I dont get double shield

General Discussion
1

Contenders doesn’t even run it a lot of the time, they go for ball? How isn’t this the meta?

GM Orisa and Rein still have relatively low pickrates compared to Ball and Hog so how is Double shield the meta?

Rein just got buffed and people are saying that Double shield will still be meta because they’ll spam him out? Which there is so many problems with.

  1. Rein can’t be spammed out everywhere. Examples include King’s row second point and Oasis University…etc This change will make Rein better than double shield where Rein is already good. THIS IS A GOOD CHANGE. It means Double shield can’t function as well on every map and makes it more map specific.
  2. The goal isn’t even to get a rid of Double shield. The goal will be to make double shield bad on maps where rein is good. Or even simply to make Rein better? It could literally be as simple as that.

So HOW is double shield the meta? HOW? Brig (who is still supposedly enabling this meta) has a 4.35% pickrate? Orisa at 3.05%?

I don’t see how this is the meta. The pro’s aren’t using it, (at least not everywhere), GM isn’t even using it consistently and the stats show it.

Why is Double shield this unstoppable force when it’s not meta.

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Dude I saw brig bap orisa sigma in my game pls nerf

-Forum Guy

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AH! I saw a barrier! ITS BACK ITS BACK. GUYS SOUND THE ALARMS. I. Saw. A. Barrier. TWO OF THEM.

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People got so scared of double shield, the sec it’s playable again they will want it extinguished.

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Yeah, I watched as much Contenders as I could yesterday. There was some Origma there, usually when a 2CP/Hybrid A capture point was involved like in Hanamura and King’s Row, but the go-to pick was Simga Balls. I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels this way, OP. At first I assumed it was a KR region deal, but it seemed to be the case from Euro and US games, too.

So I guess it’s actually “AH! I saw a barrier! ITS BACK ITS BACK. GUYS SOUND THE ALARMS. I. Saw. A. Barrier. ONE OF THEM.”

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metas change, last contenders patch double shield was played majority of the time

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The strength of double shield was buffed back up by Orisa’s buffs and then Bap buffs, however it is harder to run. The more you nerf it harder it becomes to play (that’s what she said), we saw this with GOATS too, by the end its run GOATS was still borderline dominating pro play apart from a few maps but ladder couldn’t play it anymore, or didn’t care to.

Rein-based comps are easier to play, Ball is just insanely strong individually and always has been, he’s probably the strongest tank when considered alone if you ask me.

The Rein changes are weird because exatly of what you said, they make Rein good at swinging at stuff, but that’s what Rein is already good at, great even, it’s not the problem, it doesn’t make competing comps, it just strenths his presence in Kings Row, lol.

The lack of OWL also means there’s no pro play going on to trickle the meta down to GM. Frankly no one really knows what the meta is, I don’t even think there’s scrims going on. Atop of that, Blizz pulled some crazyness with their patches. The Giga Hog patch for all playoffs games (i.e. the pro meta) while ladder had moved on and as 3 patches ahead.

I reckon we won’t see a hard defined meta until OWL comes back which is delayed for 2021, so that could be 6 months. When peopel talk about DS being meta, they’re talking about the strenght of the comp itself, and there’s not really a reason of why it isn’t stronger than everything else right now. Compared to its previous state, when it was hard defined meta, there haven’t been many changes. Halt is 5m as oppose to 7m, Grasp is 12s CD instead of 10 and Sigma’s shield is 700 rather than 900. The Halt nerf is big but the other 2 are rather unimpactful - add to that Bap’s new found strength and the state of meta kind is “wait, we did we really nerf DS? raises eyebrow oddly”

There’s also Rein-based double shield to consider. Sigma is just a plussed Zarya (yes you heard that right), don’t be surprised if Rein-Sig brawl comes out on top meta-wise, it was already strong in Lijang. That’s a less poke-y more brawl-y DS, but still DS.

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So do people not consider what’s being run in Contenders as relevant in terms of meta?

