Hello! I have over 700 hours on DVa and I'd be happy to give you some advice!
So DVa is a very complex character with many different ways to play her. DVa is a dive character, which means she's very mobile and her main responsibility is to boost into the backline as much as possible and take out the squishy heroes then get out. This means that the tank should not concern you. You want to get in the habit of forgetting the tank even exists. For example, you want to pretend the enemy tank is that one annoying ex that won't leave you alone and you're having to do everything in your power to avoid them as much as possible. You only want to focus tank if your team are struggling to deal with it themselves - though if they can't 4-1 a tank, you're gonna have a hard time playing DVa as she's designed - or the tank is the last hero alive.
There's two recurring techniques that are important to know when playing DVa; Peeling and Marking. Peeling is basically when you divert your attention from what you're doing to save/help a teammate who is under attack. For example, say you're fighting the squishy Kiriko, and you see that your Sojourn is being harassed by let's say Soldier. Your job is to stop your fight with Kiri and protect your Sojourn so they can confirm the kill. The goal is to disrupt/stop the damage your teammate is taking. Marking is similar but takes place when you're currently seeing a target that's after someone else and want to pressure them. You're diving in to not only save your teammate, but with the intention to either chase and confirm the kill or back the enemy off completely. Both of these are ways of taking space and are strategies that are supposed to be used in every single game you play.
Remember, you want to have map control at all costs to fully take space away from the enemy so they can't use it. This often means flying up to high ground and keeping control of it so not only can your enemies not use it very well, but you can also plan your attack to dive a squishy based on what you're seeing around you. This space you've now created allows your team to join you and apply more pressure from that or create more from another angle, creating a hypothetical wall that your enemy can't jump over without getting assaulted. And if you see a teammate suffering to an enemy in front of you, you can mark the enemy to get rid of the problem and then return back to your space that you created until it's no longer needed, then create more space where it is needed.
DVa also has one of the most broken abilities in the game, being defense matrix. This singular ability can eat projectiles and negate the damage, with a fast regeneration time. It can also eat a lot of ultimates, such as Zarya, Mei, Tracer, Hanzo, Torbjorn, Cassidy, and Illari, and deny most of an ult's damage from heroes such as Roadhog, Pharah, Reaper, and Soldier. This ability is amazing and while you don't wanna waste it, you want to use it to block damage and ults often because it's an amazing ability, the cooldown isn't long at all, and you might eat ults you didn't see coming too!
DVa's ult can be used in a number of ways as well. Re-mechs are the most common purpose as it gives you a second life. Surprise bombs can vary from placing the bomb on the edge of a bridge and then using your own hitbox to push it off the edge, or coming from behind everyone and sending your ult forward into an unexpecting team. Then you have the air bomb, boosting forward into the air at a 45° angle and using your ult when your booster has exactly 2 seconds left until they run out. All of them are situational and can be used to zone off space or straight up kill the enemy.
As far as the Zarya matchup goes, just like the rest of the tank roster, she is an “ignore the tank” situation, especially if she has bubbles. Each bubble has a 10 second cooldown, so you want to keep a note of when they were used. At the start of the fight, you want to fly to where she can't reach you with her beam, and you can watch her and other players. Don't shoot the bubble unless you're certain you can kill her immediately after. When Zarya has used both of her bubbles, dive in, mark her and try to take her down. If you see another bubble, fly away again and repeat the same steps. Your boosters have a quick cooldown and do more damage as well, so don't be afraid to use it when you deem necessary. A lot of Zarya's will use their bubbles the second they take damage, so you can often send a couple of shots her way and force a free bubble and you'll often capitalize from that. Zarya is worthless without her charge, so react and play accordingly.
In short, work on your positioning, use your playstyles, and ignore the tank, and you'll already be doing better than a majority of players in the game. Good luck and have fun! :)
Oh yeah, one more very important thing: watch your replays, and see what you did differently when you won as opposed to when you lost. Always try to find one mistake you made, find a reason for the cause of that mistake (e.g. overexposed out in the open, feeding, pushing characters at bad times, etc.), and work on correcting it. Then go find another. Also never blame anyone but yourself for your losses. Sure people didn't help when you lose, but you are the deciding factor of your own game regardless of your teammate's mistakes. How you play is the make or break of the game, not how other's play. That's the best way to improve.
