Wall of text incoming!
I really love Total Mayhem. So much so that it’s most of what I play whenever the mode is live in the arcade. I honestly think that there could be a ranked Total Mayhem mode. My girlfriend and I are pretty competitive people and we noticed that this mode can actually be played at a more competitive level than most arcade modes due to it’s consistent strategies and lack of randomness, so I decided to make a tier list and short strategy explanation in the hopes of making this mode more fun for people.
Here’s the tier list: https://i.imgur.com/h79NQQ9.png
NOTE: I don’t have enough experience playing on/with/against Echo to know exactly where to slot her, so her place is probably not accurate. I’d like to know what you guys think and if you have suggestions for moving the heroes around.
The reasoning:
The basic philosophy of winning Total Mayhem is to maximize your time spent on the objective point and disrupting the enemies’ gameplay as much as you possibly can. All 6 hero slots should be filled with heroes who bring high levels of utility or insanely high spikes of throughput. For this reason, each hero is incredibly important and you should aim to use any one-shot kill mechanic to snowball single picks into a team kill. In no particular order, good qualities to accomplish this goal are:
- High staying power (ability to block enemy abilities/ults, high HP, the ability to self-heal, temporary immunity to damage)
- Crowd control abilities (stuns, slows, boops, hacks, walloffs)
- Ultimate abilities that can kill high-health targets in one shot
- Abilities that cause a severe area hazard to enemies for zoning
- AoE damage and healing
- Damage, healing and special abilities that ignore enemy shields
Winston is, in my opinion, the undisputed best hero in the game for Total Mayhem. His shield’s cooldown is low enough to have 100% uptime while blocking an almost infinite amount of damage in enemy attacks, special abilities and ults, as well as some enemy healing. Even without his shield, his high health pool makes him difficult to kill even for his hardest counters like Reaper. His Ion Cannon can hit multiple targets which actually makes his damage formidable when both teams are on the point constantly. His damage ignores shields and can clear small targets like turrets very easily. Winston is the only hero who is reasonably comfortable against Sombra because he can sit in his shield where only a melee-ranged hack can successfully stop him. Winston’s Ultimate ability is also a huge game changer because it instantly heals him to full health and doubles the health pool, as well as giving him the ability to fling enemies off of the point or even off of the map for free kills (which are very valuable in this mode).
The strategy:
The strategy is to always play on point (on attack OR defend) and to use CC and eliminations to try and clear the point of all enemies, even if it’s only for a single second. You will eventually chip away at the objective with seconds here and there to pull out the win.
As far as I can tell, Winston should ALWAYS be a part of your hero composition. In almost every situation, not picking Winston is a loss of utility and staying power. Zarya as off-tank if your group is struggling with Mei’s Freeze, Ana’s Biotic Grenade, all DoT effects and/or one-shot Ultimates.
Players have a pretty wide range of choices for dealing damage and should focus either on disrupting enemies (Sombra’s Hack, Doomfist’s absurd crowd control, Mei’s Freeze, Baguette’s Shield Bash, Lucio’s Soundwave), killing enemies with one-shot abilities (Junkrat’s Riptire, D.Va’s Self-Destruct, McCree’s Deadeye) or zoning (Hammond’s Mine Field, Mei’s Blizzard, D.Va’s Self-destruct, Hanzo’s Dragonstrike, Torbjorn’s Molten Core). Heroes who mostly only have consistently high damage (Like Soldier: 76, Tracer, Pharah, Symmetra and Ashe) without much utility should be avoided as damage should NOT be your main focus.
For supports, Ana is the strongest choice if she isn’t countered. Her Sleep Dart can be infinitely chained, she negates enemy healing with her anti-heal and she can self-sustain. However, if her grenade is consistently countered by a Zarya’s shields, Reaper’s Wraith, Mei’s Iceblock, or Moira’s Fade, you should choose a different support.
Moira’s healing output is high enough to solo-heal the group, which frees up a slot for potentially more utility. Moira is also nigh UNKILLABLE because of her constant Fade uptime and self-healing. She should really only die if she’s hacked (which can be avoided fairly easily with Fade), Slept by Ana or hit with a properly timed Riptire. If you AREN’T using Moira, pretty much any combination of two healers (if one or both of them are from A-tier) will suffice. Lucio and Baguette both have great, consistent healing output and their crowd control is absolutely oppressive. Mercy is very squishy with low self-healing, but her utilities can be useful. Her resurrection (in a mode where it’s hard to land kills) and ability to heal and damage boost (charge ults for the group) while ignoring shields are her strong features.
Zenyatta’s only utilities, Discord Orb and Transcendence are easily shut down by immunity abilities and Ana’s anti-heal respectively. Baptiste’s healing is too dependent on his line of sight being unbroken by shields and his Immortality Field is way less useful in Total Mayhem because of the increased health pools and focus on shields. Amplification Matrix is less useful when both teams are fighting right on point in melee range.
So there’s my take on the Total Mayhem meta. Thoughts?
Edits:
- Moved Symmetra up 3 spots
- Moved Orisa up 1 spot