In the patch notes revealed by Blizzard for Overwatch 2 Season 4, you may have come across the term ‘stranded spawns,’ which is a newly-added system meant to help you regroup with your team. If the description was slightly confusing, we further break it down in this guide. Before going into detail, I just want to add that “stranded spawns” are one of the fundamental changes (apart from the 6v6 to 5v5 change) devs added since the first release of OW 1. So let’s look into this in a bit more detail.
Overwatch 2 Stranded Spawn System Explained
The original spawn room (before losing a checkpoint) will remain partially active for 7 seconds in the new Overwatch 2 Stranded Spawn System. You still can’t change the hero, but you can get healed, enemies can’t enter the room, and there will be an “interact” key that will immediately take you to the new spawn room that’s active.
As you know, when you capture or lose an objective, your spawn room changes. This makes the journey from your spawn room to the team longer, especially if you are playing as a slow hero on a big open map. This provides an advantage to defenders and will undoubtedly help the low ELO players, especially new players. Let’s also see how it impacts higher ELO players and how it changes the fundamental way we play the game. But first, here’s how Reddit users reacted to this new change:
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by u/Daunt_M4 from discussion New "Stranded Spawn System" potentially impacting respawn stagger kills
in Competitiveoverwatch
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by u/kaleebisnthere from discussion New "Stranded Spawn System" potentially impacting respawn stagger kills
in Competitiveoverwatch
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by u/oizen from discussion New "Stranded Spawn System" potentially impacting respawn stagger kills
in Competitiveoverwatch
Stranded Spawns Could Reduce Team Staggering
For new players or anyone unfamiliar with the term (different from ‘Stagger’ in other games like Elden Ring), staggering is when a team, instead of killing all members of the opponent team at once, will kill them one by one. This will force the other team to spawn one by one, and take a bit more time to regroup as a team. This will give the aforementioned team more time to complete their objectives easily.
That’s all about stranded spawns in OW2. Rest assured, we will be covering all about the new season of Overwatch 2 on Gamer Tweak, including new maps, heroes and more changes.