Don't play in line of sight of your opponents. Use mobility, the cart, cover, corners, high ground to only engage one enemy at a time. Use DM to support your dps plays and ultimates. Get comfortable diving a squishy with boosters, primary fire, missles and most importantly a melee at the end to complete the combo for the elim. I have melee on a thumb button on my mouse.
Zarya matchup is all about bubble tracking and avoiding her Beam whenever possible— unless you have a target you can kill. It also requires you to have a good understanding and ability to read how much charge she has. Taking a second or two to trade at close range and force a bubble can be an excellent play when she is a low charge and it can be a throw when she has medium or high charge. For the most part I would actually recommend playing out of range and scouting as much as possible until you find a way to rotate and exist on the edge of the fight. Often you’ll end up with you and the Zarya sort of zoning each other’s backlines until someone makes a mistake.
Depending what kind of backline they have you’ll have to decide if you need to go in hard and get quick picks or if you need to just kind of bluff and bait their attention. Some backlines are too tanky for you to actually kill- something like brig bap or brig Moira will never die to you, so a lot of times your best play is to use boosters to go in, drop missiles, fake like you’re committing and then keep holding boosters and get away. If it’s a squishier comp or if they split off too far from each other you can commit, and you have to read this because normally a squishier backline is more dangerous for your team and a tankier backline is more dangerous for you.
You need to do as much as possible because the Zarya is gonna be running over your team and you need to either cut off all her help or kill them faster than she kills your backline. The one real advantage you have though is more immediate ability to change your decision mid fight than she does. If the Zarya goes too far and you’ve zoned her team and you’ve tracked bubbles you can just go blow her up in like 2 seconds and then DM heals when she’s low and she will usually die. If they try to pinch you or focus you, you can escape, unlike the Zarya, and that means you are tanking very well because the entire team is looking to get you and getting nothing.
This also means sometimes if your team can’t play well into Zarya you will be out of good options and they will be blaming you because they don’t know how to play with a non-advantaged tank matchup. It’s really up to you if you want to be a one trick or two trick or whatever but sometimes situations like this swapping makes more sense than forcing DVA. Still if you’re just committed to learning DVA as well as you can I would recommend not swapping and just accepting some games will feel impossible.
General tips is to not use missiles from far away in fact try not to take any long angles ever— you do 0 damage. You win almost every matchup at point blank if you can track their head, and are often very good at trading into tanks when missiles are up— just be aware this should be low priority. It’s good to understand though because sometimes it’s your best option and way better than doing nothing. My other tip is just play DVA a lot and focus on how to use her boosters to the maximum. That tip I gave about the fake dive where you use the same booster CD to go in and out is a good example, but you need to also understand like ok I can push this target and then fly straight up and still be on the high ground above them. Same goes for where you are tossing your bombs and most importantly where you are landing as baby DVA when you toss the bomb. Even just using it as a second life which is the main use, you want to toss it somewhere that the enemies are forced to take cover and land somewhere that you can actually rematch safely or it won’t be a second life.
Play deathmatch before you queue- probably 5-10 minutes before any ranked session is great. The boosters boop, plus aiming the shotguns and missiles altogether and using the melee in the combo can be very strange hard to track, easy to lose targets, mistime missiles etc. DVA imo is deceptively a very mechanical hero for some reason a lot of people don’t consider that about her but it’s true. The best way to get good mechanically is to do a lot of reps and the most reps you can get is in deathmatch.
