more. For the most part she is a defense sided hero meant to keep others safe, so they can keep Ramattra safe in turn.
Illari can primarily help Ramattra during poke engagements. Her solar rifle healing can provide him brief reprieve in a brawl scenario or when you are behind cover. But the majority of her power is in her pylon during poke fights. Ramattra can jiggle peek out of cover with the staff when it is up and it will help keep him topped up with its 40 health pellets.
Her ult is particularly useful during a nemesis form or annihilation usage, as his pummels can 2 tap the enemy and set off the captive sun status explosions. His vortex is especially useful during this, as it helps her keep her targets in place for the initial shot.
Not really much to go over. She does reliable healing for Ram, she can lift him to spots and flanks he can never do on his own. She can also help him with simply damaging enemies he needs killed and ult people off the map for him. This is as run of the mill as it gets. No crazy techs or whatever. She can fly him where he needs to go and that utility is crazy because it allows Ram to drop down from the top ropes on somebody and completely destroy them with a form. She can also lift him out of trouble too. That’s about it.
Juno can help Ramattra immensely by not only giving him extreme amounts of healing, similar to ana, but her hyper ring is extremely useful for enabling his nemesis form engagements. What’s more is that her torpedo not only gives him immense burst healing for critical moments, but it also does a decent chunk of damage on his opponents which frees up a breakpoint for when he is using nemesis form. Her orbital ray is also particularly useful for when wants to make a surge forward or use his annihilation. The healing and damage boost from the ult is not to be understated. Juno is quite possibly one of the strongest supports Ramattra could have on his team. Provided he peels for her when necessary.
Kiriko can do a myriad of things for Ramattra. She can poke at long range for him, confirming kills with him and the like. She can pump him with consistent and high amounts of healing, and she can TP in to save him in specific scenarios. She can even take insane off angles to get any problematic enemies for him and then TPing back to safety.
Her Kitsune rush is extremely useful for winning fights since he can pummel faster and get his cooldowns back quicker. Especially useful when used in conjunction with annihilation. For cleansing, refer to Misc knowledge tip number 14 for a list of things that can be cleansed.
Lifeweaver helps by giving Ramattra high amounts of consistent healing like Kiriko does, but he cannot take off angles or deal crazy damage like Kiriko or Baptiste can. He can also help Ramattra by elevating him with his petal platform. Making some dive maps not nearly as problematic if you simply skip the long stair climbs to high ground. His pull can obviously pull him out of bad spots when he is low. But it can also be used to pull him into the fray with his annihilation.
Sometimes the lifeweaver can hide and pull the ulting Ramattra into the enemy team, making the radius thing not a problem. But make sure not to pull him away when he wants to ult as it takes away the enemy and thus his fuel source for his ult. Additionally, your tree of life can be used to keep him up in brawl heavy scenarios on key territory, such as the objective or the payload. It’s especially helpful for when he is blocking heavy damage or is using his annihilation.
Lucio assists Ramattra by speeding him around all over the place to help him hunt down his pummel targets and kill them swiftly. He is especially useful for helping him move from cover to cover during poke fights and even helping him by flanking and going for isolated targets, booping them off the map, or booping them towards Ramattra himself, even more effective if they are booped into the vortex.
His healing is low but the speed can help him kill the enemy before they can damage him too heavily. If the Ramattra is low HP and blocking you can speed him into cover since his movement speed is heavily reduced in his block stance. Lastly, the beat can turn the tide of a fight by either empowering an extremely aggressive push forward. Be it to defensively counter an enemy ultimate, keep Ramattra up during a nemesis form usage, or to give him breathing room for an annihilation usage.
Mercy can be one of the strongest, or sometimes weakest supports for Ramattra. Ideally she supports Ramattra by simply boosting his damage, and healing him to keep his armor topped up. Her damage boost can help Ramattra melt down armored and regular targets with his staff, as it boosts the 5 damage pellet to 6.5, which is a 13 damage headshot or 325 DPS on headshots. It raises his total damage per reload to 650 and allows him to farm immense ultimate charge.
It’s especially useful for his nemesis form usage as it gives him 84.5 damage per pummel and when stacked on multiple opponents, Mercy can help Ramattra build annihilation in but a few nemesis form usages. As for her healing overall, use it when he blocks, is behind his shield, or is low HP. She can resurrect him only if she has an escape plan or Valk ready. 1v5 rez is almost never worth it unless both of them have their ultimates, and even then, depending on how damage heavy the enemy is, this is an extremely risky move. Ideally she helps Ramattra build his ult and confirm kills quicker, and then she ults if he does so they can keep the pressure on. Rez should only happen when she is behind cover or has the escape plan or valk usage ready as explained earlier.
