"OW2 less strategic and deathmatchy"

General Discussion
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Statements like that are just nonsense to me and honestly bothers me quite a lot.

I have been coaching people on and off for years now and I can tell you that the vast majority of people don’t even play live OW with any resemblance of strategy or even thought. I have seen gameplay from Bronze to GM and you’d be surprised at how much nonsense happens at every rank, obviously less and less as you get to diamond+ but it’s still pretty tragic.

Plat and below people don’t even know where to stand most of the time, what position to fight for and take and how and when to engage fights. People have mains who they haven’t understood how to play to the strengths of that hero.

Most of the time you see people just gunning towards the objective regardless of what heroes have been picked. Often people are in different 1v1s even when people are all together. Tanks who pick heroes that have synergy but don’t actually make use of those synergies, supports who don’t keep each other alive, hitscan players who don’t realize that high ground is generally a good place to be. Sometimes you see a few people on either team who actually seem to have a decent idea of what they should be doing but in general most people don’t.

I watched a plat player recently who picked Sigma and decided to go straight for the objective and basically squared off against a Reinhardt instead of playing positioning that makes sense for Sig that actually plays to the characters strengths. The strangest part is that it actually worked out for them because the person who picked Rein didn’t realize that they could just walk at the Sig and start to batter him.

It’s a complete mess.

Mind you I’m actually spending time watching the PoV of people who want to improve and they do, but first time I see their gameplay it’s rare that you see someone below diamond who actually gets it.

It’s not surprising that people who didn’t get live OW don’t get OW2 either. OW2 lost tank synergy and cut down on possible team comp combinations which was already more than people could realistically deal with. But other than that, it didn’t really lose much else. Even Push that people say is just death match has lots of strategy to it despite the flaws that the mode has, like insanely long spawn distances and that dumb curve on Colosseo before the last stretch towards completion.

Just because you don’t understand it or see it, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I don’t see how anyone can watch the good teams in OWL play and say it’s just death match or there’s no strategy, it just shows that you don’t understand the strategies of the game and you likely didn’t understand the ones of live OW either.

Being able to have pop off moments where one player can turn the fight does not make the game less strategic, it’s just rewarding someone for popping off.

I don’t care if you don’t like it, everyone has their preferences, but it’s just very weird when people are making claims like this when they just don’t get it.

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I mean it is objectively less strategic and more deathmatchy. One of the main ideas of 5v5 is more self-carry potential and less team-reliance to get things done. As such it results in less strategy because you don’t need to work together as much…

Tank just does whatever and the team should follow (unless the tank is feeding or doing dumb things). Only real thing is that DPS need to help supports more, supports need to have better awareness & positioning and need to make sure they always peel for their other support.

I play Sombra a lot, and now in Overwatch 2 it’s kinda pointless to combo her ult with certain other ults (such as the iconic DVA bomb EMP) because 1) you don’t need it & 2) it’s a waste of EMP, since it’s better to use for it’s damage now (you should be able to win a fight with just EMP, rather then using it to setup bomb). And I never need to make callouts on hacks or communicate “ok i’ll hack this then etc, group up to bait this or whatever” because people are doing their own thing all over the map.

Either way I think OW2 translates better to the playerbase (it seems most of the playerbase is too stupid to play OW1 correctly, it feels like half the team is AFK in OW1 and I never realised it until after beta 2)

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Bro wdym bro strategy is standing behind your double shield tanks and spamming CC. Smh bro you gotta learn to strategize.

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Allowing for more individualistic play doesn’t make it deathmatchy. When evenly matched teams play the amount of individualistic solo carries wouldn’t be high, they are possible like aces in games like CSGO and Valorant but it’s not the norm. You cannot rely on pop off moments, you still need general gameplan and strategy. The only difference is that someone who has the opportunity and the means to do it, can make a play by themselves and even that is something that you need to take into consideration and prepare for.

No one calls CSGO and Valorant death match games, the genre is literally called tactical shooter

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Mostly just translate it from a mid-ELO Support perspective.

  • “I’m having to take more duels with less peels”
  • “It’s harder to prevent teammate deaths”
  • “Having to split your attention focus a lot”
  • “Just Healbotting on Mercy isn’t enough”
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More individual pop off = less strategy, like it or not.

A strategy-heavy game is a game where strategies matter more than individual mechanical skill.

There is still a sizable strategical aspect in OW2 for sure, but it’s more than ever about which team has the better Widow and the better Tracer.

People are free to express their thoughts and make claims, even if they “don’t get it”.
No one is born knowing everything.

Judge the idea itself, not the person behind it.

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False. Tac shooters allow for individual pop off from every single player in the lobby and it’s still the most tactics and strategy heavy FPS genre that exists.

Which fits both live OW and OW2. You cannot rely just on individual mechanics all the time.

This is just wrong. Tracer by no means is as dominant as she was and she only became even harder to get solo value from for the average player, she has become more team reliant. It’s not even a hot take to say that Zen has the advantage vs. a Tracer in OW2

Widow is only dominant on the maps she’s good on just like on live OW.

