Is there ever a time where I should just suicide

overwatch

Overwatch is a 100% teamplay game where the combination of heroes is very important.
When you play casual/unranked you will see following situation quite often:

Situation:
First one player on your team dies, then two others and soon after you are the only one left. In most cases being the last alive means you will be dead sooner than later.
After a few seconds the play who died first respawns, and starts running to the fight – just to die after a few seconds of action due to the difference of team strength.

It is usually rare that team members wait for a full team respawn to engage at full team strength.

Question:
I am the last player of my team and the opposing team has 2-3 players alive. I can see two choices:

  1. Try to survive until my team arrives, but with the risk of dying and causing my team to wait for me
  2. I suicide on purpose to join my team in a few seconds with full health.

Is it ever a valid strategy to take the free death?

Best Answer

As a rule of thumb, no.

The situation may differ depending on whether you're attacking or defending, but the time it takes to die, respawn and run back is time you could be spending diverting enemy attention, rounding up health packs (to zone/deny your enemy getting them when the next team fight starts), or scouting for teleporters/turrets/flankers.

One thing I will mention though, is that in a situation where it's suicide or die to the enemy without the option of retreating/regrouping (let's say you overextended and can't backtrack without getting pipped by a turret or sniper, and you're watching a Reinhardt trudging towards you); suiciding is the better of the two options.

This is because if you let that Reinhardt hammer your face in, he gets ultimate charge, which stacks the odds against your next engagement. If you suicide, the respawn timer is the same, and he is ~10% further from his ultimate because you decided the cliff would treat you better than his beatstick.