OverwatchOverwatch Freja Guide and Overview

Freja is a hybrid sniper hero who excels in poke battles and quick bursts of aggression. She likes to position either behind her frontline Tank or take a soft flank angle. Especially when there is high ground nearby the objective area, Freja looks to use Updraft to take the superior position on the enemy team.

She can hold her own in close-range battles as well, thanks to the short cooldown on her Quick Dash. When your team needs a combination of poke pressure and burst damage, Freja is one of the best DPS choices for the job.

TLDR Freja Guide

Play As

• Use Updraft to leap over walls and barriers, allowing you to attack enemies the rest of your team can't reach.
• Save at least one Quick Dash charge to dodge enemy flanks and dives.
• Focus on landing direct hits with Bola Shot to gain the Hindered and pull-in effects.

Play Against

• Freja excels at focusing down one target, but is weak when there are multiple enemies. Position near your allies so you don’t end up in a 1v1 situation.
• If you see her use Updraft, know you have a 10-second window where she can’t target you behind cover or run away to high ground.
• Counter Freja by outranging her with a hitscan sniper, or overwhelming her with a close-range, high mobility hero.

Strengths

High Mobility

Up to three charges of Quick Dash, vertical leap, and the float effect from Take Aim give Freja some of the best in-class mobility. The ability to dash, float, and leap synergizes well with her crossbow kit and allows her to take side angles, shoot over barriers, and disengage quickly.

Burst Damage

The explosive bolt from Take Aim deals 130 damage on a direct hit, and even without perks, Freja can fire three in a row with Dash refreshes. While she won’t always have the most consistent damage, when it matters most, she can burst down a single enemy very quickly.

Debuff Abilities

Her Minor Perk, Frost Bolts, applies a 20% slow debuff on targets and greatly helps to even the odds against high mobility enemies. Moreover, while it's not explicitly stated in the ability description, Bola Shot direct hits apply Hindered debuff to the enemy. Freja can use her ult to movement lock or cancel channeled abilities of an enemy and turn the tide of a fight in her team's favor.

Weaknesses

Travel Projectile Sniper

Freja’s kit is best suited for medium to long-range combat. Landing shots with her primary and secondary fire at these longer ranges becomes more difficult because of the travel speed. She shares similar weaknesses to Hanzo, but trades the ability to one-shot for more consistent damage.

Situational Ultimate

Unlike many of the other DPS heroes, Freja’s ultimate isn’t typically going to win fights on its own. Bola Shot has good situational power and sets up her teammates for follow-up on the CC, but most often, she’s just hoping to get a single pick with each use.

Multiple ways to counter

Freja has weaknesses on both ends of the ranged spectrum. Close-range mobility heroes and long-range hitscans have favorable matchups against her. Whereas most heroes only have one easily exploitable range weakness, Freja gets countered by both types of heroes, so expect to always be playing into multiple counters.

Primary Fire: Revdraw Crossbow

Tips for Revdraw Crossbow

• Max spread doesn’t kick in until the 12th shot in a row.
• • Even when using Relentless Barrage, you can hold down primary fire until after the 3rd Take Aim bolt before you need to pause and reset her bullet spread.
• Leading shots
• • Use Revdraw bolts to lead shots and measure how much you need to lead the explosive bolts.

Secondary Fire: Take Aim

Tips for Take Aim (Freja)

• 1 Explosive, 4 standard bolts
• • Fire Take Aim explosive bolt, then spam 4 primary fires, 1 explosive bolt, then repeat.
• Float Effect
• • Pausing in the air can be great for firing over walls and barriers, while also giving you time to line up your shot. Just be careful not to overuse the float and become predictable, because Freja is very easy to kill while floating. 

Quick Dash

Tips for Quick Dash

• Spam explosive bolts
• • The best way for Freja to confirm single target elims is by using Quick Dash to chase down an enemy and fire multiple explosive bolts at them.
  • If your target is not receiving any healing, two direct hits will eliminate a standard 250HP hero.
• Dodging
• • When facing any dive enemies targeting you, be sure to save at least one Quick Dash to dodge their attack and get in an extra explosive bolt.
  • If Freja gets caught with no Dashes, she’s as good as dead.

Updraft

Tips for Updraft

• Take high ground
• • Before fights or at the beginning of fights, look to use Updraft to set up on high ground. Freja’s range becomes even stronger when she can control overlooking positions.
• Jump to shoot over barriers
• • Whether it's a Tank deployable barrier or a wall, the best use of Updraft is to leap above cover and target enemies who think they are positioned outside of danger. 
  • Pressuring the backline with a couple of quick explosive bolts can force them to retreat and give up supporting their team.

Ultimate: Bola Shot

Tips for Bola Shot

Always go for direct hits

• Even though the AoE damage can be useful on a group of enemies, you should always focus on landing the direct hit. Both the Hindered and pull effect only activate on direct hits.

Prevent the enemy from disengaging

• Dive heroes who rely on mobility tools to get in and get out, and are perfect targets for Bola Shot. Tanks like Winston, Doomfist, and Wrecking Ball can easily be eliminated if you save Bola Shot for just before they try to jump away from your team.

Set up combos

• The grav-like pull effect of a direct impact can be a powerful combo setup. Whether the follow-up is an ally's ultimate or standard ability, it makes for easy wins. Unlike Graviton Surge, the pull effect is too short to wait and react to, so you’ll have to call it out and go on the assumption that your shot will land.

Passive: Bounty Hunting

Tips for Bounty Hunting

• Final Blow stocks carry over through death
• • You don’t need to panic and try to get the 3rd final blow before dying. Take your time, and don’t unnecessarily risk your life attempting to get the final blow.
• Ult charge bonus stores
• • The bonus charge will be stored if Freja already has ult. If you are at 3/3 as indicated to the right of your ultimate charge, Freja will immediately gain 25% upon using her ult.
  • Moreover, if she lands a final blow with her ult, those will count towards the next bonus, so it’s possible to immediately be at 50% ult charge if you get a triple kill.

Minor Perks

Frost Bolts

• Inflicting slow makes explosive bolt follow-up shots considerably easier to direct hit. Look for the slow debuff animation (cloud effect), then use Quick Dash to fire two explosive bolts.
• While holding down primary fire, landing ⅗ shots will still inflict the slow debuff

Tracking Instinct

• Chase them down
• • Knowing their exact position behind cover and knowing they are still at critical health means you should aggressively chase down the enemy to finish them off.
• Reveal
• • As long as the enemy remains at critical health, they are revealed to you for an infinite duration.
  • Revealed enemies can be pinged to your team through walls

Major Perks

Ready to Hunt

• Good against shield Tanks like Rein, Sigma, or Orisa with barrier perk. The extra dash allows Freja to maximize Updraft and bypass the shields.
• Infinite flight
• • While very niche, Freja can technically float forever when using Ready to Hunt. Updraft, (Take Aim, float, fire, Dash…repeat until Updraft refreshes).

Relentless Barrage

• When you want to focus on spam and poke damage, Relentless Barrage is the better Major Perk to take. Her standard combo listed under Take Aim tips — 4 primary fire → Take Aim, 4 primary fire → Take Aim — enables theoretical infinite ammo if Freja never misses a shot.
• Significantly increases poke damage uptime.

The best maps for Freja complement her medium-long range positioning. She struggles on map areas with tight spaces, and a lot of flat ground. Finding longer sight lines and high ground to set up on is the way Freja primarily wants to position on any map.

Best Maps

• Dorado
• Blizzard World
• Colosseo

Worst Maps

• New Junk City
• Nepal
• Oasis

Coming Soon!

Coming Soon!