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With the game being five vs five, every player has a role in the team when you're playing Overwatch 2. When you get into a game, you can get different objectives ranging from escorting or defending payloads to occupying a certain area for a limited amount of time.

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There are a ton of different maps that you can get randomly, allowing you to select a different hero who'll be good based on the layout of your map. Fortunately, Roadhog is one of the few characters who is good on almost all the maps in the game because of his flexible kit.

Roadhog's Role In Overwatch 2

Overwatch 2 Roadhog Closeup From Trailer

Whenever you get into a Role or Open Queue in Overwatch 2, you can select a hero from three different roles: Tank, Support, and Damage. The only difference is that you're restricted to your selected role in Role Queue, while you can choose any hero across the board in Open Queue.

Roadhog belongs to the Tank role in the game. As the name suggests, your job is to take a ton of damage for your team and protect the squishy characters using the different skills you have. This is the reason why every tank has some sort of crowd-controlling abilities.

Roadhog also shares a passive with the rest of the Tank heroes that reduce the knockback he receives from enemy abilities. Furthermore, he can generate Ultimate points by taking damage and healing as well.

The main difference between the first and the second Overwatch game is the reduction of Tanks in a particular team. In the previous game, you'd have two Tanks in a team making it six vs six. This reduction also caused an increase in the time you'd have to wait in queue for the role.

Roadhog's Abilities

Overwatch 2 Roadhog In Game Closeup

Another unique part about Overwatch is that the number of abilities every hero has isn't the same. Every character's abilities consist of their weapons, active abilities, passive abilities, and ultimate. Except for the ultimate, the number of other abilities varies from hero to hero.

Roadhog has a total of five abilities and here's what they all do for him:

Ability Name

Ability Type

Description

Scrap Gun

Primary Weapon

Roadhog is inherently meant to be a close-range character, and the primary function of the Scrap Gun supports it. It's a shotgun with a bunch of spread.

Scrap Gun

Secondary Weapon

With its secondary use, the Scrap Gun throws a boulder bullet that goes a longer distance but deals very less damage on a body shot.


Both the primary and the secondary shots consume one bullet of the Scrap Gun, and you can only hold five of them before you have to reload. Roadhog's reloading time is also quite high.

Chain Hook

Active Ability

Upon activating this ability, Roadhog throws a hook in the direction of your crosshair. If the hook hits an enemy, he drags them to himself, allowing you to get an easy kill.

Take A Breather

Active Ability

Activating this ability allows Roadhog to take a breather, as he puts something in his mouth that heals him for a significant amount of health. It can help you survive some dire situations because the HP gain is almost instant.

Whole Hog

Ultimate

Once you have all the points required to activate the ultimate, Roadhog puts some upgrades on his weapon that make it a machine gun with a ton of recoil. This gun knocks the enemies back heavily and deals a lot of damage to them as well.

Some characters in the game are lucky enough to get their own unique passive like wall climbing or gliding, but unfortunately, Roadhog isn't one of them. The only passive he has is the one shared by all the Tanks in the game.

Tips To Play As Roadhog

Overwatch 2 Roadhog Looking At Camera In Cinematic

Tank is possibly the hardest role to play in Overwatch 2 because of the impact your gameplay can have on the victory or defeat of your team. You need to make sure that none of the enemy Damage heroes get to your back line, while also tanking the damage dealt to your team from the front.

Since you're the only tank on the team, it's easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you're not getting the required healing from your Support while you do your job. Here are a few tips that can make playing Roadhog a lot easier for you:

Edges Are Your Best Friend

Overwatch 2 Training Bot On Edge With Roadhog's Hook

Roadhog is one of the most fun Tanks to play in the game specifically because of his Chain Hook. It's already a great ability because you can pull an enemy's squishy character toward your team, which almost guarantees their demise. There are also a few other tricks with this ability that'll help you a lot.

During the entire animation of you hitting the character with the hook and pulling them, your movement will decide where the hooked enemy ends up. Here's how this can affect you and your team:

  • If you successfully hit a character, but they're able to put a wall in between before you hook them back, the hook will only drag them until they reach that wall. This allows for a little counterplay against Roadhog.
  • Furthermore, you can also change the direction you're looking at, and the enemy will be dragged where you're looking instead of where you started the hooking animation.

The second pointer is what makes edges your best friend. If you hook an enemy while you're standing near an edge, you can look in the direction of the fall, and it'll force the enemy to fall almost every time unless they have a flight or wall-climbing ability.

Moreover, some maps contain deathly holes in the middle of the area you have to capture. In these games, you can simply stand on one edge of the hole and hook enemies from any direction to make them fall inside.

Melee Is Important With Roadhog

Overwatch 2 Roadhog Melee Tracer In Training Grounds

When you do the Tutorial for Overwatch 2, it tells you that you can melee an enemy when they're super close to you to deal a little damage to them. For most of the heroes in the game, you will never be using this mechanic because it's quite hard to remember it's there at the right time.

While melee can make a difference for every hero in a lot of fights, it is especially important for Roadhog because of his combination. Whenever you successfully hook any squishy character, and they don't fall down an edge, you can hit them with your primary weapon instantly followed by a melee hit to kill them right there.

You'll be surprised by the number of times an enemy will be able to escape with one health because of their dash ability even after you hook them. Once you get used to performing a melee attack afterward, you'll see that happening a lot less.

Don't Forget To Keep A Check On Your Health

Overwatch 2 Roadhog Healing Himself With Take A Breather

Usually, it'd be easy to keep a check on your health because you can see it clearly at the bottom-left of your HUD. Unfortunately, you have a lot more things to pay attention to when you're playing Roadhog. This includes tracing enemies to be ready to hook them whenever your ability is available.

In these scenarios, it's important to keep a check on how low your health is, especially because you can heal yourself. Even if you're at 70 percent HP with no enemies around, it's recommended to use Take A Breather because the cooldown on it is relatively short.

He's Not An Aggressive Tank

Overwatch 2 Roadhog With Shark Face In Cinematic

This might be the only problem while you're using Roadhog. The special part about most of the Tanks in the game is their ability to mitigate damage using a barrier or some damage-reduction ability. This hero has no such abilities, and he can't mitigate a lot of damage.

He has high HP and the ability to heal himself, but without good Support heroes, he won't be able to tank the damage well in a battle. If you want to use this character in a game against good enemies, you might have to rely on certain tanky Support and Damage characters to help you.

On the other hand, the damage output from Roadhog will surprise you considering he's a Tank. You can two-shot almost every squishy character in the game even with the medium-range secondary shot of your weapon, given that you can be extremely precise with it.

NEXT: Overwatch 2: Winston Hero Guide