This is a non-example. You’re comparing a tank to a DPS, which is like comparing apples to oranges.
And if you’re talking about open queue then god save your soul
Yeah, that seems like a good way of thinking about it too. But then it gets a bit complicated, because a lot of the complaints about “low skilled” heroes are from people in high ranks complaining that a hero they think is “low skilled” is working well in their elo. Sometimes that’s just because the hero is doing really well in all elos (so it is not doing “better in high ranks”), but I don’t know that that’s always the case. So I do think that even this paradigm would result in different conclusions about what are “high skill” and “low skill” heroes than what the conventional wisdom is.
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You want the easy answer to this?
Hard heroes are any heroes that the average players struggling playing in your average game and you wish that person should just swap into something else “easier”, yeah, that thought crossed your mind.
That’s all it is.
It is though, if everyone knows the map well enough and how to use terrain, that is entirely what it is, take tracer low health and blink with recall, to be good with her requires you to be good at target acquisition, because every time you blink or recall that delay between response to target buts you at a disadvantage, it is why she is hard and it is that slow response time i exploit when fighting her… Ball and doom are high skilled, cause of graple mostly and dooms jump and winston prolly medium skill because his leaps and making useful landings…
Low skill and high skill is determined by where the ceiling is and the work required to achieve it… low skill heroes can get you closer to the ceiling of potential of the hero, while highskill heroes you need to work at…
There are plenty of zero aim heroes > widow. Thou most people seemingly do not want to go there and make excuses, even now with all the widow nerfs, which in part is hilarious, but also sad.
Removing every hero seems kinda counterproductive, thou it would remove any pseudo arguments for people to hide behind and simply “git gud” be hard to deny for even the craziest fanatics.
On topic high mechanical skill is not everything in this game and it has been designed that way. Thou again - this point can not be stressed enough - it does not mean low mechanical skill should be rewarded over high skill. This has been pointed out by tons of people and yes I hate to say it, even Samito. He is a top 500 player after all, you can not deny his input and honestly he is A LOT less bias than lots of people like flats(what a parrot) per example.
Than everyone just runs around playing lower mech skill heroes, which usually ends the same. Bad players lose, but good mech skilled players have a boring time with the game.
Right, i just watched a few WC matches. I didnt think the game would sink so low that Bastion of all heroes is being played at one of the highest level.
Truly fascinating.
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Absolutely. But the thing is, I think conventional wisdom of what is high skill and low skill was never right.
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I would divide characer-specific skill and general skill.
General skill like positioning, awareness and knowing/predicting what my team/enemies are doing can be utilised regardless of characters, and OW hugely emphasized this type of skill.
But sadly, OW has not much room for the character-specific skill, cause you have only 2 very simple abilities, and thus most character-specific skill is related to mechanical skill after all.
So, there exists high-skill/low-skill characters for me and that is mostly determined by the mechanical skill. But, the character-specific skill is usually overshadowed by general skill in this game. So, if you have good general skill, you could achieve high tiers with most characters.
Some people say about game sense characters, but most of their game sense characters are just characters don’t need mechanical skill, and not say about how it is. I’m pretty sure people will call them no more game sense character when the devs decided to change the character requires precision aim and nothing else.
The funny thing is the “skilled hero’s” often require better game sense.
Most of the “low aim” hero’s have a lot of get out of jail free cards
Moira, mercy (lots of escape) Mei (ice block)
Ect.
Escapes make hero’s easier to play. Like kiri is easier bc of tp so is tracer. Where mccree you either hit your shots or you are heavily punished for poor positioning.
But. People that play low heros also play hero’s that can’t be punished well for bad positioning ect.
So they are just all around easier
I think there are genuinely “game sense characters” because some heroes simply require more game sense to play well than others. I don’t think it’s just that people talk about non-mechanically-intensive heroes as game sense heroes even though they don’t require more game sense. As I said in the OP, there’s heroes with much simpler gameplay loops and decision trees than other heroes, and/or ones that are not nearly as required to anticipate the other team’s actions, track cooldowns and ultimates, etc. And this ultimately means that some heroes require more game sense than others. For instance, I think it is unequivocally true that Reinhardt requires substantially more game sense to play than Widow. Widow requires more mechanical skill than Reinhardt, though. So which one is a “higher skill” hero? It’s not so clear. And if forced to say one, I’d probably say Reinhardt.
one i would rather a diamond but i would rather a rein over ash any day if they have to be silver all a silver ash in diamond will be good for is ult while rein can be good for being a shield and his ult
and rein is harder to master then ash is
I wouldn’t say some require more game sense, cause most of them, if not all, are just general game sense as of most other characters, and not character-specific. They require the same general game sense, but the difference is, the value those game sense characters can get/lose from the general game sense is absurdly high, simply b/c they have no other skill check mechanism. It’s like FPS and FPS with aimbot. If you play a noraml FPS in a complex map, you need all those general game sense and mechanical skill, and the value of general game sense is not too high. But when the players have an aimbot like S76’s ult(the target should be in your screen), mechanical skill is nothing, and the value of general game sense becomes the highest.
