I personally think reinhardt is the only viable main tank. Might be why matches feel bad without him.
When the shield nerfs arrived a few months ago sigma was obliterated with little compensation.
Orisa was given 50 extra armour and power was shifted from her shield into fortify, which was later nerfed into a worse state than before and now she feels terrible too. The changes made orisa/sigma much more dependable on each other.
Reinhardt has barely been touched.
I dunno, Overbuff’s stats for tank pickrates in GM this week almost match exactly what they showed on stream. Hmm, I just feel like if OWL’s pickrates are being taken into account as well, Mei and Reaper should have shown up somewhere.
Wooo, no widow! Now we just need to do that in all the other game modes too.
i was looking forward to see how echo played against mccree/widow…guess we will never find out because they keep rotating the same heroes out every week. very ‘smart’ blizzard. this hero ban thing has been a complete shambles.
BANS SHOULD BE USER SIDE, IT SHOULD NEVER BE OKAY FOR DEVS TO CHOOSE WHAT YOU PLAY
Echo and her counters will just keep alternating bans.
Blizzard has addressed this multiple times:
Scott Mercer explains in the article that talks about Hero Pools:
Learn more: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/news/23323791/mixing-up-the-meta-scott-mercer-on-hero-pools-in-season-21
Understand, I am providing this to explain why this is the case with Overwatch to expand the conversation, and you do not have to agree with it.
they can give whatever reason they want, banning the most popular hitscans every other week is not ‘shaking up the meta’, is just annoying your playerbase. thats not even touching the fact picking bans based on RANKED play is ridiculous bad idea. ranked and owl are nothing alike.
I do believe the chances are pretty random, just not that increased pickrate has a significant effect on increases your chance to be banned, because if that was the case ana would definitely be banned since you can’t get much higher pickrate.
Also, i like to zone in on the support category and multiply by 2, rather than all heroes and multiply by 6. It gives a more accurate representation of pickrate
why even have bans for owl when they don’t even reflect the owl meta? mei is the most played dps in the game but because blizzard literally doesn’t take her pickrate into account she wasn’t eligible to be banned
what an awful way to make a system do very little to spice up or address any of the balance problems of the game. all bans do is remove pubstompers and keep the actual problematic heroes free of scrutiny
“they shake up the meta” - scott mercer
is mercy meta?
To an extent yes, because her pickrate did meet the minimum required threshold to qualify for possible removal.
I would argue that pick rate was heavily inflated by Echo’s introduction, Ashe’s recent buffs and the lack of the hitscan heros in the last two weeks. It’s all artificially inflated for those two weeks while her actual pick rate remains very low in the current balance of overwatch when you don’t account bans. It just seems wrong that she got banned while Ana stays with an almost 100% pick rate (as high as mercy’s during the moth meta I must add)
The system has some very big flaws with it
It would be nice if they skipped 1 week of bans (after new hero release), so the ‘real’ meta got to show itself.
I am a Widow/McCree main, I play those heroes because I find them to be enjoyable and ultimately that’s why people play games, to have fun.
Now… how do you think people feel when the source of said fun is locked out of the game every two weeks? because McCree and Widow have been banned in every single opportunity they’ve had except maybe 1 week?
I am not a one trick, I play mostly Widow and McCree because they’re fun and I perform my best when playing them, I also flex out to multiple other heroes when the situation calls for it but I do so because I want to win not because I enjoy doing it. However… with the hero pools I am locked out of my favourite hero time and time again so not only do I have to sit through 10-15 minute queue for a game that might not last as long as the queue itself now I can’t even play the heroes that make me enjoy the game.
I ask you this Wyoming… not as a mod but as a player, would you stick around a game that is constantly preventing you from playing the heroes you enjoy? because I sure as hell wont if this abomination of hero pool does not change.
That’s actually a really fair point. I guess you must be right or Mei would have most certainly been eligible. I guess I underestimated the tank diversity.
Jeff talked about it a bit more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/g4kioz/this_weeks_hero_bans_do_not_make_sense_the_system/fo0n2jt/
“we made the decision to base the picks off of a more stable environment – a segment of our high-end players from the live game.”
which sounds like they don’t factor in OWL playrates at all.
Here is where I say almost exactly what you are saying, a few days ago
It doesn’t matter the whys, if a hero has a certain pickrate threshold that week they can be banned.
The whys don’t matter, and that is why the system has massive flaws.
Not really. It’s the most fair way to do things since any hero can be eligible under the right conditions rather than just the ones favored by high end players as a matter of enjoyment and impact.
If a given reason is unlikely to make a hero consistently eligible, they won’t be banned nearly as often as the more powerful heroes.
I’m annoyed Mercy and Wrecking Ball are banned too but at least it’s a fair system now instead of the random one we had before.