Ramattra can only really get value with mercy if he helps her in turn. Peeling for Mercy should be high up on his priority list as her character is extremely volatile in many circumstances. It’s a “help me, help you” situation with her. Shield for her, block with her, and focus down any who try to engage her so she can keep boosting you and your other teammates.
Uses for the damage boost are as follows (these are provided by Petal): Boost his pummels, boost when he has armor in his health pool, boost his annihilation as he can self heal 300 HP when the initial armor runs out or if her other support is healing him, do not damage boost when below half HP or more than 1 enemy is alive, do not boost when she has a DPS on her team in a better position than he is.
He can do a decent bit for Ramattra. But not via raw healing numbers. He can do pretty decent damage on targets for Ram, even a single blade hit can help Ram score a kill. Most of his utility comes from his ability to be a distracting flanker, and his chains. A good chain can either save Ram or help him score an even easier kill than usual. Especially powerful when combo’d with vortex. Lastly, his ult can give ram some much needed breathing room in important fights. It allows Ram to pummel freely and not be forced to block.
Moira herself isn’t necessarily the best support for Ramattra. But her healing is semi- adequate for most scenarios, be it brawl or rush, but where she fails is her ability to keep up with heavy amounts of damage. The Ramattra can mitigate this himself by simply shielding or blocking, or using cover like a normal person should.
She excels with other Rush or Brawl heavy supports, like Lucio, Kiriko, or Baptiste, so she can provide healing for all of them as well as the Ramattra himself. Moira can sometimes focus down Ramattra’s targets with her alternate fire which can provide Ramattra with enough damage dealt to finish them off quicker. Be it with the staff or pummel breakpoints. Other targets she can focus on are flying characters that Ramattra can’t as easily deal with. Moira’s coalescence is her strongest tool for helping Ramattra as she can keep him up when he blocks, is out in the open with no shield, or is in a brawling scenario. Particularly useful during an annihilation engagement.
Wuyang can be quite a strong pick with Ramattra as he can spam his targets with 100 damage orbs to soften them up for pummels or void surge spam. He can also give him a huge heal and healing amp with his wave. Wuyang’s own sustain and mobility keeps him safe from enemy dives that Ramattra can’t help the most with.
Wuyang’s ability to enable flex DPS also makes him really good for Ramattra since he will not have to try as hard to deal meaningful damage as his enabled dps can do the heavy lifting and he can merely support them with an offensive vortex and pummel/surge spam. Furthermore, Wuyang’s ult is extremely strong in that it lets anyone on his team int their brains out and get value. Be it an ulting Ram or one of Ram’s other teammates. It is also an excellent tool in keeping Ramattra alive as it adds 400 overhealth to his health pool and then heals him after. Particularly useful for nemesis form usage mid-fight.
Zenyatta can help Ramattra immensely. Be it in a poke or brawl scenario. Though he isn’t as fast as his rush support counterparts, he can help Ramattra confirm kills quicker with his orbs and his discord orb, which can be used in a similar fashion to Mercy’s damage boost. It is especially useful against his pummel targets as the pummels deal 81.25 damage when connecting with a discorded target. His orb of harmony can be used to gain passive ult charge when he is in a nemesis form engagement or is blocking heavy damage.
Overall Zenyatta excels at simply dealing damage and this makes Ramattra’s job much easier. Transcendence is especially useful when paired with annihilation, as that brief 5 seconds of immense healing can allow him to pummel freely without having to block. Usually it’s best used to save him from enemy ults, or to get him out of a pinch.
Ult tracking is the act of trying to predict what your enemy’s ult charge is at any given point. This is different from ult economy in that it's a guessing game on the enemy’s ult charge rather than looking at your own to see what it is. Learning how to track ultimates is imperative to success on Ramattra and just about any other character too.
Ult tracking can be as simple as opening the scoreboard and looking at your enemy’s stats. Every hero in Overwatch has a set specific cost for their ultimate. These costs can vary from patch to patch so they will not be listed here in order to make future maintenance of this document easier for me.
