This is a question to all the old-timer players who’ve been playing Overwatch since it came out:
It’s not here yet, but what what are you most looking forward to in the next Overwatch Classic? They’re doing Moth Meta this time.
For me, I’m really looking forward to ult economy being a thing again. Ults back then came online roughly every two fights, which made it a lot harder for teams to build or maintain a one-sided steamroll. I miss the spicy extra layer of strategy ults added to the game, and how they used to foster a “Never Give Up! We can still win this!” mentality.
I’m not looking forward to Moth Mercy. I was a hardcore Mercy 1.0 main before the Moth Rework, and I was heartbroken by the dev’s decision to dumb down Mercy’s resurrect ultimate into a single-target cooldown… I don’t care how powerful that iteration of Mercy is, I’m not playing the friggin Moth again. It’s nothing but bad memories and bitter disappointment to me.
I am however, really looking forward to playing Symmetra 2.0 and Torbjorn 2.0 again. Bring on the armor packs and teleporters, I’m gonna basebuild so hard!
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Honestly, not looking forward to it at all. Played it many years ago. The first owc they did being the first patch made sense, a blast from the past, where it all started. I could excuse the awful balance, since the game just came out, and we were having tons of fun there not caring about balance. But moth meta is them just picking a terribly unbalanced point in time where a hero was completely required. A hero who denied kills reactively. Didn’t even need to be proactive like bap lamp.
I can understand mercy players having fun being totally broken, but aside from that, meh. I don’t like the direction of choosing polarizing points in time because something was broken. Just like I wouldn’t want to have a launch brig or launch sigma owc.
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I honestly would rather have an Overwatch classic that lets us play the midpoint between “Launch overwatch” and “Moth meta”.
Far enough in that every hero feels much better to play then they did at launch (thanks to lots of QoL updates), but BEFORE Mercy got turned into that detestable cheesy moth.
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I’m honestly not looking forward to it either to be honest. Even as a Mercy main. I also always much preferred the rework with the rez then how it used to be. Maybe I’m weird, idk.
I’ll probably hardly play it unless my friends want to. Otherwise you can fine me in the 6v6 testing playlist in hopes that makes a permanent return lol
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I’d love to play anywhere between s2-5. S6 was broken mercy. S3 and some of s4 was triple tank, so not the most ideal. But s2 and s5 I’d love to see.
Not sure if you mean rez with a cast time or not. As moth meta, assuming we are talking about the first patch of s6, was just after her rework. So no mass rez, but normal rez was instant, and she could do it like 3 times during valk.
Ohhh I thought this next OWC was when they still had her Mass Rez Ultimate. MY BAD.
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Not looking forward to this. It was broken then and will be broken now.
Nope, should be right when she got reworked, since that’s when she was hard meta, and got nerfed for 11 months before no longer being the meta support. Patch before she was mediocre, people didn’t like her mass rez with invulnerability, but she wasn’t meta at high ranks. Was Lucio and zen meta during s5. S6 turned to mercy zen for a year.
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My hope for it is that there is an earnable player title that’s just “moth” 
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I actually quite liked Rez with invulnerability at the time… Although that was because I had quite a bit of experience with Rez without invulnerability, and was frustrated with how pre-invul rez it was basically a suicide button a lot of the time.
Looking back on it, I wish that the devs had simply given Mercy her GA slingshot/superjump moment tech earlier. It would have fixed Mercy 1.0’s survivability issues a lot more effectively than just making her immortal when she casts her ult, and we could have avoided the “hide n Rez” scandal.
For the readers who don’t know about the hide-n-rez scandal: The short version is that there used to be a well-known SR exploit that rewarded stat-padding. If you regularly got at least 4 people with your ultimate whenever you used it, you’d get higher SR gains for winning and lower SR penalties for losing.
It caused a lot of degenerate behavior where players would leave fights for extended periods of time to try and set up “the perfect ult,” and players who did it with Mercy were especially hated. While most cases of “Ugh, Mercy hid during the fight and only came out to cast rez at the end” was actually just players not noticing a clearly-visible Mercy (at least until Mercy shoots or resurrects someone), the few Mercy players who DID actually throw fights in hopes of getting a huge rez were infuriating to play with and against.
