Creative 'Overwatch' players bring boss battles to the game

With the new custom game browser in Overwatch, players are coming up with some really inventive new game modes. One of the best genres by far is boss battles, where multiple players team up against one super-powered hero in an epic fight to the death.

Whether the games are called "boss battle," "raid boss" or "Reinhardt vs. Torbletts," the new boss fight games populating the custom game browser tend to follow a few simple rules:

1. One team consists of a single player while the opposing team has multiple players.

2. The single player (the boss) is buffed to have higher health, do more damage, have shorter cooldowns, move faster or a combination of those three things.

3. The team with multiple players (fighters) is either nerfed or not buffed.

Boss battles in Overwatch mimic the boss fights seen in just about any MMO game, like Blizzard's own World of Warcraft or Bungie's MMOFPS Destiny. Here's a classic example with an OP Roadhog up against four players doing their best to take him down:

While some games like the one above allow the fighters to respawn and keep fighting, others only give the fighters one life each to take down the boss, which can make for really interesting dynamics and team compositions focused on stopping the boss with things like Mei's Endothermic Blaster and Ana's Sleep Dart.

Here is a boss battle from the fighters' perspective with no respawn and a majorly buffed Reinhardt boss:

The possibilities don't stop there. You can create a huge array of variations on boss battles by limiting fighters to certain heroes or forcing the boss to play a specific hero. One popular mode is having a boss Reinhardt fight off a team of Torbjörns who are only able to use their hammer weapon, or having a boss Torbjörn fend off a team of fighters who are trying to capture an objective on an assault map.

For fans of sniping, there's a the boss Pharah vs. Widowmaker battle:

With the amount of options on Overwatch's custom game feature, the possibilities are nearly endless for how to set up your own boss battle.

Just make sure the boss is in that sweet spot of being overpowered enough to be a challenge but not impossible to beat. If the boss seems too weak or too strong, you can tweak the settings for the next match.