That One Achievement / Overwatch

• The hero-specific achievements range from simple stuff, like attaching four Pulse Bombs for Tracer, to ridiculous ones, like... well, read on. Most of the heroes have one achievement related to their Ultimate (such as for many Damage and some Tank heroes, getting four kills with one Ultimate use) and one related to another ability.^note  Most high-level players who mainly play a particular character will say that if you know how the character works, you can get both achievements without even consciously trying, but even then, there are exceptions. As for the four kill achievements, keep in mind that many of them amount to four "eliminations", not killing blows; as long as an enemy takes damage from the Ultimate and doesn't heal before reaching 0 HP, it counts toward the achievement.
  • Before he was re-worked as a Tank, Doomfist had the dubious honor of having the perhaps most difficult achievement to date. "Cratered" required the player to hit six enemies with a single use of his ultimate. Having the entire enemy team close together is a rarity by itself, but his Meteor Strike is one of the slowest to execute, giving the enemy team plenty of time to scatter even before he has chosen his target area. Zarya's Graviton Surge is almost a requirement to achieve this and even that is far from a guarantee. Following the transition to Overwatch 2, this was scaled back to requiring that Meteor Strike "only" hit four enemies.
  • The time between activation and detonation for D.Va's Self-Destruct can make "Game Over", which requires getting four kills with one Self-Destruct, a real pain, as most players with any game sense will know to avoid bunching up or congregating in open spaces if the enemy team has a D.Va, so unless they're all unconscious from an Earthshatter or stuck in a Graviton Surge, most of them will almost certainly get to cover in time.
  • Junker Queen's "Adrenalin Junkie" requires her to have seven wounds active at once. However, there are only five characters in a team, so even the best case scenario (where the entire enemy team is hit by her ultimate, as would be enough for some of the other achievements on this page) that's only five wounds. Worse, wounds only last three seconds (four and a half if they're inflicted by her ultimate) and immediately go away on death, so if she hits the entire enemy team with an ability, they have to stay alive long enough for her to follow-up with another of her skills, do so very quickly and hit multiple enemies with it, and that followup or her own teammates can't kill them either before all the wounds tick together at least once.
  • In the original Overwatch era, Orisa's "Halt State" achievement required that the player drag enemies into 1000 HP worth of damage with one use of Halt!; this effectively required that Orisa drag at least four enemy characters, including one Tank (or three characters including two Tanks), into a high-damage Ultimate like RIP-Tire, Barrage, Dragonstrike, or Self-Destruct, but even then, getting the affected enemy players to take 1000 damage felt like a Luck-Based Mission. In Overwatch 2, this was replaced with "Terrible Terrible Damage", which involves killing three enemies with her new ultimate, Terra Surge.
  • Following a re-work of Sigma's Gravitic Flux that makes it possible to cancel it by stunning or killing him mid-animation, the "Event Horizon" achievement, which entails getting three killing blows with one Gravitic Flux, requires a massive amount of luck and poor positioning by the enemy team to grab three players who are below half health and slam them against the ground without getting hit by a crowd control move.
  • Winston's "Mine Sweeper" requires clearing ten turrets or traps without dying. This almost requires either clearing most of an enemy Wrecking Ball's Minefield single-handedly (the mines count toward the total, but there are only fifteen of them, so even if you survive a follow-up Piledriver, you may be left with fewer than ten mines when the dust settles) or having a very persistent Junkrat, Symmetra, and/or Torbjorn on the other team who refuses to swap to a character who isn't as effectively countered by Winston.
  • Genji is difficult enough to get the hang of without having to resort to meme-level spamming of "I need healing!" for most players, but then there's "Their Own Worst Enemy", which requires getting two killing blows with one Deflect. Your best bet is to hope that you have the millisecond-perfect timing and positioning to reflect an enemy Cassidy's Deadeye or an enemy Pharah's Barrage while the character in question is standing near several of their allies.
  • Junkrat's "Mine Like a Steel Trap" involves sending an enemy flying with a Concussion Mine so that they land in a Steel Trap. It requires either judicious arrangement of the two items in an enclosed passage and trying to bait an enemy player into walking into the traps, or hoping that when you set off a Concussion Mine, you just happen to blast the person standing near it in the right direction to land in the Steel Trap (if you're really quick and Steel Trap is off cooldown, you can throw it on their landing spot just before they hit the ground, but it requires very sharp reflexes).
  • Reaper's "Waste Not, Want Not" achievement requires the player to get three solo kills in one clip. In other words, the player needs to kill three full-health enemies with only eight shots, which almost requires that all three enemies be 200 HP squishies (or, better yet, a 150 HP Tracer) and that every shot be a headshot, preferably at point blank range. Made even harder with the patch in May 2017, which made it so Reaper automatically reloads once he enters Wraith Form. Getting three solo kills with Death Blossom doesn't grant this achievement, although damaging the enemy and then using it will count, but finding three full health enemies and trapping them in Death Blossom after firing three shots is no easy task, either.
  • Soldier: 76's "Target Rich Environment" involves getting four kills with one Tactical Visor; even with the aid of a Nano Boost and/or Amplification Matrix, it can be immensely frustrating trying to get four killable enemies in view for long enough to reduce them all to zero health.
