Your missing the part where D.Va would be swapped out because she wasn’t really the MAIN part of Goats.
Yet, she still got nerfed the hardest.
#RevertMatrixRange
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It was so fun to play in GM. You can just roll into the enemy team and live, and felt like the golden era for tank players. 6 man shatters and gravs, 4k dva bombs, making huge blocks against sound barrier or shatter, and snipers werent meta
But lasted too long
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Basically, take any Rein/Zarya deathball you’ve seen in low ranks and quickplay and multiply it’s efficiency and boring factors by 100.
Goats itself, when played with the proper coordination to utilize it, is probably one of the most robust and overall strongest comps overwatch has ever seen.
The catch however was it did require good coordination to use at that kind of level- many aspects of it relied on long cooldown shot duration abilities from multiple heroes to bolster a teams defenses to the level that they were amazingly difficult to kill without play-opening ults.
Outside of practiced coordination it was very easy for these multiple heroes to overlap their abilities- and drastically reduce their effectiveness.
Bubbling someone who had decaying stacked armor, using DM on a target as they got bubbled, etc
There were a lot of things to go “wrong” and diminish the power.
Even at Gm you didn’t see goats every game, let alone see it played well (were GM party size limitations a factor at the time? Can’t recall when all that changed)
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Exactly this, the hate it got was very much from overstaying it’s welcome.
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Grandmaster games began to restrict grouping up to no more than 2 starting in season 16:
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It was definitely played in other ranks, it just wasn’t super popular cause people like their dps heroes too much. Though if one team went goats and one didn’t, the goats team had a pretty big advantage as long as they could play it decently. Goats actually took a considerable amount of coordination, which is why some people really liked it, but it was incredibly boring to watch.
I honestly don’t remember this. People would just play Pharah/Mercy and hardcounter it since ladder teams couldn’t deal with it.
Reaper also kinda walked over it on ladder.
Regardless of even that, 3-0-3 comps had a sub 50% winrate (omnicmeta used to show stats for different team comps), and below masters I remember it used to sit at like 42% regularly.
nah, she got her rework pushed to live in june of 2018, Hanzo’s rework was may of 2018, we were most likely in the middle of the double sniper meta still, GOATs did come in to play around this time but didnt see wide meta usage until after a little while since players had to get used to the comp and learning to run it before they made the hard switch to it
There were counter comps but blizz kept nerfing the counters. There were comps involving pharah, junkrat, cree, doomfist, or sombra that could counter it until blizz nerfed them.
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Probably rank dependent. I played in diamond back then, occasionally dropping to plat.
No. This never happened. Brig provided massive armor back then and reaper is one of the worst dps vs armor.
It was wasn’t quite non-existent in GM, but it wasn’t hard-meta either - they were playing a combination of GOATS and Orisa/Hog+Double-sniper throughout all of 2019 up until the release of Role Queue. At the start of 2019, all Tank pickrates were roughly equal in GM - probably the best Tank balance has ever been.
GOATS fell more-and-more out-of-favour and Orisa+Hog solidified as meta as Blizzard kept introducing nerfs aimed at GOATS heroes, targeted mainly at OWL-level.
tl;dr: GOATS wasn’t all that bad on ladder, was hard-meta in OWL. In trying to nerf the OWL meta, they forced a new meta on ladder.
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Goats was a fun to play meta for most tank and support players, while DPS players were moaning in pain.
Painful to watch for me, but it was kinda fun to play it.
Some pro players and streamers said, Goats was the best meta in case of strategical ability and Ultimate usage.
My thought: There is a vid out from an OWL match where both teams have thrown 12 Ultimates at each other and no-one died. I would say its broken and thank god such Support / Tank stacking is gone outside of Arcade / OQ matches.
While ult economy was important to Goats, I’d say the focus was more on stacking abilities that made Goats so dominant. With Matrix, Bubble, Rein shield, Brig’s shield, Repair Pack, and Amp, they were nigh unkillable. You couldn’t kill them from range, but trying to engage in a brawl meant Brig was getting Inspire.
Ultimates was meant to just win fights decisively.
Either you’re misremembering, did not play in GM during that time period, or you’re quoting something that was incorrect. 2019 is the wrong time period because it was ladder goat’s sunset, which was often played with Ana, and the rise of OWL goats. We already had two steady seasons of goats in GM in 2018, then by the start of 2019 we had a bunch of nerfs and it still looked like this:
https://i.imgur.com/ff33xsT.png
In GM, that’s Orisa and Hog with barely more than 1% pickrates. The worst tanks here in 2021 have the same pickrates as the worst tanks on that list. There is also another tank here in 2021 to dilute the pickrates and that was after 2 seasons of nerfs to goats itself, so there was a certain meta flux as people tried heroes that hadn’t yet been ruled unviable. How the heck is that the best tank balance has ever been?
source: https://www.esportstales.com/overwatch/most-played-heroes-by-competitive-tier-january-season-14
Only GM/Pros experienced GOATs. And GM experienced a different kind of GOATs than Pros.
So in reality? It wasn’t that bad.
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THis might be an unpopular opinion but I actually enjoyed GOATS as a comp. It required a lot of teamwork and battles were long and exiting FOR ME. One of the reasons I didn’t like dive was because you blinked and one team just won the fight and I was like wat just happened. Also the team with the best Tracer won.
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Practically nonexistent on ladder. There simply weren’t enough tanks to even make it a thing in the first place and you only ever saw it on OWL.
It was when Support/Tank synergies were strong enough that you could solo tank even if you were roadhog. And considering how unpopular tanks were, if your tank was already doing fine by himself, you were less likely to get a DPS to swap to a second tank.
This meant the playerbase was essentially self regulating as they tended to pick the least number of tanks they could get away with. Goats required an “I MUST WIN” mindset that simply isn’t representative of what you would find on ladder.
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Exactly. Which is why ladder goats was different than Pro goats and by ladder goats I mean GM players.
ah goats was the best in the world, the best time to play bastion and phara and see people crying for using bastion