Yet most people here pretend to be all knowing.
The idea is the dumb part and refusal to discuss the topic is ignorance.

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Valorant allows for aces (1v5) and it’s called tactical but overwatch allows for 1v2s and it’s called cod, truly a society we live in.

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I want this on a t-shirt.

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Tactics are not the same thing as strategy, although they are related.

Strategy describes a macro plan of action

Tactics describe the moment to moment choices made to achieve a strategic end.

It is possible for a game to become less strategic while remaining tactical, and I think this is the case in OW2. While the fast paced game play means there’s a lot of moment to moment decision making about positioning, the loss of 2 players as well as the reduction in ability usage and ability variation means there are fewer things to consider when taking into account your overall strategy. For example, Sombra’s hack is still used tactically in OW2, but it’s strategic value in terms of disrupting shields and disabling flankers is reduced. The choice of who gets hacked matters less now because there are fewer variables to consider.

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There is technically a difference between tactical and strategical.
Games like valorant are mostly about micro actions, rarely about the macro aspect.
OW has much more strategical potential into it, because the game can theoretically be played in totally different ways, even within the same match.

I thought you’d get it without any more explanation.
Tracer is just an example.
And Tracer is still a top pick in OWL even if she’s less deadly.

But the idea is, the solo carry potential is more noticeable than ever.

That’s not the actual problem in what you said.
If a specific plat player pretends to be all knowing, then it’s that specific plat player’s fault.
That doesn’t allow us to say “shut up all of you plat players, you know nothing about the game. Reach GM before you’re allowed to share your opinions”

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Strategy matters even more in OW2 because making a mistake early on can have significant impact as the fight starts to move out of your favor. You need to know exactly where you want to engage, why you want to be there, how to get there, and when to engage–failing to plan ahead results in getting d-dunked by a team with a better strategy, and the loser coming here to complain that OW2 is “too deathmatchy”.

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That’s right.
The strategy is to spam everything at supports and kill before being killed.
Kinda like Counter Strike.
Another 120 IQ take by Kobold.

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It will never change. Things to always bear in mind:

  • Most people do not play OW as often as the hardcores, maybe a couple hours a week. These people equate all to getting medals.

  • Most people only play to get elims and pogs, they do not care if the team wins or loses, they stare at that elim number

  • Half the people and by proxy half the players are below average intelligence - need I say more

  • 2/3 are 20 or younger, so their brains literally are not done developing - the prefrontal cortex responsible for self-control and planning is simply underdeveloped - these are the people who simply will not group up and blow their c/ds racing out of spawn

Bear these things in mind always.

I think on the strategy and death-matchy part this is more true than OW1, but in OW2 it shifted the relative SR level up where on has to be even more tight about playing within the team.

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It is objectively more strategic and deathmatchy is not really a definable word, but the problem is that a lot of players do not know the strategy yet so the game looks like S1-S3 OW and will probably not settle in until ranked comes in and the meta can trickle down properly.

Meanwhile your description is Tank is nonsense. Tank has very specific strategies depending on the enemy comp and the map and the same can be applied to DPS. Sometimes you have to make a lot of snap choices because there are more likely to be multiple points of attack compared to OW1 where there was generally 1.

I am slightly concerned by the amount of people who were seemingly in the beta just completely not understanding how to play OW2 on a fundamental level. This take, a take earlier calling Orisa and JQ by far the best tanks (they are 2 of the 4 worst) and I am just confused what people are seeing and experiencing that is so different from how OW functions.

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??? I never said tank didn’t play differently depending on the map? No s*** people pick different heroes depending on the map? The solo tank doesn’t need to plan things with people like they would with their co-tank in OW1 is what i’m saying.

I’m confused if everything there is addressed to me because I never said anything about either of those tanks here, but I do recall saying orisa was terrible in response to the guy who said she was the best tank lol

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I jusr hope in ow2 you still get rewarded for having more teamplay and teamwork rayher then the other team

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People actually think throwing down a dozen shields and playing peek a boo for like 10 minutes is strategy.

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OW1 strategy > OW2 strategy

OW2 removes tons of tactics with the removal of 2 tanks and OW1 already contains everything you can do in OW2 and more.

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If the argument is that OW2 is “less strategic” than OW1 then, by definition, there must be well less strategy but the opposite is true. In OW1 you moved as a semi uniform blob sometimes sending 1-2 to hit their backline.

To describe my last game of OW1 (well last high level as I have played an odd game here and there trying to derust) standard double shield with a Hanzo/Echo. We poked shields until they went down and then walked on them and killed them. There was no deeper strategy than that. If the comp had a Tracer instead of Hanzo/Echo she would have harassed the backline while we broke the shields walked on them and killed them while they tried (and failed) to do the same thing.

Meanwhile in OW2 I am worried about diving and counter diving while at the same time trying to keep an eye on the objective while also trying to secure the vital pick that can swing the fight. It is far less structured than OW1 which in turn makes it more strategic because you do not have that structure that everything neatly falls into so you have a LOT more decisions to make.

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