  • Sombra's "Power Outage" requires you to hack five enemies at once (six in original Overwatch). In other words, the entire enemy team to be bunched up enough to hack them all at once, which is quite rare unless they are all sitting on the payload or the point (and most teams have the savvy not to do that if they know the enemy Sombra is close to an EMP). Her other achievement, "Hack the Planet", isn't much more forgiving, given that it requires you to hack 15 enemies without dying, which will probably mean regular translocating to safety in a way that shifts most of the burden of attacking or defending to your increasingly impatient teammates.
  • Symmetra's "Huge Success" requires her to teleport 20 players in a single game. While her 2018 rework made it possible to achieve this by putting down a portal and then having Sym herself teleport back and forth until the achievement pops,^note  Or, if you'd rather not go the Loophole Abuse route, putting a teleporter pad close to spawn on a Control Map to make it easy for you and your teammates to get back to the point quickly. this was not always so; in its original design, each Teleporter could teleport up to 6 people (ignoring if it gets prematurely destroyed), so you were expected not only to have a team incompetent enough to constantly die in order to respawn and use it at all, but also to be perfectly able to deal enough damage in order to build up at least four Teleporters in a single game. The Loophole Abuse of Sym herself using the portal twenty times was still possible, but still required that she build up to her Ultimate four times, and wasting those on teleporting yourself back and forth was a good way to enrage your teammates.
  • Widowmaker's "Smooth as Silk" requires you to get a scoped headshot while airborne; routine enough for mid-to-high-level Widowmakers (who might do this several times in a single game), not so much for low-level players. She automatically unscopes when she jumps or is flung into the air. That being said, all the game looks for is that Widowmaker is off the ground when she gets a headshot, which means that immediately jumping after getting a scoped headshot can get you the achievement. It's telling that, when a thread was created on the game's forum that asked "Which achievement did you get completely by accident?", the overwhelming answer was this one.
  • Baptiste's "Window of Opportunity" is almost completely beyond all but the highest level players, as it requires amplifying 2500 combined damage and healing with Amplification Matrix without dying. And that's amplified damage and healing, which means a total of 5000 damage and healing must pass through Amplification Matrix - and if the shots don't hit anything or the healing hits an ally at full HP, it counts for nothing. Fire Ultimates through the window? Most of them aren't damage boosted by it (notable exceptions include Tactical Visor). And while most Baptiste players can build up to an Amplification Matrix quickly, they still need to stay alive throughout the process and position the window so that their teammates can get meaningful use out of it.
  • Lúcio has perhaps the worst achievement in the entire game. "The Floor is Lava" requires him to get three killing blows while wall-running without dying. Thus, the situation requires Lúcio to be wall-running with a relatively weak enemy in his line-of-sight, and if a single teammate decides to help out and kill the enemy for you (as their job as damage-dealers entails), then good luck. At least you can push an opponent off the edge of the map and wall run as the kill is registered. If you're lucky enough to have a good Orisa on your team, she can also Halt! three players into the air so that Lúcio can knock them into a bottomless pit before they land, but it still requires razor sharp timing.
  • Mercy's "Huge Rez" achievement was changed from "rezzing four teammates at once" to "Rezzing six teammates without dying". Not impossible to achieve, but since Mercy has always been the focal target since the start of the game, her new skills force her to be in the line of fire much more often now.
  • Zenyatta's "Rapid Discord" achievement requires four people killed with Orb of Discord applied at the time of their death. The final blow can either be from Zenyatta or a teammate. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, it has to be done within six seconds, meaning that if you aren't communicating with your teammates, getting this achievement almost requires the stars to align. Combine that with that fact the Zenyatta uses projectiles rather than hitscan, this means that people will likely fall just one kill short or 1 second short of getting this achievement.
  • "The Path is Closed" requires destroying three of Symmetra's teleporters in one match as any character (and getting elimination credit isn't enough; you have to deliver the final blow to three teleporters). What makes it difficult is that it completely depends on if three teleporters are even available, as there's a likely chance of her switching characters or, prior to her rework, simply alternating to the shield generator.
• From Junkenstein's Revenge:
  • "Not a Scratch" requires a No-Damage Run for the door, which is easy to screw up on simply by missing a Shock-Tire or letting a Zomnic slip past.
  • "Held the Door" requires a successful Legendary mode win. It borders on Nintendo Hard if the Zombardiers aren't disposed of quickly, or the Gunslinger and Alchemist don't team up to kill the bosses before they overwhelm the players.
  • "Survivor" needs the players to survive four bonus waves on Endless mode, on Expert difficulty. This means the players only need to survive long enough for Bonus Wave 4's timer to run out. No need to kill the bosses, and it's not on Legendary, so what gives? First off, Expert mode is already hard enough. Second is that on Endless mode, more than one of each boss can be present on the field. Of note is the third bonus wave 3, which has three of Junkenstein's Monsters spawn. It can be considered Nintendo Hard, which is nothing to say about the bonus wave immediately after, in which two Witches spawn. If you don't kill the monsters in Bonus Wave 3 fast enough, you may have up to four of them in the next wave, accompanied by the other bosses.
• From Uprising, the "Distinguished Service" achievement, which requires a successful win on Legendary difficulty. That's right, not Expert, Legendary. The smallest screw-up from any player on Legendary difficulty is almost guaranteed to end the game. To emphasize its difficulty, a team of pros were able to earn the achievement with only 1 second left on the clock. At the end of the event, when the mode's metrics were posted on the Overwatch website, fewer than one percent of attempts on Legendary difficulty ended in victory.

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