The long version
Trolls throwing fights on Mercy just so they can get a “huge rez” had always been a meme in classic Overwatch, but it was almost never worth it due to how it was literally throwing and Mercy always got killed almost immediately after a big Rez.
When Mercy got buffed to be invulnerable while casting rez, trolling teams with hide-n-rez was still throwing… BUT now the troll could “get away with it” (aka not get killed immediately afterwards). Which ended up emboldening some of them to use hide-n-rez to exploit the “performance based” SR algorithm’s massive blind spot when it came to calculating gains/losses for Mercy players in competitive: most serious Mercy players didn’t try to get huge rezzes. They went for small 1-3 man tempo rezzes most of the time, because it was more efficient and posed less risk to the players being revived … So when a Mercy got a 4-5 man “mass Rez,” even if they threw the fight to get it, the SR algorythm only saw a player getting a Big Number in a rank where everyone else was getting Small Numbers.
This effectively created a SR farming exploit. Even though the hide-n-rez trolls were losing more often than they won (which isn’t surprising, it’s a throw strat after all), the SR system gave them massive bonuses for winning and little to no SR penalty for losing. And since “performance based SR” was used at ALL ranks back then, “fake Mercy” players were able to use the hide-n-rez exploit to climb into ranks they had no business being in… In one particularly infamous case, there was a Fake Mercy who got into grandmasters with a 30% win rate.
One of the worst things about the whole debacle is how it poisoned the well on the concept of an area-of-effect rez. Even to this very day, you can’t mention multirez without someone unironically calling hide-n-rez OP and accusing Mercy players of "just wanting to hide in a corner and wait for everyone to die.’
Is release brig next? That would be something since it’s always talked about and many of us never experienced it.
I’m mostly looking forward to hearing the old voicelines and seeing the old 2d hero icons again, the hero’s were just better written back then imo. The new hero icons look like something from a mobile game, the old icons had more of a comic book like art style to them.
Doomfist came out two months prior to the Moth rework, sooo… that.
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Meh.
IMO the best version of OW1 was the last year before they turned off the OW1 servers to launch OW2.
It was very well balanced. Shields were nerfed and reasonable and it obviously had the most heroes in OW1.
There were other fun times with earlier patches, but not as good as the last year of OW1, so would rather just jump to that.
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It wasn’t the reason Mercy was so powerful at the time, but my favorite part of it was how fast you were during Valkyrie. I’d love to get that speed back.
Honestly? I’m not. I was glad when those old metas were gone. I think its fun for new players to see how it was, but as a pre-day1 player, F all that nonesense
Brig was released around a year after Mercy’s rework, so no. Given Brigitte’s infamy as the hero who defined the GOATS meta, however, I have no doubt that we’ll be able to play Launch Brig in a future OWC patch.
I actually quite liked Launch Brigitte. She was basically a mini-tank with healing capabilities, which was a godsend for exhausted support mains everywhere & addressed many of our biggest pain points at the time:
1: There were several “fine, I’ll do it myself” support options to choose from if your DPS teammates were bad at their job… but if your tank sucked, you were just SOL.
2: If a flanker was bullying you, you had zero counterswap options. “Dive heroes” hard-countered literally every healer in the game for a very long time, which made playing support feel absolutely miserable. Tracer in particular was especially feared and hated by support players.
3: By the time Brigitte came out, Overwatch’s support and tank player populations were in the process of collapsing (long story, don’t ask)… Which made being stuck on a team of “Oops, All Dps Mains” and stressing out over not having enough tanks on your team (or any tanks at all) depressingly common.
Launch Brigitte wasn’t a silver bullet against these issues, but she DID ameliorate them quite a bit. If your tank was scared of touching the objective, Launch Briggite could march in and do it herself. If Tracer was picking on you, Launch Brigitte was a great counterswap option. If your team needed more tanks, but no one else was willing to swap, Launch Brigitte could fill in as a pseudo-tank.
I don’t remember what version of Sombra was back then but I used to one trick her. So that will be fun.