The stats don’t lie, Lucio is Overwatch’s most valuable hero

Overwatch keeps a detailed record of your in-game stats—sorting kills, damage, healing, and lots more by hero. But what’s the point of knowing your stats if you can’t rub your superior McCree winrate in the faces of your friends? Since face-rubbing functionality isn’t built into the game, stat-tracking website Master Overwatch has emerged to fill that role. And according to the site, everybody's favorite beat-dropping DJ, Lucio, is among the top three heroes in the game for popularity, winrate, and score-per-minute.

Master Overwatch gathers player statistics through their career profiles, putting it all into one searchable, sortable database. Players aren’t added to that database until their profile has been searched for, so it isn’t a complete representation of all 7+ million people playing the game. But even so, the Master Overwatch team told me they “currently have over 800,000 players in the database and the leaderboards are based on those players,” despite having no official API from Blizzard to help gather this information.

The data exposes some interesting things about the state of Overwatch’s meta shortly after launch, like how the different heroes stack up against one another. For example, Symmetra is currently sitting pretty with the highest overall winrate at 61.7%, but is also the least picked of any hero. Meanwhile Mercy is bringing up the rear with a 48% winrate, despite being the most-picked hero in the game—followed closely in popularity by Lucio who, as mentioned, is near or at the top of pretty much every column.  

Seriously, Lucio is statistically one of the best heroes in Overwatch. It isn't a secret that Lucio is a valuable pick on almost any team, but these stats clearly show just how influential he can be. He has the highest score per minute (probably because he’s able to heal multiple characters at once and contribute some damage), the third highest winrate, and is the second most popular character globally—which jumps to the most popular for PS4 players. 

Indeed, Master Overwatch highlights some other interesting discrepancies between PC and console players. Torbjorn boasts a strong 59.4% winrate among PC players, but that number jumps all the way up to 68% on consoles. Additionally, those joysticks seem to get in the way of good sniping, as Widowmaker has a 49.9% winrate with a mouse and keyboard, but only 46.4% and 47.7% on PS4 and Xbox One respectively. It seems an auto-aiming turret is a valuable asset when you’re using a gamepad, while a sniper rifle is generally more of a burden. 

I encourage you to mess with the filters and look through this data yourself, especially because there’s no guarantee what Blizzard’s reaction to the site will be. The Master Overwatch team told me that Blizzard hasn’t taken a position for or against this sort of thing yet, and that uncertainty has influenced the site’s development. “Of course we are nervous if Blizzard decides to remove access or prevent these sorts of things,” Master Overwatch told me, “but that is why we are very, very careful, despite the frequency that we have been releasing features, about the quality of those features that we introduce.” The team believes the tools they are providing are valuable to the game and the community, and I’m inclined to agree. 

Master Overwatch is also looking to provide tools for the game’s esports scene, with hand-curated player profile lists for some of the top teams in the game right now. Want to see the K/D of streamer and Luminosity player Seagull on his signature hero, Genji? Turns out it’s a whopping 4.29, though it’s important to note that figure currently only includes stats from Quick Play games. Tournaments and other custom matches aren’t included, but Master Overwatch is hoping to bring the numbers that are available into a tournament setting by partnering with One Nation of Gamers for a $15K tournament this weekend. “During the ONOG games, we will have a list of all the players' public profiles for viewers to quickly take a glance at,” Master Overwatch said, “that's what we're going for—this higher level of engagement.”

Master Overwatch is a pretty rich toolset considering it’s only been around for two weeks, and the more people that use it the more accurate those numbers will get. Hopefully Blizzard sees the value a site like this has for Overwatch’s rapidly growing community, and ideally provides an official API to make developing similar things even easier. The alternative, going all Nostalrius on it, would be disappointing for everyone involved.