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I just got back into playing this game since the Halloween event started. My desperate need for that Mercy Witch skin has shown how much I hate the randomized loot system

Anyway, I've been playing competitive and it's become clear to me that:

The 2 DPS, 2 Tanks, 2 Healers is a rock solid formation. There is absolutely zero reason to deviate from this in comp.

Widowmaker is not even worth playing anymore. I've seen exactly ONE widow in dozens of matches of any kind now.

All of the defense characters except Junkrat and any support that can't heal (like Symmetra) are utterly useless.

If you're going to pick any sniper, pick Hanzo because the hitboxes are ridiculous. 

Soldier 76, Genji and Pharah are by far the best offense. Tracer and McCree are completely useless.

Game is still fun as shit, though. 

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Two nights ago, I had:

  • A 22-kill streak, 5 golds, and POTG as Widowmaker on Anubis defense. Enemy team didn't even cap the first point.
  • 15 kill streak, 5 golds, and POTG as Symmetra, defense on Dorado. Team was stopped well before the second checkpoint.
  • Solid win on Nepal with a team consisting of 1 Lucio and 5 Tracers -- one of which was me. Don't remember how many golds, but one of the other Tracers got POTG.

My sister-in-law also got 5 golds as Bastion on Numbani defense. Solid win for us there too.

You not knowing how to play a character =/= character being "useless".

But yes, game is still fun.

EDIT: 'Nother funny match: We lost to a full team of McCrees, defense on Route 66. Best quote of the night: "THAT'S HOW THE WEST WAS WON"

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"i was playing and it was like this so that's the meta"
"no i was playing and it was like this so that's the meta" 

:<

On 9/22/2016 at 11:26 PM, Newt said:

My experience with hanzo is pretty dissimilar to yours. The arrow speed buff helped him out quite a bit, and I don't have a lot of problems in the near game 1v1 except vs tracer, genji, mei, and reinhardt. Scatter arrow can 0-100 just about the entire cast, and his ult charges at a really dumb rate. I've found he's best on payload maps (attacking and defending), because you have mobile cover or an easy target. The vision is also useful for setting up headshots; doubly so on flanking areas.

His problem is that he isn't a 'sniper' even though he's billed as one. Comparing him to widowmaker/ana doesn't make a lot of sense because he doesn't do the same things. His kit is built for area denial, but on most maps junkrat is just better at that.

Have you tried just.. playing him differently? It sounds like you're just hiding behind a wall at distance and shooting arrows, which doesn't work nearly as well in my experience.

I think you might have misinterpreted my post, because you're talking about viability, strength, etc. I'm not saying I don't find him strong or viable, I'm saying the playstyle in which he's most effective isn't very fun for me to play. I like to play him as infiltration (so the opposite of a sniper, not what you thought), using vision and scatter in corridors, getting behind lines and getting surprise kills on people. That's not how you're supposed to play him, and he's less effective that way, but I like it more, and wish it was more viable. I am not asserting that is the direction Blizzard should take him. I simply would enjoy it. That's all I'm saying.

And yes I know I could just play Genji. That's not the point, I like Hanzo's kit more. :P

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3 hours ago, DusK said:

Two nights ago, I had:

  • A 22-kill streak, 5 golds, and POTG as Widowmaker on Anubis defense. Enemy team didn't even cap the first point.
  • 15 kill streak, 5 golds, and POTG as Symmetra, defense on Dorado. Team was stopped well before the second checkpoint.
  • Solid win on Nepal with a team consisting of 1 Lucio and 5 Tracers -- one of which was me. Don't remember how many golds, but one of the other Tracers got POTG.

My sister-in-law also got 5 golds as Bastion on Numbani defense. Solid win for us there too.

You not knowing how to play a character =/= character being "useless".

But yes, game is still fun.

EDIT: 'Nother funny match: We lost to a full team of McCrees, defense on Route 66. Best quote of the night: "THAT'S HOW THE WEST WAS WON"

I said absolutely nothing about "me knowing how to play a character" and the fact that you're good as Widow doesn't override any obvious faults.

Why would I bother playing as Widowmaker, who requires a far greater level of skill (especially post-nerf) to use effectively than Hanzo, who has better mobility, can see through walls too, better field of view, a better ult and it's waaaaay easier to score kills? Screw it, I'll just pick Hanzo. Ana is also a good choice as she can throw grenades, do damage OR heal.

