Before I begin: I am a support main, currently sitting around masters, I usually play main support. Ana/Bap/Moira (sometimes mercy if needed). But I can also flex to other supports like lucio/brig/zen. So I’m not a 1 trick, but I don’t know if hero pools is the best thing right now.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of the meta changing more frequently than it did before, that’s all fine and dandy. However I’m worried.
- 1 tricks:
Why am I worried about 1 tricks, you might ask? In a matter of fact I hate getting one tricks on my team for the sole purpose that they are more easily countered, they won’t change to what the team needs, the only time their relevant is when the meta favors them, otherwise they are…in reality, soft throwing. But…I didn’t come here to bash on one tricks for ruining a third of my games. I’m worried for the one tricks that queue competitive during a hero pool phase and find out their main is banned. What are they going to do? Throw by playing a hero they’ve never played before? Be forced out of competitive for a week because their hero isn’t their, so they are forced to play more casual gamemodes that make them rusty? Don’t play the game at all and build up rust that way? (By not playing the core competitive gamemode for long periods of time you are building up “rust” your mechanics will suffer and your positioning and game sense might as well, albeit to a lesser extent). In some form it might help them branch out but how many games would they have to lose before they learned the new hero?
- Counters & Certain heroes
This is another thing I’m worried about, I’ll try and make this short, but in essence what if the one and only counter for a particular hero gets banned? A lot of what overwatch was built on was counterpicking, at least in my eyes. So what happens if one of the best counters for a character is banned…let’s say mccree, and the other hero is allowed to basically run free with no possible restraint, obviously tracer in this example. (I’m not saying she doesn’t have other counters). But also, looking at the support role their are (at this time) 2 really good defensive ultimates, that being lucio and zen, sure you have brig’s rally but it takes time and isn’t instant much like the other two are and is better used prior to the start of a fight. What happens if lucio or zen gets “banned” , i-field isn’t that great anymore for a lot of these big ult’s or combos, so what happens? You’re left with 1 defensive support ultimate to stop something but at the same time their a certain ult’s that deal better with certain situations. So that’s something you have to take into consideration with hero pools as well.
- Too frequent meta shifts.
Really, this is just something that the dev team is going to have to figure out. I’m not saying frequent changes are bad but weekly? IF balance/meta changes are made too frequently no one can really learn and figure out how the new style is played, fast enough. It takes time to learn what the best and easiest “meta heroes” are, the ones that provide the most benefit. Double Shield didn’t really become a thing overnight, rather it took some time to figure it out after role queue was announced and implemented. What I’m saying here is that it might be unhealthy for the competitive player base as a whole. I’m not sure if their really is a sweet spot for this in terms of hero pools, because make it more time = longer waits to play a hero, make it less time = pure chaos. The same thing occurs with patches, before our patches were too long, when the devs released a patch almost 2 weeks after the last one it was too quick, people were still adjusting to the previous changes and needed time to figure out if X heroes were still good or if something else was now better.
- Overall hero pool is too slim
Arguably their are still not enough heroes in the game. If we go with a 1/2/1 hero pool ban system it might be but if they decided to op out two tanks during a particular week then we’re really low on the total amount of tanks playable. I think having about 10 supports and tanks would be better for this hero pool system. We just need more heroes tbh.
In essence, hero pools cause just about the same amount of issues as hero bans would have. The only big differences are:
A. Hero bans would’ve let the players choose what would be played and not the developers (although devs do have a card in this as they are the ones making balance changes).
B. Hero pools allow for a meta shift on a weekly basis, while bans (coming from my moba knowledge) would’ve just banned the most op heroes in the game and left this secondary “meta” that would be default until said op heroes were nerfed. (In essence Hero bans would’ve created the “ban meta” , if hero is banned, continue to meta-2 if hero is not banned stay on meta-1. Most of the time this results in meta-2 becoming the default and meta-1 not seeing the light of day unless someone makes a careless ban decision. Thus, nothing really changes)
It’s a slippery slope, I don’t think either is right for the game, if I had to lean with one, I’d go with bans, for the sole fact that it would give the players more power and devs could use information from ban rates to change and balance different heroes…but that’s just me.