Every hero gains ultimate charge by simply existing, dealing damage, or healing. Every point of damage adds 1 point per instance of damage, and healing adds 1 point per instance of healing. So as an example, Ramattra deals 65 damage with every pummel. And thus he gets 65 points for his ultimate. This number then gets converted into a percentage point for the ult gauge on the bottom of your screen.
So, with that all out of the way, the way you can tell what an enemy’s ult charge may be is to simply open the scoreboard and look at their raw numbers. Using Ramattra as an example again, he has a cost of 2,300 points on his annihilation, so if you see the enemy Ramattra add 2,300 damage to his damage value on the scoreboard, you can be sure he has it for the next fight.
But considering that heroes gain ult charge for simply existing, you can scale back a little bit on your estimate to compensate for the passive charge gain, which is 5 per second after the spawn doors open. So if you’re good enough at mental math, you can add that number to whatever damage or healing the enemy has done after you’ve multiplied 5 by however many seconds it has been since their last ult usage. One last thing to consider is that tank heroes give 40% less ult charge when shot, so you must take that into account when you try to deduce the charge gains of the enemy.
Another way you can tell when the enemy will ult is if they start playing much more aggressively and almost statically. For example a Zarya will just walk in and bubble so she can throw out a grav. Or a Reinhardt who starts to exclusively shield as if he’s waiting for something to happen for him to shatter. Watching out for various changes in an enemy’s body language is an extraordinarily easy way to tell when they will ult. All players no matter their skill have some innate vibe to them when they want to use their ult. Tracers will hang around a little bit longer so they can stick you, Sombra will hide to jump in and EMP, Winston will feed his brains out so he can primal, Reaper will either TP in or just jump down and hit the blossom, etc.
More information on ultimates and their charge and other various bits of knowledge on the subject can be found on the overwatch wiki. Seen here: https://overwatch.fandom.com/wiki/Ultimate_ability
Not too Ramattra specific but it does carry a ton of weight and influences how you play the hero. For starters, staging is simply the act of layering your engagement. Not every fight is a fight where you can int your brains out and hard focus a target and burn all your cooldowns and expect to get 5 kills.
When you approach each fight, you should assess who is who and where they are and what they can do to you. When this is all in mind, you can plan out how to take that fight depending on the map and the positions of yourself and every other player in the lobby. As detailed in the other sections of this guide, you have to be slow and methodical with your approach. Rarely if ever will your first or second form/vortex use get a kill or insane value. But your third or fourth? That’s where the magic can happen.
Every fight is secretly a resource war. The team with the most resources usually wins as it allows them to make more aggressive plays or be defensive enough to live through offensive plays themselves. It is very easy to swing this scale on Ramattra. The enemy can often dump all their resources into you, either to heal themselves, or back up, or to try damaging you which can easily be mitigated with your shield and block. So learning how to push and damage them to apply pressure is crucial to siphoning their resources. Simultaneously, however, you can easily make it to where your team is the one draining their resources to keep you alive if you play too aggressively. Which is where staging comes into play.
Your kit draws a lot of attention. Use this to your advantage. Your first couple ability usages should be used to take space and apply pressure to any number of different targets on the map. Either pushing the tank or a lone squishy can draw a lot of attention to yourself and your target. This is where resources are drawn out and you can now chill for a sec and wait for your abilities to recharge so you can repeat the engagement and push even harder to perhaps secure a kill.
An example of this is quite simple: A Reinhardt will play down main which is when you can shield behind him, vortex him, and then form on him to apply major pressure. This will be when he turns around and pins away thus giving up all the space he had and allowing your team to advance and take angles. Reinhardt and his team have now lost a ton of space and resources while your team barely had to use any to get a massive advantage. With the newfound space, you can now do another engagement where you can run at a squishy or keep pressuring the Rein to siphon the enemy more and finally secure all the kills needed to win that fight.
In a nutshell, play around and try to influence the resource war via staging because that is one of the best ways to win fights in this game. But at the same time, having weaker resources means you have to stage differently. There are probably 100 quadrillion different variables that could affect the resource budget for either team in each game so its up to you to learn how to play overwatch the video game to better ascertain what to do and how.
As stated in the general playstyle section, advancing on and holding territory on this hero is very important. So is the act of pressuring the enemy team. This section seeks to delve deeper into this without polluting that earlier section.