McCree is hardly a threat post nerf; his only useful trick is the flashbang and roll. Tracer is just really fast, but super squishy. I rarely see Tracer anymore either. Pharah can fly and has an often game-changing ult and her "E" is the best means of dispersing opponents. 76 can sprint and throw down heals, Genji is super mobile and can deflect shots and Junkrat is far better suited to offense. 

The defense characters are pointless. Why have an immobile bastion, a torbjorn or a Mei, when you can have another healer or tank? In support, why bother with symmetra? She's the only one who can't heal and we all know how important healing is. If it's healing or armor, pick healing.

2 2 2 is a good strategy because you will always have two people dealing the damage, two that can take the damage and two that can heal the damage and each other. This eliminates a good portion of the cast in competitive play pretty quickly.

While typing this, I thought I'd google to see if it's just me. It's not — this is the legit strategy right now. Because as most users say, "It works".

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20748945519

 

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36 minutes ago, AngelCityOutlaw said:

I said absolutely nothing about "me knowing how to play a character" and the fact that you're good as Widow doesn't override any obvious faults.

Why would I bother playing as Widowmaker, who requires a far greater level of skill (especially post-nerf) to use effectively than Hanzo, who has better mobility, can see through walls too, better field of view, a better ult and it's waaaaay easier to score kills? Screw it, I'll just pick Hanzo. Ana is also a good choice as she can throw grenades, do damage OR heal.

McCree is hardly a threat post nerf; his only useful trick is the flashbang and roll. Tracer is just really fast, but super squishy. I rarely see Tracer anymore either. Pharah can fly and has an often game-changing ult and her "E" is the best means of dispersing opponents. 76 can sprint and throw down heals, Genji is super mobile and can deflect shots and Junkrat is far better suited to offense. 

The defense characters are pointless. Why have an immobile bastion, a torbjorn or a Mei, when you can have another healer or tank? In support, why bother with symmetra? She's the only one who can't heal and we all know how important healing is. If it's healing or armor, pick healing.

2 2 2 is a good strategy because you will always have two people dealing the damage, two that can take the damage and two that can heal the damage and each other. This eliminates a good portion of the cast in competitive play pretty quickly.

While typing this, I thought I'd google to see if it's just me. It's not — this is the legit strategy right now. Because as most users say, "It works".

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20748945519

 

I know you said nothing about you knowing how to play a character. That's the problem; you're bad with these characters, so you're assuming they're bad characters overall.

Hanzo is an easy pick for you because you (apparently) can't aim. It also probably helps that he's better in mid-range engagements than Widowmaker is. But you touched on why Widowmaker is "bad" in your first sentence: In order to be good at Widowmaker, you need to know how to aim. You don't, so you think she's bad. You don't understand that Widowmaker can effectively OHK lower-health players (Tracer, D.Va pilot) with a body shot when charged, and headshot kill literally every single character in the game except for the tanks, or even fire off one charged body shot and then a quick body shot to kill just about any character. But in order to do this, you need to be able to aim. Widowmaker is by far the most accuracy-dependent character in the game. If you can aim, you'll tear the other team apart. If you can't aim, you're -- as you put it -- useless. Players that can aim will tear it up as Widowmaker.

McCree is a massive threat to any fast-moving character (Genji, Tracer, Lucio) if his flashbang is on cooldown. If a Genji rounds the corner and faces a McCree that actually knows how to play, that Genji is dead. Flash and fan will kill literally any character with 250 health or less. That's what he's there for.

Tracer is fast, and that's her asset. Characters with a low rate of fire will get wrecked by a good Tracer. She's amazing at flanking snipers. I freaking hate when the enemy team has a good Tracer and I'm trying to play Widowmaker or Ana. Her damage is crazy as well; a single full unload of her guns will kill any sniper and support in the game, in addition to Junkrat, Soldier 76, Pharah, and Torbjorn. That kind of killing power is huge if a player knows how to utilize her mobility to mitigate damage or detection.

Why have an immobile Bastion? For fighting a team that feels like rolling heavy in mid-range characters. Hilariously enough, many of the characters you prefer are either hard or soft counters to Bastion. The exception would be Soldier 76; it'd have to be a pretty dumb Bastion to lose to Soldier, considering the most he can do to a turret form Bastion is spook it. If you put a Bastion in a good spot with a line of sight that's blocked off approaching, but along a crucial path (great for payload, think Dorado), Bastion can chew through enough people for an easy team kill.

