Drafting Heist
Crack their safe before they crack yours.
The objective
Each team has a safe. Destroy the enemy's, or have dealt more damage to it when time expires. Heist is the tempo mode: defense exists, but every second spent defending is a second not spent on their safe, and the team that dictates which safe is under attack usually wins.
It's also the mode where draft mistakes are least recoverable — if your comp can't threaten the safe, no amount of skill manufactures the missing damage.
How to draft it
01Count your safe damage
The first question of every Heist draft: who actually melts the safe? Brawlers with huge sustained output or supers that dump damage onto a stationary target are the win condition. Be honest in the math — a brawler that's great in fights but mediocre at safe damage is a support pick here, and a comp of three of them loses the race even when it wins the lanes.
02Assign the defense
Somebody has to mind the shop. Throwers and area-control brawlers defend the safe while barely leaving the attack, and their lobbed damage punishes divers stacked on your safe. On lane maps, decide at draft time who rotates back — a comp where everyone assumes someone else defends is how safes die to a single unanswered tank.
03Wall-breakers open the vault
Most Heist maps hide the safe behind cover, and breaking it changes everything: new attack angles, shorter routes, snipers hitting the safe from range. A wall-breaking super effectively adds a second attacker. Conversely, if your defense depends on those walls, an enemy wall-breaker is a problem you need to answer in the draft, not discover mid-game.
Who to ban
Ban the patch's best safe-melter — the pick that forces the whole enemy draft to be about stopping it — and, on walled maps, the elite defensive throwers who can hold a safe alone. Heist metas tend to concentrate on a few degenerate attackers; if one brawler routinely ends games in the first minute, that ban is not optional.
The ban phase runs from Diamond upward — below that, drafts go straight to picks. Bans are also the most patch-sensitive call in the draft: for today’s data-backed ban suggestions on a specific map, use the draft board.
The Heist maps
Lane maps make Heist a rotation game: win a lane, trade damage on the safe, get back in time. Open maps become pure races where team-fight control decides who attacks. Water and bridge maps restrict approach routes and inflate the value of brawlers who ignore terrain. The safe's wall cover — and who can remove it — is the single most map-dependent factor in the draft.
- All Things Wicked
- Aridity
- Bridge Too Far
- Corner Cave
- Eating Good
- Gg 2.0
- Hot Potato
- Kaboom Canyon
- Perpetual Motion
- Photic Doom
- Pit Stop
- Plain Text
- Quintillion
- Safe Zone
- Safe(r) Zone
- Subway Turfers
- Tuning Fork
- Zip Zap Zoom
All 18 competitive Heist maps — Ranked rotates a handful of these each season, and the draft board’s map picker tracks the live rotation, with per-map win rates, synergies, and counters for each.