I don’t know whether the current patch is live for them, but I did just watch a game where one team used Rein+Winston on Oasis Gardens. These are strange times.

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Then why are so many people complaining it is meta?
Or saying things won’t beat out double shield?

It should probably be a viable comp as long as Orisa remains as bad as she is or else she’ll see no use. But I don’t get why so many complain it’s meta or that they’re sick of it when it clearely isn’t even being played enough

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in new metas on maps like oasis youre gonna get wacky comps because people dont know how to play the meta perfectly, so things like that can work. especially in early games where the teams arent as good

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Same could be said about Bap. Watching contenders gaunlet and there is BARELY any bap , unless its mixed with Orisa Sigma.

Mercy Zen is in like almost every game tho. If we already nerf Bap we might aswell nerf Mercy and Zen then. -_-

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I personally do, Contenders teams did invent Goats, Doombra and ClockWork Vendetta comp after all, but one must remember Contenders isn’t as hard defined as OWL. There’s a lot more fluidity meta-wise because teams offer a lot less practice hours and more games when compared to OWL.

The more practice time teams get, more defined the meta becomes. Pros tend to scrim and test stuff a lot behind the scenes and in Contenders a lot of those test runs become just the games.

Contenders follows live patches, yes. It’s been a blast to watch recently, far better than Playoffs and its dumb Giga Hog patch.

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The support situation’s kinda interesting. I saw Brig + Zen, Mercy + Zen, Bap + Brig, Bap + Zen yesterday. No Ana or Moira, and I did see a bit of Lucio but usually just to get back to point ASAP or the one time in Nepal when they tried Brig + Lucio (and lost).

Absolutely agreed! There are a bunch of comps and heroes I don’t like watching, such as double barrier and Widow, but Sigma Ball + Tracer has made for good viewing as far as I’m concerned.

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As someone who plays in masters: 25% of the matches are double shield, 25% is hog/ball and then the other is rein/sigma, and then you have Zarya/Winston :weary:

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wow wow flexing about being masters lol

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im kidding. anyway on console masters is way diffrent its still rein zarya i hate it

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Can we trade? :cry: :smiley:

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Well, metas can be fluid sometimes. “Meta innertia” has been used to describe it.

I guess what people are saying is that the innertia is going at the direction of double shield. The reasons for that is the power of the comp, either perceived or actual, doens’t seem to have lowered significantly, or at all.

The meta did shift, right? Giga Hog patch hapenned, Orisa had her HP nerfed to 400 (that alone was a HUGE nerf to DS, more than most people realize).

But then Giga Hog was reverted, Orisa HP was reverted and now Bap has even more poke damage and a garage door rather than a window…

There’s really no reason Orisa based DS isn’t the strongest comp when it’s only marginally different than when it was the meta; and we have not seen a huge power creep to outclass it, in fact quite the opposite, there were a lot of changes that powered the game down at the very least a bit (we saw 11 heroes nerfed in a single patch few months ago).

So DS is probably harder to counter now than they were around august/june. At that specific patch, DS was being consistently ravaged in pro play by Winston/Zarya/Ana, but now that comp isn’t working too well, it’s too hard to play even for semi-pros - maybe the actual pros can do, but without OWL we’ll never know. The Orisa revert, armor buff against beams and even the Ana nerf hit that comp harder than even I expected - and I did expect it to some extent to toot my own horn here.

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You make a good argument, but maybe it’ll turn out that WB was simply undervalued pre-GigaHog, and SigBall is the future. I hope so, anyway.

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That’s half of any meta.

Ana has had anti nade since her launch but it’s taken ages for people to focus in on it because no one was creative enough to rely on it in high play.

High tier play is what makes “meta”. Hell , half of goats being meta…wasn’t even actually meta. Brig wasn’t even played in gm for a solid two months prior to 222, let alone lower ranks. But since she was being used in owl, she was still seen as “meta”.

:woman_shrugging:t5:

1 Like