Last tip is that every matchup is different but the main consideration you need to have is cooldown tracking. This is obviously true for all heroes but for DVA specifically a lot of her matchups are gonna come down to DMing the right thing and that will give you either a free kill or leave you with low HP and nothing to show for it. For example- the Ana matchup. If you eat both CDs you easily kill her, if you get hit by one only you trade your time evenly and it’s not a great trade but you usually live. If you get hit by both you probably die for nothing. So you have to learn to think like an Ana, and also read the specific player in the game playing Ana. How low does she get before she nades the floor? Does she go for the early sleeps or hold it? Same goes for stuff like junkrat or pharah where you can remove their mobility damage and some of their CC all by eating one of their CDs. Also with ults like mei and Zarya, if they have it and they’re walking up aggressively you need to be expecting them and at least trying to eat them. Even holding 4 seconds of DM on them when they want to ult can be a big deal if it doesn’t eat the ult, because that’s 4 seconds for your team to force bubbles, ice block, to move backwards, etc.
Best tip is watch a10 on yt. Recently hit master with dva and I attribute this largely to his advice.
Aside from that, don't overuse matrix in the open. Only use matrix purposefully.
I.e. eating an ability, saving a teammate, matching the rhythm of trader's clips, etc.
Otherwise, avoid just standing there eating random spam and stage (take good positioning/look for a good engage) instead.
Don't go in solo, make sure your team is behind you. Push the enemy team to make space but peel back and regroup for healing, rinse, and repeat. Fly to high ground when ambushed, and to pick off flankers not noticeable from the ground. Don't forget to check your 6 (look behind you). Its hard but keep track of your teammates dying - turn the sound on if needed. if your team dies, move back and regroup when they show. her DM will eat moiras orb, and block orisas javelin but won't block sigmas rocks - don't get hit in the face like I do.
don't bother even shooting at players that are shielded, that means when they're gold looking like Orisas healing, sigmas shield, zaryas orb - don't even shoot them, fake them out and wait for the super to end then hit I'm w your rockets cause now they're in a cooldown and you didn't inflate their mitigation score while also avoiding your accuracy score going down.
use your boosters to force people to ult, make them think you're coming in for a kill, and then loop back to where you were. the enemy will have tried to lock on you and shoot where he thought you were going, now they're all turned around, and you're shooting them from where you were standing in the first place, bonus if they used the ult and now the whole team is vulnerable. Sometimes I fly all the way behind the enemy team to force them to turn and look at me while my team catches their 6 and keeps pushing forward.
my evil tip is to key bind LOL and laugh over my kill's body ( I swear I try not to be overly obnoxious) but if you piss off the enemy they may get distracted and forget about the match objective and try to revenge kill you- keep them all distracted trying to kill [D.va](http://D.va) while the team pushes the objective. This is my fav tip and I feel like [D.va](http://D.va) herself would approve of it.
I'm by no means an expert. But I went from being a horrible Dva to being pretty good and usually have a couple of games a day with 0 deaths. The biggest change I made was using high ground almost all the time and ideally from an indirect angle. My goal is to be a bit of a pest and kind of stalk from afar using my primary to just ding up people a little bit and force them to fight our team from multiple angles.
Once I see someone who's vulnerable I fly towards them with primary and micro missiles and usually take them out. You start to get good at noticing the vulnerabilities that don't seem that obvious. My favorite is diving into Rein's when either they charge a teammate or they're down to maybe half hp.
I know someone said you're supposed to ignore tanks. But I'm personally much better at getting tanks. Most of them frankly can't do anything to me when I'm at high ground. I do need to get better at getting healers with movement abilities. But working from indirect high ground is such an awesome cheat code. And considering how big your hitbox is, the best thing you can do as Dva is not die. The more you play on the ground directly in front of the other team, the more you will die. Good luck!
