Do you lean towards mechanical skills?
Do you lean towards game sense?
Are you someone who emphasizes both?
Basically, what do you perceive as “skill?”
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To be able to play competitively in mid or high ranks. You can use game sense, or mechanics, or a combination of both…it doesn’t matter. As long as you’re able to play competitively and be an asset to your team and not a liability.
(By “competitively” I mean not get stomped routinely, but instead have close games and a decent win ratio)
Someone who doesn’t suck
First, I’m a tank main, so I acknowledge that I am biased towards game sense as skill. I feel having both is important for any class. I think of mechanical as offense and game sense as defense.
If you play most of the heroes without mechanical skill you will end up not doing to much healing or damage.
If you play with no game sense your more prone to getting flanked and taking bad positions, reducing your teams defense.
Both mechanical and game sense skills are required to be successful in my opinion.
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I think most people get the gut reaction that there’s no skill when they see someone like Mercy healing someone or Brigitte hitting you with the flail. Then you see someone like Widow landing 5 headshots in a row and the skill is immediately apparent.
There are a lot of factors that make game sense more of an invisible skill. There’s a reason that Brigitte is flailing you for 3 feet away and killing you before she dies, but it takes a lot more effort to appreciate the positioning and planning that went into that play.
At the end of the day though, that doesn’t mean that Widow landing headshots isn’t a skill that I appreciate. I think what truly defines how difficult a hero is to play is their win rate. If most people that play your hero are winning, chances are they’re easier to play.
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Everything is a skill. Literally everything. If people want to climb, they are lowkey more likely to do it by teaching their teammates how to play with a positive attitude. It is the most underrated skill in a team based game… Communication. Who would have guessed? Anyways, I don’t have those skills. I could never mask my annoyance realistically.
I am smart enough to not misplay often and my mechanical skill is relatively high for a console player, so you know, I can usually handle my own. Winning on my own? Nah. Not possible with how often I give up at the first sign of a team that does not function independently.
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To me, skill is a combination of;
- Mechanical ability (both aim and practicable movement methods/combos/etc.)
- Game sense and knowledge
- Positioning
- Decision making and ability management (this ties into point 2)
You have to be excellent at all of these to truly be a skilled player. Every hero in the game needs some parts of the above, and thus no heroes in the game are truly “skill-less”. Certain heroes might need less of one and more of the other. For example, a hero like Brig needs to be skilled at positioning appropriately and managing her resources, whereas Widow doesn’t need to manage her abilities very much at all. On the flipside, Brig’s mechanical requirements are limited, but Widow’s are very high.
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Everything is skill, and I try to practice positioning, game sense, mechanics, aim, etc…
That said, some things are easier than others. Headshotting someone with widow from half a map away is MUCH harder than, for example, positioning with Ana.
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True skill is learning all you can about a game that could make you better and then using that knowledge effectively in a real world setting. Learning to aim, learning the map, learning strats and actually using them is skill and I like that alot.
Even though I don’t think lucio boops are very skillful mechanically because holding one button to wall climb and timing jumps into one button boops sounds alot harder than it actually is. However, strategically so, Lucio’s have to be ahead of the game. They have to time their ride around long perimeters predicting where the enemy will be when he is boopable and then get the easy mechanics off. Thats why even though Lucio may be the easiest champ in the game to play he has advanced strategies that make up for his other flaws making him quite the skillful character despite the mechanics.
You can have mechanical skill in any game but knowing what to do in OW is a completely different story. I still see anas going ahead of the tanks or ppl still dying on spawn gate junkrat mine. 
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People think I won’t do it because it ain’t 2016 anymore, but I still do it, and I get kills off of it like every other time… No joke.
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Skill is simply the inverse of viability.
Go to Overbuff and sort by GM pickrates. Scroll to the bottom. See those heroes with 0.1% pickrates? Those are the high-skill heroes. They have such a low pickrate because so few people are able to play them effectively in GM. They simply demand too much skill from the player.
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Whatever it is, I don’t have it.
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who ever click button better master of skill
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OP realizes it is a mixture of many factors. And you guys are reciting that back to him lol.
They’re asking you guys to simplify it to a spectrum of aim vs. brain. Where aim is a catchall for actions/sec, aim%/tracking, predict/react speed, …and brain is cd value, ult economy, combo cds/ults, macro/map util, value added, etc.
To me when I started OW (beta), I assumed I would be completely outclassed and outcompeted micro/mechanically in other games, so I was looking for an fps/moba hybrid - be it arena shooter or hero shooter. I played builders or supports, because I knew I was aging-out of esports from an fps/micro perspective and most games like this braincap at depth4 (you can always aim better but your brainpower sort of doesn’t matter at a certain point).
After many years of OW I prefer more aim/apm/micro differentiation. It’s faster and brain stuffs is easily copied off of youtube content. So I would settle on that 70/30 kind of design. Some room for moba/brains, but the lion’s share emphasis on fps skills.
And you can always cater to a broad audience by having various heroes viable at different levels of micro/macro breakpoints. I would love more brain scaling, but it just doesn’t seem to work - this isn’t the genre for checkmate in 37.
I would compare that to (non-e)sports like soccer or basket ball. Mechanical skillz are like the physical strength/precision/reaction time/speed/etc. in those ball games. It is the most basic and fundamental one in FPS games. And if people have similar level of mechanical skillz, then the game sense plays a role.
Mechanical skillz are hugely different between avg. people, so it is really important for normal tiers. But there is a human limitation, so people at highest tiers have about the similar mechanical skillz, and game sense plays a huge role there like in OWL IMO.
People say some heroes need more game sense, who are arguably less demanding mechanically, but I don’t think so. Game sense is very generic, and all heroes need about the same level of game sense.
For the strategic aspects, You don’t have many abilities and the game is very fast. Also it allows instakill. I don’t think OW provides much room for strategy. Game sense and faster reaction are more important IMO.
Not dying
Communication
STRATEGY (so many players lack this)
Great positioning
Awareness of your team’s positions
awareness of the opponent’s positions
Ultimate tracking
Cooldown tracking
Discipline (not wasting cooldowns or ultimates)
Moving as a unit
Embracing all of the BS present in the game and trying your best not to get tilted about it.
Relevant application of damage (basically reducing the amount of trash damage your team deals)
Anyone can click heads, so that’s of lesser importance in my book. It’s still useful, but there’s a reason I describe low Platinum players as “golds who can actually aim.”
It’s actually dumb how often it still works, heck sometimes I’ve called it out and people still died to it
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Your ability to fulfill your role (tank, dps, or healer) while focusing on the objective bc that’s all that matters at the end of the match
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I have complete potato aim and rely mostly on my game sense to have an impact.
Game sense somehow came to me naturally while playing, aim unfortunately didn’t and I’d rather have fun playing the game than feeling like I am working while practicing mechanical skill 