For starters, Ramattra is very good at holding space by living an extremely high amount of damage. And he himself deals enough damage with his own kit to make enemies have to yield to his lethality and take him down first before they can do anything else. This is where the pressure bit comes from. There are three main positioning stratagems to employ when playing this (or really any) hero.
Firstly is on control maps or flashpoint or any map that doesn’t involve you pushing something you should always be on the move holding different chokes, corridors, map sectors, sight lines, chasing down kills, soaking up damage for your team by using your shield and taking enemy aggro etc. An example of doing this would be when you cap point on Busan downtown, you push up to the choke where the enemy spawn is and try to hold and pressure them there whilst slowly backing up as they push forward.
Your ability to stay in certain spots and hold them/get kills is supplemented by your team and the angles they hold. No teammates means you have to be extremely cautious with this strat as you can very easily die even in block. Know when to back up and where to hold so you don’t die instantly.
In lower ranks, people often like to afk on or near point so this strat is less valid but if you are good enough at this hero you can easily score kills on your own and hold that space but obviously, you, dear reader, know your limits better than I.
Second stratagem is when you’re on a map that involves pushing the bot or the cart. For push maps its pretty simple, sometimes you position yourself on the bot and move it while your team takes angles and whittles the enemy down and push it as far as you can as you don't need to be healed or otherwise cared on cart especially considering Ram’s survivability. But on the flip side, sometimes, depending on my team comp and the enemy comp, i will have somebody else sit on the cart while I push up and hold a critical spot from the enemy, like the first corner where the checkpoint is on Runasapi or the bridge on Colosseo.
On push maps, its wise to play down main because the maps are linear in the middle and your team can easily die if there’s no tank to absorb all the damage and pressure the enemy as your bot moves around the map. You can branch out and take different angles when you reach transitionary spots with more options, usually found after the checkpoint. Like for example, the high ground room on Runasapi or New Queen Street or the bridge on Colosseo.
For payload, it depends on your team comp and the enemy comp. If its high ground heavy and they’re on poke and you dont have adequate mobile heroes on your team or poke heroes in return, you do not wanna be sitting afk on the point and instead sometimes try to push and contest high ground. That way someone else on your team, like an Ana or a Tracer, can push the cart for you unimpeded. I often find myself pathing to different power positions and holding them on payload maps. Be it different corners, chokes, or high grounds or anything in between. In a nutshell, play and hold where the enemy wants to play.
The third stratagem is simply just positioning where the action is and acting like a wedge or big target holding the space. So for example on Busan downtown you can choose to play on the stairs where the high ground is above the point to prevent the enemy dps from taking it and having a strong position when they push to the point below, or you can hold the line at the bottom where the tank and his supports might wanna go. You are the front line and get to decide where it is and it is up to you which target you prioritize. There usually isn’t a wrong answer but it always depends. If you have good DPS you don’t need to worry about the height but if you don’t that’s another task for you to handle.
When I say wedge or big target, I mean when a tank just exists somewhere and denies the enemy from freely taking that space. Hog can do this by camping in a spot and hooking any squishy who isn’t careful. Orisa can sit there taking a million damage and dishing an equal amount outwards with her spear and primary fire. The list goes on, but the point I'm making is this: Ramattra can exist and take a ton of damage but also control the space by using vortex and punishing enemies with sustain fire from his staff or burst damage from his pummels.
The wedge bit comes from the fact that a tank can usually use their insane amount of sustain to sit between the enemy tank and the rest of their team. Ramattra is really effective at this due to his shield and block which buys him a lot of time to soak up damage and delay the enemy team while his team devours the enemy tank who now has no team.
The last bit is pressure: the concept of simply EXISTING near an enemy and forcing them to focus on you or keep you in check to free up THEIR pressure on your team. Its much harder for a hitscan to click on your team for free if you’re constantly in his face bullying him. The important distinction and thing to keep track of is that pressure doesn’t mean you have to kill. Just exist and safely hold space near the enemy so they don’t get free value off your squishies. Your ability to pressure the enemy is pretty decent on this hero given the damage you can take and the damage you can do. So utilize your kit to make this task easier. You will win significantly more games if you can successfully play in the right spot and pressure/kill the enemy. However, this section also ties into the staging section so I’d advise studying them both to really master it. You can’t pressure anything if you don’t do things at the right time.
This section is to include various bits of knowledge I've gathered that are and aren’t Ramattra specific but also relate to him as well. Some of them are not-so-common knowledge tidbits and such. New bits may be added to this down the line as I learn them. But let’s be honest most of these are some low level 5Head slop I just feel like jotting down.