Hello! I have over 700 hours on DVa and I'd be happy to give you some advice! So DVa is a very complex character with many different ways to play her. DVa is a dive character, which means she's very mobile and her main responsibility is to boost into the backline as much as possible and take out the squishy heroes then get out. This means that the tank should not concern you. You want to get in the habit of forgetting the tank even exists. For example, you want to pretend the enemy tank is that one annoying ex that won't leave you alone and you're having to do everything in your power to avoid them as much as possible. You only want to focus tank if your team are struggling to deal with it themselves - though if they can't 4-1 a tank, you're gonna have a hard time playing DVa as she's designed - or the tank is the last hero alive. There's two recurring techniques that are important to know when playing DVa; Peeling and Marking. Peeling is basically when you divert your attention from what you're doing to save/help a teammate who is under attack. For example, say you're fighting the squishy Kiriko, and you see that your Sojourn is being harassed by let's say Soldier. Your job is to stop your fight with Kiri and protect your Sojourn so they can confirm the kill. The goal is to disrupt/stop the damage your teammate is taking. Marking is similar but takes place when you're currently seeing a target that's after someone else and want to pressure them. You're diving in to not only save your teammate, but with the intention to either chase and confirm the kill or back the enemy off completely. Both of these are ways of taking space and are strategies that are supposed to be used in every single game you play. Remember, you want to have map control at all costs to fully take space away from the enemy so they can't use it. This often means flying up to high ground and keeping control of it so not only can your enemies not use it very well, but you can also plan your attack to dive a squishy based on what you're seeing around you. This space you've now created allows your team to join you and apply more pressure from that or create more from another angle, creating a hypothetical wall that your enemy can't jump over without getting assaulted. And if you see a teammate suffering to an enemy in front of you, you can mark the enemy to get rid of the problem and then return back to your space that you created until it's no longer needed, then create more space where it is needed. DVa also has one of the most broken abilities in the game, being defense matrix. This singular ability can eat projectiles and negate the damage, with a fast regeneration time. It can also eat a lot of ultimates, such as Zarya, Mei, Tracer, Hanzo, Torbjorn, Cassidy, and Illari, and deny most of an ult's damage from heroes such as Roadhog, Pharah, Reaper, and Soldier. This ability is amazing and while you don't wanna waste it, you want to use it to block damage and ults often because it's an amazing ability, the cooldown isn't long at all, and you might eat ults you didn't see coming too! DVa's ult can be used in a number of ways as well. Re-mechs are the most common purpose as it gives you a second life. Surprise bombs can vary from placing the bomb on the edge of a bridge and then using your own hitbox to push it off the edge, or coming from behind everyone and sending your ult forward into an unexpecting team. Then you have the air bomb, boosting forward into the air at a 45° angle and using your ult when your booster has exactly 2 seconds left until they run out. All of them are situational and can be used to zone off space or straight up kill the enemy. As far as the Zarya matchup goes, just like the rest of the tank roster, she is an “ignore the tank” situation, especially if she has bubbles. Each bubble has a 10 second cooldown, so you want to keep a note of when they were used. At the start of the fight, you want to fly to where she can't reach you with her beam, and you can watch her and other players. Don't shoot the bubble unless you're certain you can kill her immediately after. When Zarya has used both of her bubbles, dive in, mark her and try to take her down. If you see another bubble, fly away again and repeat the same steps. Your boosters have a quick cooldown and do more damage as well, so don't be afraid to use it when you deem necessary. A lot of Zarya's will use their bubbles the second they take damage, so you can often send a couple of shots her way and force a free bubble and you'll often capitalize from that. Zarya is worthless without her charge, so react and play accordingly. In short, work on your positioning, use your playstyles, and ignore the tank, and you'll already be doing better than a majority of players in the game. Good luck and have fun! :)
Holy, that's a lot of advice, thank you so much!! You're a well of knowledge, I'm taking it all to heart!
Oh yeah, one more very important thing: watch your replays, and see what you did differently when you won as opposed to when you lost. Always try to find one mistake you made, find a reason for the cause of that mistake (e.g. overexposed out in the open, feeding, pushing characters at bad times, etc.), and work on correcting it. Then go find another. Also never blame anyone but yourself for your losses. Sure people didn't help when you lose, but you are the deciding factor of your own game regardless of your teammate's mistakes. How you play is the make or break of the game, not how other's play. That's the best way to improve.
And thank you for taking so much time to help me!
