Overwatch Overwatch Doctrine Guide and Overview

We had the chance to play Doctrine at BlizzCon on the upcoming patch, as well as a ton of hours during the Quickplay weekend! If there are any changes on his official release, we'll get those updated ASAP!

After a quick reveal and surprise shadow drop timed with Blizzcon, Doctrine will be unlocked for Competitive modes in Season 5!

As a Support, Doctrine requires solid mechanical skill and the ability to maintain high APM. His kit rewards players who can seamlessly weave between damage and healing, while also tracking team resources. Don't fall into the trap of healbotting because Doctrine enables hyper aggressive playstyles for himself and his allies.

What makes Doctrine unique is how much of his value comes from resource management rather than raw healing output. Smart Infuse usage lets him amplify his abilities, improve his own survivability, and empower teammates at vital fight determining moments; giving him a flexible mix of offensive and defensive utility. Everything about his kit revolves around Infuse uptime and Invigorating Drones timing. Play Doctrine if you enjoy mechanically demanding Supports that behave like a DPS with the added bonus of having team utility.

Official Hero Reveal Trailer

TLDR Doctrine Guide

Play As

• Always save an Infuse charge to enhance your Invigorating Drones. The increased attack speed and self-healing are crucial to successful Doctrine play.
• Stay active by constantly firing Eternal Scepter. Focus primarily on healing but any time your allies have close to full HP, you should be intentionally attacking the enemy heroes.
• Deliverance is a good defensive tool to counter enemy offensive ultimate. You can also use it aggressively by shooting it at your frontline during their push.

Play Against

• After you've seen Doctrine use Shrouded Momentum, that is your best opportunity to pressure and eliminate him because he will be unable to maneuver or escape.
• Be extra cautious fighting enemy dive heroes. Expect Doctrine to empower his dive and flank allies with Invigorating Drones. Try to avoid, then counter attack instead of immediately fighting the enemy with drones attached.
• His ultimate is a large and slow moving AoE. Respect it, and stay out of the AoE. Heroes with strong mobility tools can use them to escape vertically or horizontally.

Strengths

High Offensive Impact

Thanks to the ability to give passive healing with his Invigorating Drones, Doctrine can contribute to damage output and eliminations without giving up his responsibilities as a Support. His gameplay loop encourages him to constantly output poke pressure against enemies and finish off kills with enhanced Scepter shots. Drones and his ultimate can be paired with an allies ultimate for deadly combos.

Flexible Utility Through Infuse

Infuse gives Doctrine a lot of freedom in how he responds to the different phases of a team fight. He can consistently grant himself and another ally increased attack speed and passive-healing. When needed he can use an infuse charge to fly, or for burst healing/damage.

Strong Mobility and Repositioning

Although it is on a longer cooldown, Shrouded Momentum is a great mobility tool with the option to Infuse and fly. The ability to quickly repositions enables Doctrine to follow up with team aggression and pushes, or to escape from the enemies dive attempts. He can also take a strong high ground position before a fight breaks out. An ability many other Supports lack.

Weaknesses

Resource Management Is Punishing

Doctrine loses a significant amount of value when Infuse charges are spent carelessly. Burning charges too aggressively can leave him without the empowered ability or self-sustain he needs when the enemy team commits onto him.

Mechanically Demanding

Doctrine relies heavily on consistently landing both damage and healing shots, making him more aim-intensive than many other Supports. Missing frequently not only lowers his immediate output, but can also slow down his ability to cycle Infuse and access more of his kit.

Cannot fire during rush or flight

Doctrine cannot use activate any other abilities or attack during Shrouded Momentum. Although the ability to fly is a good repositioning and escape tool, he can't fight back or pressure attackers during his movement. This makes him a non-threatening dive target for enemy heroes with the mobility to chase him. The same hindrance is noticeable when rushing to an ally or trying to chase down an enemy target. Doctrine has to stop his momentum before he is able to heal or attack.

Video demonstrations of every ability coming soon!