1. Being mindful of your surroundings, be it the map, team environment, or what cooldowns either team has used, is paramount to your ability to live and get kills. Or to block damage for your team.
2. You can use your staff exclusively for damage to melt enemies, deal ranged damage, and be an overall nuisance to the enemy. You can use your nemesis form and vortex for exclusively defensive purposes to make killing you a sisyphean task.
3. Learning to shield specific bouts of damage on Ramattra or any other tank for that matter will earn far greater value than just shielding anything and everything. (who’da thunk?)
4. Doing your best to learn how to do math in your head is paramount to ensure your ability to secure kills or deny value from enemy abilities on Ramattra or any hero for that matter. Like for example how it takes 4 pummels to confirm a kill on a squishy hero in nemesis form. Or how 750 nemesis form HP being quadrupled by the 75% damage reduction to make 3,000 effective HP.
5. Learning as many interactions in this game as possible will not only help your Ramattra skill improve but that of any hero. Knowing specific interactions can be the difference between winning or losing a game. Such as how blocking the center of sigma flux with tree of life or mei wall can completely deny it’s LOS and mitigate the whole ult.
6. Review any bad game to look for crucial mistakes or otherwise refine your gamesense. Learning what you do wrong and working to overcome such mistakes is what enables you to climb.
7. Not every hero matchup, on Ramattra or any other hero, is as formulaic or clear cut as I portray them to be in this doc. Overwatch is an extremely dynamic game so it’s imperative to use logic and critical thinking to plan your next move.
8. Focusing on constantly maintaining your core mechanics, like aim, hero knowledge, and positioning, is critical to finding success on any hero.
9. On Ramattra, Winston, and Sigma, you can dance around your shield to break the ankles of any DPS player and dodge massive damage. You would not believe the effectiveness of this technique.
10. Be careful not to use too many ults at the same time, or mistime your ult usage either. Having a good ultimate economy is the key to winning important teamfights.
11. Be not afraid to meme out or experiment with your stratagems here and there. Constantly finding new iterations on your playstyle is critical to building game sense and actually having fun.
12. Annihilation and nemesis form are your “haha fuck you im staying alive” buttons on some occasions. Getting ran down by someone and your HP is low? Pop nemesis form. Nemesis form HP running low? Pop annihilation. As said in their respective sections, they can be used to turn the tide of fights, be it soaking damage and being defensive, or going on the offensive with them. So be sure to use them accordingly because I am not a quantum computer and thus cannot list every possible interaction in great detail. THINK.
13. If you cannot kill the enemy tank, look at their team. They don’t have nearly as much sustain and are more easily harmed. This will cripple the tank and make them an easy kill.
14. If you have a Kiriko, or are on Kiriko with a Ramattra on your team, abilities that fall under the “must cleanse” category would be anti nade and sleep dart within the first second and a half of their duration provided your ram is in the open with no shield, block, or cover, or is low health as wasting it towards the end of the anti effect or sleep dart usually opens up an opportunity for more damage to come in. Other abilities include Reinhardt’s earth shatter before it goes off, sigma’s rock, junker queen’s ult or bleeds to deny her health and ult charge, sombra’s EMP before it goes off, and discord orb is a massive must cleanse, especially if your ram is blocking massive damage and has no cover to get behind to break the discord LOS.
15. Do not hyper focus on massive improvement or ranking up all the time as it burns you out and ruins the enjoyment of the game. One sign you may need to take a step back is when you constantly have the scoreboard open, complain about the tiniest of numbers or unlucky interactions, blaming everyone but yourself, etc.
16. Against characters like Juno or Ana, you can use your hitbox to body block the healing that's directed at a target of yours. Particularly useful if they are frozen, slowed, or trapped by some means.
17. Armor is extremely powerful and you should always be playing around that portion of your HP as it helps you live much better.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tnjsp7s4CXfqRSRngtSozpY_CcvNdiFXQ_DSwiXl2MA/edit
Overwatch wiki
Cactuspuppy armor spreadsheet
Arciax
Oops
Mostly just me
Special thanks to my friends. All of you have either read the doc, gave me feedback, or have otherwise been cool enough people to keep my spirits high enough to make me wanna even write this thing. ALL of you rock :D
Date of doc creation: 4/9/24
Author: Nemesis
Co-editor: Norskasai