What are Mythic Prisms in Overwatch 2 and how do you earn them?

A new season in Overwatch 2 usually means it’s time for a shakeup in the meta, but this time, Blizzard is also introducing some changes to its systems for the Battle Pass and Mythic skins. These snazzy looks have often been a highlight of completing your Battle Pass, but now there are some new steps involved in getting your shiny new unlocks. Rather than summarize, let’s dive right into the details and sort out what the new processes mean for players.

Overwatch 2 is revamping how you earn Mythics

Season 10 is introducing Mythic Prisms to the game. This currency is earned in the Premium level Battle Pass, beginning with ten prisms at Tier 8, followed by ten prisms every additional ten tiers. Once you have 50 Mythic Prisms, you can unlock a brand new Mythic skin at Level 1 in the brand-new Mythic Shop.  You can take the Mythic skins currently on offer for a spin in the Practice Range from the Mythic shop too, seeing whether you vibe with a particular set of new voice lines or animations before you invest.

There are four levels of customization for the Mythic skins, adding in colors and variations at each stage. Unlocking a level will cost 10 Mythic Prisms. You can also purchase Prisms from the shop with real money, starting with 10 Prisms for $10 USD.

Blizzard experimented with a similar idea during its Season 5 Battle Pass. During that phase, players unlocked increasingly complex variants of the Tracer Mythic skin as they progressed through the Battle Pass tiers, so despite all the new language, the concept should be familiar if you were around in that season.

What does this actually mean in practice?

In all honesty, not that much has truly changed. If you want, you can have the exact same experience earning a Mythic skin as in the old system. Buy the Premium Battle Pass, get to Tier 80, and you’ll have the full range of a Mythic look in your collection. But now, you can choose whether you want the skin for this season, or if you’d rather invest in one you missed out on in the past.

There are a couple good things about this approach. For starters, if you missed out on a Mythic that you want to have in your collection, you haven’t lost the opportunity. The Battle Pass formula can have a tendency to cause FOMO, so this shift should be useful for players who have missed out on past seasons and want a chance to play catch-up. There’s only one limitation: after its debut, a Mythic skin will not be available in the shop for two seasons, but then it will rejoin the available roster. The shop even has an ‘Available Soon’ section at the bottom reminding you which two skins are currently out of the lineup.

This change also lets you have more control over your rewards if you’re only sporadically committing the funds for a Premium season. Rather than be locked into whatever hero it is at the end of the Battle Pass when you have the interest in paying for cosmetics, the reward is your pick. I also like that this gives you a way to carry over your progress from one season to another, which is a benefit for any players who aren’t always making it through the complete Battle Pass. Finally, if you’re most drawn to the aesthetic of a lower-level Mythic variant, you don’t have to sink all of your Prisms into unlocking something you’ll never use.

The only real bad thing, at least to my mind, is that this adds yet another currency system. If you’re keeping track, the game has a grand total of four currencies: the old Overwatch credits, the new Overwatch coins, the Overwatch League tokens, and now the Mythic Prisms. The system isn’t actually that complicated, but the addition of another layer of language and in-game transactions — and microtransactions — has a history of turning off a lot of the community.

We’ll just have to see over the next nine weeks how this shift plays out in Season 10.