I really expected that the devs implement character-specific game sense by adding more (not too general/luck/spam)abilities in OW2, but yeah.
their are definitely are heroes who need more base game sense then others
i too divide things in to general skill and hero mastery but the one area you miss out on is not realizing that complexity in the kit can be deceiving.
a hero might have 2 abilities but its how you use them that changes everything.
anyone can use a tracer blink but not everyone can use it properly. understanding the exact distance the blink will let you travel, being able too blink without looking in the direction in a cluttered area, pacing your blinks so you are never out in open space with no escape and so on.
this is true for most heroes in the game. winston has to “aim” his jump so he always lands on the target, booping them and dealing dmg to them. but he also has to do the melee cancel to get that extra + 30.
knowing how to swing reins hammer is another big thing that will show the differences between good reins and bad reins.
yes some heroes are very simple, but the kit mastery goes beyond the obvious aspects of the kit.
and leads to using things in unique and cleaver ways.
and this is what determines if a hero is easy to play or hard.
heroes like moira and mercy have no unique tech they need to learn. its all very basic stuff that you’ll pick up within a few matches of playin those heroes
meanwhile heroes like winston, genji, tracer, echo, pharah, lucio, rein, ball, doomfist…ect ect.
all have things you have to master to play them properly that goes beyond aim.
A problem right now with characters requiring less mechanical skill is that they’re also often characters that are easier to abuse. Moira has fade, Mercy can fly like an F-22 Raptor, Mei has a wall to escape and an invulnerability that also heals her. Sure, if these characters had more depth to them then you could argue they require more overall skill even though they lack mechanical skill, but as it is, they require less mechanical skill as well as game sense.
A Moira, Mercy or Mei has tools to nullify their mistakes, while a Genji and Tracer have less powerful escape tools. Genji’s deflect can be bypassed and stunned out of, Tracer can run out of blinks and be a sitting duck. These two characters require significantly more mechanical skill than the first three, but they’re also given less potent escape abilities.
So while it is true that there can be a character that doesn’t require as much mechanical skill but requires more game sense, that character doesn’t exist in the game right now.
When it comes to “high skill” or “low skill”, I like to consider the effort required to get a similar value. If you need a lot of effort to get the same value as someone using less effort but matching your value, then I would say you’re on the “higher” skill hero while they’re not. And this is also why certain matchups feel horrible to play into, prime example would be Zarya v Dva, Genji v Moira, so on and so forth.
It is subjective. There is genuinely no use trying to find a consensus as there is no common ground to be found.
I believe Mercy is the hardest hero to play in the game. That is a very unpopular sentiment because a lot of people that literally cannot play Mercy with any degree of competence would tell you that she is actually the easiest hero ever.
There is also what I call the “main bias” which is extremely common. Widowmaker players believe Widow is the most difficult hero to play despite the fact that they should probably not main a hero they struggle with. Genji players are the same. I used to one trick Widow and I absolutely did not do it because I thought she was hard.
It is literally counter-intuitive to main a hero that you find challenging as, even if it was once true, they should no longer be challenging once you learned them. The challenge was learning them, not playing them. Despite that, they will use this “logic” to demand the game bends to their will. “I struggled with Genji back in 2016, so they should buff him!” Utterly nonsensical.
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This is such a blatantly curated question and conclusion. Lol.
So what about Soldier and Moira? Would you want a Diamond Moira and a Silver Soldier or a Silver Moira and a DIamond Soldier?
How about Doomfist and Wifeleaver? You want a silver Doom or a silver Weaver?
Mechanically demanding and mechanically easier heroes can both be desirable to have on ones team in the hands of a good player. YOu are just blatantly biased.
As he mostly does, the Buddha speaks wise here.
Frequently, the lower skill heroes have less impact on the battlefield, even at low ranks. Mercy provides almost zero offense, and damage boost is mostly wasted in the metal ranks unless, say, you’re aware enough to prioritize boosting a hammer swinging Rein over a Soldier who will miss 70% of their shots when they’re not ulting. Moira has a great HoT, but it sucks against big burst damage and her escape/dueling skill is entirely predicated on low rank players not knowing what to do OR hitting their shots.
It’s why the “low skill” heroes don’t sweep the t500 charts. It’s not because of some fuctional idea of “honor” or “pride” against playing those heroes, it’s that being top of the top on those heroes is stupid hard. People who can take Mei ir Junkrat to t500 should be celebrated, not scorned.
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The idea that a “high skill” hero is allowed to be OP is ridiculous.
If i’m a high skill player, i dont suddenly get better at the game if i select a different hero, so why should my power level go up to broken levels?
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This is actually a very good post.
The average player, no matter the rank, is usually a very low informed individual in regards of the environment he is on.
So if you tell them this game is a FPS, they think Aiming and Eliminations are everything.
Althought, this also applies to any other genre.
Racing, Building, Flying, Puzzles, etc.
The problem appears when you have a multidisciplinary game such as Overwatch.
And the excercise that applies here is the same as a classroom with different animals.
You gotta work with them, you gotta teach them, but its not very smart to ask a Dolphin to go fetch fruits from a tree; just like neither it is to tell a Giraffe, don’t let that baby seal escape! xD
We have this problem because most players are uncapable of making the abstraction from their own perspective.
Everyone thinks everything would be better if we were all Giraffes; or Dolphins.
And this translates in game to seeing people not understanding the role they are filling.
.
Tanks fail because they believe they are just picking a random big guy with tons of armor so they can 1v5 everything.
DPS fails because they don’t understand that not everything is about pressing W and going pewpew.
And supports fail, because they also think they are just another DPS with a more oriented survivability toolkit.
This is the reason why specialists will always perform better than flex players.
But the sad reality behind OW, is that in most cases, by switching heros, the most common of Cassidys can counter the very best of Tracers; with little effort.
In a bigger picture, in most FPS, we call skill to just farm eliminations; and deny being skill diffed by any other role.
Oh yeah, when we get killed by another role, we blast the forums with all sorts of rants xD
TL;DR
When the guy shows up to the football match with a couple of gloves under his arm, you just won the match.
Because 90% of the amateur players are just focused, and “trained”, to think, and do, nothing but shooting the ball into the net.
Even the most popular and known sport in the world, has incredible issues for understanding every player role on the field.
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