Primary Fire: Eternal Scepter

Tips for Eternal Scepter

The range of Eternal Scepter and Invigorating Drones makes the mid-range Doctrine's optimal spacing and positioning. Playing behind, but not too far away from your frontline will allow you to stay in range of assisting your allies but also apply offensive pressure with your primary fire. At long range his healing and damage suffer from severe falloff damage. But if you are too close, Shrouded Momentum is generally not evasive enough to get out alive.

The main objective is to balance offensive and defensive use of Eternal Scepter. Do not only heal, as Doctrine has high damage and pick potential. However, equally important is to not tunnel on attacking because that will force the rest of your team to play more passively while they wait for sustain.

Secondary Fire: Infuse

Tips for Infuse

Infuse is by far Doctrine most important ability. Empowering the right ability at the right time separates the great Doctrine players from the bad ones. Always save one charge to align with Invigorating Drones' cooldown because ideally every use will be empowered. Because Drone's cooldown is almost twice as long as Infuse's, you can use one-to-two charges on your primary fire or rush between each drone.

Empowering your rush before fights allows Doctrine to set up on an advantageous high ground position before the fight breakout. Flight is also good for escaping to high ground or going over walls when being attacked.

The burst of Infuse Scepter damage enables Doctrine to a great final blow hero for his team. When you see an enemy at low HP, you have the capability to finish them off yourself. When your allies, especially squishies, are being pressured, keep them sustained with an empowered heal shot.

• By default, Infuse is set where you must HOLD Right-Click + press the ability you want to enhance.

[SHIFT]: Shrouded Momentum

Tips for Shrouded Momentum

Shrouded Momentum should be used cautiously. Doctrine doesn't have CC or any other survival tools besides the rush, and the healing + attack speed buff from Infused drones. Any enemy hero looking to eliminate a Doctrine player simply waits for rush to be used, then exploits the window where Doctrine has no mobility. Try to avoid the common mistake of rushing up a team fight, or being too aggressive with the rush, because you'll be positioned so far forward that you'll be an easy target and you'll be stuck waiting for the cooldown to refresh.

Only empower Shrouded Momentum when you need the flight to reach high ground, or escape from a grounded enemy. Otherwise, it is more valuable to use the standard rush and save Infuse charges for a burst of damage/healing on primary fire.

• Cannot use any other abilities during the Rush.

[E]: Invigorating Drones

Tips for Invigorating Drones

Although the healing of the drones is very important, focus on the attack speed buff as a core purpose of the drones. Every other Support can provide healing, but Doctrine's drones are unique in providing an attack speed bonus.

Look for allies who are committed to attacking aggressively such as a Tank pushing into the enemy team, or a DPS attacking from the flank or diving. Invigorating Drones greatly raises the effectiveness of their attack through both sustain and lethality. Since your Drone should always be Infused, you'll also have increased heal shot speed to provide even more sustain if that same ally remains in you LoS.

Also, anytime you are being pressured, that is a great time to use an Infuse Drone to grant yourself healing + attack speed to enable you to deal with flankers yourself.

Ultimate: Deliverance

Tips for Deliverance

Deliverance can be used as a initiating Ultimate to give your team the "go signal" early in a fight, or as a defensive ult to shutdown the enemies attacks. Before using it offensively, think about where the enemy team will want to move after you launch Deliverance, and use knowledge to inform your placement. Don't shoot it somewhere that the enemy team can easily avoid it's AoE or play away from. Objective areas and choke points are typically good choices.

Granting your team overhealth and reducing the enemy max health makes Deliverance one of the best counter-Ultimates in Overwatch. For example, if the enemy Ana uses Nano Boost and the empowered enemy comes charging looking to eliminate you or your allies, deploy Deliverance right on top of yourself/team to pressure the attacker to retreat, or full commit while your team has the advantage.

Minor

• Saving Grace
• • Good extra burst healing option, and self-drones also gain the perk. This is the more team-oriented option, but the downside is the infrequent benefit as drones have a long cooldown. However the instant health can make the difference between quickly saving an ally before the healing over time kicks in.
• Sanguine Siphon
• • Very good survival tool considering Doctrine's base kit is lacking in self-sustain. Healing yourself helps to alleviate the burden placed on your 2nd Support to keep you up, and is especially strong when you end up having to duel enemy divers.