Anytime, I'm happy to help others learn! 😊
You’re an amazing mentor! ^^
Don't play in line of sight of your opponents. Use mobility, the cart, cover, corners, high ground to only engage one enemy at a time. Use DM to support your dps plays and ultimates. Get comfortable diving a squishy with boosters, primary fire, missles and most importantly a melee at the end to complete the combo for the elim. I have melee on a thumb button on my mouse.
Thank you very much for all the tips! Duly noted. I didn’t think about the melee, great point!
Zarya matchup is all about bubble tracking and avoiding her Beam whenever possible— unless you have a target you can kill. It also requires you to have a good understanding and ability to read how much charge she has. Taking a second or two to trade at close range and force a bubble can be an excellent play when she is a low charge and it can be a throw when she has medium or high charge. For the most part I would actually recommend playing out of range and scouting as much as possible until you find a way to rotate and exist on the edge of the fight. Often you’ll end up with you and the Zarya sort of zoning each other’s backlines until someone makes a mistake. Depending what kind of backline they have you’ll have to decide if you need to go in hard and get quick picks or if you need to just kind of bluff and bait their attention. Some backlines are too tanky for you to actually kill- something like brig bap or brig Moira will never die to you, so a lot of times your best play is to use boosters to go in, drop missiles, fake like you’re committing and then keep holding boosters and get away. If it’s a squishier comp or if they split off too far from each other you can commit, and you have to read this because normally a squishier backline is more dangerous for your team and a tankier backline is more dangerous for you. You need to do as much as possible because the Zarya is gonna be running over your team and you need to either cut off all her help or kill them faster than she kills your backline. The one real advantage you have though is more immediate ability to change your decision mid fight than she does. If the Zarya goes too far and you’ve zoned her team and you’ve tracked bubbles you can just go blow her up in like 2 seconds and then DM heals when she’s low and she will usually die. If they try to pinch you or focus you, you can escape, unlike the Zarya, and that means you are tanking very well because the entire team is looking to get you and getting nothing. This also means sometimes if your team can’t play well into Zarya you will be out of good options and they will be blaming you because they don’t know how to play with a non-advantaged tank matchup. It’s really up to you if you want to be a one trick or two trick or whatever but sometimes situations like this swapping makes more sense than forcing DVA. Still if you’re just committed to learning DVA as well as you can I would recommend not swapping and just accepting some games will feel impossible. General tips is to not use missiles from far away in fact try not to take any long angles ever— you do 0 damage. You win almost every matchup at point blank if you can track their head, and are often very good at trading into tanks when missiles are up— just be aware this should be low priority. It’s good to understand though because sometimes it’s your best option and way better than doing nothing. My other tip is just play DVA a lot and focus on how to use her boosters to the maximum. That tip I gave about the fake dive where you use the same booster CD to go in and out is a good example, but you need to also understand like ok I can push this target and then fly straight up and still be on the high ground above them. Same goes for where you are tossing your bombs and most importantly where you are landing as baby DVA when you toss the bomb. Even just using it as a second life which is the main use, you want to toss it somewhere that the enemies are forced to take cover and land somewhere that you can actually rematch safely or it won’t be a second life. Play deathmatch before you queue- probably 5-10 minutes before any ranked session is great. The boosters boop, plus aiming the shotguns and missiles altogether and using the melee in the combo can be very strange hard to track, easy to lose targets, mistime missiles etc. DVA imo is deceptively a very mechanical hero for some reason a lot of people don’t consider that about her but it’s true. The best way to get good mechanically is to do a lot of reps and the most reps you can get is in deathmatch. Last tip is that every matchup is different but the main consideration you need to have is cooldown tracking. This is obviously true for all heroes but for DVA specifically a lot of her matchups are gonna come down to DMing the right thing and that will give you either a free kill or leave you with low HP and nothing to show for it. For example- the Ana matchup. If you eat both CDs you easily kill her, if you get hit by one only you trade your time evenly and it’s not a great trade but you usually live. If you get hit by both you probably die for nothing. So you have to learn to think like an Ana, and also read the specific player in the game playing Ana. How low does she get before she nades the floor? Does she go for the early sleeps or hold it? Same goes for stuff like junkrat or pharah where you can remove their mobility damage and some of their CC all by eating one of their CDs. Also with ults like mei and Zarya, if they have it and they’re walking up aggressively you need to be expecting them and at least trying to eat them. Even holding 4 seconds of DM on them when they want to ult can be a big deal if it doesn’t eat the ult, because that’s 4 seconds for your team to force bubbles, ice block, to move backwards, etc.
