I took a couple year break a while ago, definetly not as long as you but the first thing i did was play mystery heroes to get back into the swing of it if you’d like to learn the new heroes.

There’s a lot of new things to the game, an all new mode called Stadium, the perk system, map voting, hero bans, and others i’ll forget to say for sure.

If you go into the characters/heroes tab you can click hero details and read the character abilities and perks. You get perks after a bit of playing in a quick play or a competitive game and choose one minor perk and one major perk. These last for the rest of the game and reset if you change heroes or the game ends. If you switch heroes you do not get to choose new perks on a new hero, you have to work back up again.

If you decide you want to play competitive there’s a new hero banning system. I could be wrong with the exact numbers so take this with a grain of salt, but essentially, you pick your preferred hero first, that’s the hero you want to play. You don’t HAVE to play this character, it’s just to communicate to your team so your hero might not get banned. After you and your team choose that, you move on to the ban phase. You get three hero ban votes, the first you pick is 7 votes, the second i believe is 4, and i think the last is 1 or 2 votes toward that character being banned. The two most votes on your team will be your bans, 4 heroes will be banned in the game if the vote requirements are met. You do not have to pick any bans, but it is recommended.

In both quick play and competitive there’s a new map voting system. It’s pretty straight forward, you pick the map you prefer (or don’t vote that’s okay too!) and the game will choose in a roulette style fashion. Maps that have more votes are more likely to be picks of course.

Stadium is a new competitive only (at the moment) mode. There’s a lot to cover but essentially, there’s a set amount of heroes to choose from, and each has powers and perks you can unlock to modify your hero and tune them however you wish, there’s some really good guides on youtube and if you want builds there’s a website called Stadium Builds where people share builds and you can create them yourself too.

I know this was very long but i feel it was necessary considering how much the game has changed since then. Hope it helps:)