Major

• Transfusion
• • Highly Recommended Major Perk
  • Once you are able to select Transfusion, Doctrine gains the ability to play more active, aggressive and with higher APM. All healing and damage dealt decreases the cooldown for Infuse, which translates into more consistent self-Drones (+self-heal +attack speed) without sacrificing the freedom empower other abilites.
• Cost of Life
• • Currently not ever worth taking over Transfusion. The extra healing can be strong if your other Support has low healing output, but the decreased life is punishing and you are sacrificing increased Infuse uptime.

General Team Strategy

Doctrine paris best with Brawl, Rush, and midrange Poke comps where his teammates remain within his LoS and play within the range of his drones to take full advantage of the high value attack speed buffs. He can still support more mobile heroes from range, but falloff damage because a weaknesses, and spread-out Dive comps make it harder for him to maintain consistent healing, manage his Drone targets, and survive himself.

Tanks

Doctrine fits especially well with frontline Tanks who who are easy targets to pump healing into and farm Deliverance. Giving his frontline an attack speed buff with Invigorating Drones can turn the momentum in your teams favor as it gives your Tank a momentary advantage in the Tank fight.

Reinhardt, for example, can literally run over the enemy front line or get a quick elim on the mid-line as he swings his Rocket Hammer faster, plus has the extra sustain to enable more swing uptime. Other frontline Tanks such as Ramattra Mauga, , and Junker Queen similarily benefit from having additional healing and increased attack speed while they are actively brawling.

Playing with Tanks like these is mutually beneficial as it also gives Doctrine a stable frontline to position safely behind. When the Tank is occupying enemy attention in front of him, Doctrine has more freedom to sit at his optimal midrange spacing and land attacking shots without constantly being forced to retreat or hide.

DPS

For DPS, look for heroes with kits built around bursts of value because they bring the most value to each Invigorating Drones use. Dive and flanking DPS such as Genji, Tracer, and Vendetta can have a drone attached just before they fully dive so that they take the passive healing and attack speed buff with them as they initiate their attack.

Heroes' like Bastion and Reaper are also great drone targets because they attack suddenly and aggressively, but only have a short window to do so. Moreover, most of their damage comes from their primary fire which is exactly what Invigorating Drones buff. Having increased attack speed plus extra sustain allows them to stay committed longer, or get the elimination more quickly.

Doctrine doesn't need to permanently pocket one DPS, either. Invigorating Drone is best treated as a flexible offensive resource—identify which teammate is currently in position to deal damage and move the buff accordingly. A Bastion entering Assault mode, a Reaper fighting at close range, or a Soldier holding a strong firing angle can all become priority targets depending on the fight.

Supports

Doctrine benefits from having another Support who can provide enough team or AoE sustain to free him up to play more offensively. Kiriko and Mizuki are notably flexible pairings because they can offer burst healing and defensive utility (e.g. Protection Suzu or Binding Chain) while Doctrine spends more time dealing damage and enabling aggressive teammates.

Against heavy Dive, Doctrine can be vulnerable when enemies force him to spend his mobility and Infuse defensively, so having a backline capable of protecting themselves as they play together gives him considerably more freedom to position more forward and focus on his offensive presence.

General Mindset Playing Against Doctrine

Doctrine is most vulnerable when Shrouded Momentum has already been committed, and when he's not able to use an Infuse Invigorating Drones.

His effectiveness also depends heavily on maintaining clear LoS to both allies and enemies, and staying within the range of drone deployment and within Eternal Scepter's falloff range. Playing from longer range, around natural cover, breaking LoS, and attacking from multiple angles all make it difficult for him to consistently heal teammates, deal damage, and find high value opportunities for his drones.

Shrouded Momentum is one of Doctrine's most important survival tools, so forcing it out before fully committing makes him significantly easier to eliminate. Once you've seen Doctrine use it, look for an opportunity to close the distance and continue your attack before the rush ability becomes available again.

Also, avoid wasting your major mobility cooldowns trying to dive Doctrine when you haven't confirmed that either or both of his rush and his drone cooldowns are offline. He can easily fly away and make you waste your cooldown, or his counter attack with drones make him a scary target.