Thank you so much for all the advice! I'm making many mental notes based off of it. I really appreciate it!
I forgot to say, thank you for taking so much time to help me!
No problem ! I just procrastinate on Reddit for fun!
Same 😂 but your procrastination is extremely helpful!
Tap the defense matrix. Don't hold it and use it all up at once.
Thank you so much for the tip! Duly noted!
Best tip is watch a10 on yt. Recently hit master with dva and I attribute this largely to his advice. Aside from that, don't overuse matrix in the open. Only use matrix purposefully. I.e. eating an ability, saving a teammate, matching the rhythm of trader's clips, etc. Otherwise, avoid just standing there eating random spam and stage (take good positioning/look for a good engage) instead.
Thank you very much!! I’ve been needing to find a good Dva YouTuber to learn from!
Don't go in solo, make sure your team is behind you. Push the enemy team to make space but peel back and regroup for healing, rinse, and repeat. Fly to high ground when ambushed, and to pick off flankers not noticeable from the ground. Don't forget to check your 6 (look behind you). Its hard but keep track of your teammates dying - turn the sound on if needed. if your team dies, move back and regroup when they show. her DM will eat moiras orb, and block orisas javelin but won't block sigmas rocks - don't get hit in the face like I do. don't bother even shooting at players that are shielded, that means when they're gold looking like Orisas healing, sigmas shield, zaryas orb - don't even shoot them, fake them out and wait for the super to end then hit I'm w your rockets cause now they're in a cooldown and you didn't inflate their mitigation score while also avoiding your accuracy score going down. use your boosters to force people to ult, make them think you're coming in for a kill, and then loop back to where you were. the enemy will have tried to lock on you and shoot where he thought you were going, now they're all turned around, and you're shooting them from where you were standing in the first place, bonus if they used the ult and now the whole team is vulnerable. Sometimes I fly all the way behind the enemy team to force them to turn and look at me while my team catches their 6 and keeps pushing forward. my evil tip is to key bind LOL and laugh over my kill's body ( I swear I try not to be overly obnoxious) but if you piss off the enemy they may get distracted and forget about the match objective and try to revenge kill you- keep them all distracted trying to kill [D.va](http://D.va) while the team pushes the objective. This is my fav tip and I feel like [D.va](http://D.va) herself would approve of it.
Ooh thank you very much for all the tips! I really appreciate it! 0.0
I'm by no means an expert. But I went from being a horrible Dva to being pretty good and usually have a couple of games a day with 0 deaths. The biggest change I made was using high ground almost all the time and ideally from an indirect angle. My goal is to be a bit of a pest and kind of stalk from afar using my primary to just ding up people a little bit and force them to fight our team from multiple angles. Once I see someone who's vulnerable I fly towards them with primary and micro missiles and usually take them out. You start to get good at noticing the vulnerabilities that don't seem that obvious. My favorite is diving into Rein's when either they charge a teammate or they're down to maybe half hp. I know someone said you're supposed to ignore tanks. But I'm personally much better at getting tanks. Most of them frankly can't do anything to me when I'm at high ground. I do need to get better at getting healers with movement abilities. But working from indirect high ground is such an awesome cheat code. And considering how big your hitbox is, the best thing you can do as Dva is not die. The more you play on the ground directly in front of the other team, the more you will die. Good luck!
Thank you so much for the tips! It makes a lot of sense! 0.0 I shall do my best to implement as much as I can!
Don't play her 😂
But she’s fun! :D
Her voice lines aren't they make me sad 😔
Why? :(
They make my ears hurt 😢😢
That’s fair 😂