Mei is a hard counter against Genji. No joke: I've never even come close to losing a fight with a Genji when I play Mei. The same can be said when fighting against Lucio and Tracer. Often, I'll end up taking on a Soldier 76 when his missiles are on cooldown, because at that point, he's got no shot of taking down Mei. She's a solid counter against any tank as well, except for Reinhardt, assuming he's smart enough to lower his shield and start swinging. Her strength is control, though. She can block lines of sight. She can block paths of movement. She can block snipers. She can cage off ults like DVa's. And her ult is a Godsend when attacking a control point. Mei is easily my favorite go-to defense character when playing Nepal or Lijiang. She's about controlling the battlefield and taking care of pesky low-health fast-moving characters.

A good Torbjorn is basically two players at the same time, but one of them is stationary and has an aimbot. He actually does a sizable amount of damage with both firing modes, and can take down a lot of mid-health characters pretty quickly if you can aim. His turret is a hard counter against Junkrat when placed high, and a soft counter for Pharah in areas where Pharahs tend to fly high (i.e., first Volskaya point, a turret can deny the entire point to Pharah from several locations). But the big thing a lot of players overlook with Torb is his armor. 75 is the difference life and death for just about every attack in the game, but bad players won't bother trying to get scrap; they'll just prop up a turret and spend the game trying to repair it. A good Torbjorn player is active; you set a turret up in a spot that has a good line of sight (great for Pharahs) and wander around killing low health characters for scrap, then chuck that armor all over the field, like an aggressive defense and support all rolled into one.

Today, I had two fantastic matches and easy wins when I rolled Symmetra; at this point, she might actually be my favorite payload defense character. I can't remember a single time in recent history that I didn't end the match with a gold in damage with her. Her turret damage is ridiculous when you pair them up (space 'em for more effect), and payload maps make it very easy to predict enemy movement. You know what else does a lot of damage? Her freakin' gun. Genji doesn't stand a chance against a decent Symmetra; that gun's homing main fire removes every advantage Genji gains with mobility, and his damage simply can't keep up when fighting up close. My favorite is taking on payload teams hiding behind Reinhardt shields. The secondary fire does 125(!) damage fully charges, to everyone it touches, and passes through Reinhardt's shield and enemies. Payload teams get shredded by a good Symmetra. And of course she can't heal; she doesn't even count as a healer. She's a support class best suited to defense. The thing about her is that she's a really hard character to play if you're not smart, and a lot of players' Overwatch tactics boil down to "hurr durr push out more damage faster than the other guy". You can't play Symmetra like that. You need to be a nuisance with the turrets, putting them in hard to reach places that force players to stop aiming at your team. You need to line up those energy ball shots correctly. And in a fight, you need to be mobile.

And here's the thing with "obvious faults"; every character is going to have them situationally. Characters in this game were made to counter other characters. Genji will completely wreck any sniper, but will get torn to shreds by Symmetra, Mei, and McCree. Hanzo's great against slow movers mid-range like McCree, Mei, Junkrat, and most supports, but doesn't stand a chance in hell against a good Widowmaker at range because she can just plink at him over and over when he's trying to charge enough to get his arrow across the map (2-3 body shots takes care of him).

The point is that even though all of these characters are useless when you play them, it doesn't mean these characters are useless when other people play them.

I'm bad at some characters too. But I'm not going to write off Zarya, McCree, Tracer, Mercy, Zenyatta, Reaper, or Hanzo just because I'm not as good with them as other characters, because that would be ridiculous. From your complaints, you seem to be focusing on who is better in a straight-up firefight (especially ones where you don't need to aim all that well) against other characters, rather than who is good when their tactical strengths are properly applied. You're not thinking outside the arena shooter or CoD box, and it's made worse by the fact that you clearly have issues with accuracy.

I'd personally recommend taking all the energy you put into hating these characters simply because you can't play them, and channel that into bettering yourself at them. You'll end up a much better player as a result; being good at a wide range of characters is crucial to counter-play, and counter-play is pretty damn important. And once you're better at more characters, you'll have more fun.

As for the 2/2/2 deal, I can see the appeal, and the game's made so that such a thing could work, but I've seen so many teams with that setup get absolutely stomped, whether it's my team or not. I actually love when people fill up their teams with slow-moving tanks and healers. It makes it easy to get nice killstreaks with Widowmaker.  ;)

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Yeah, definitely not reading all of that, man. 

But I can tell that you're missing the point. I'm not "hating characters" and I never even play as Hanzo, for example. I'm not basing this on ME playing the character.

The point is that some of the characters, in their attributes, are obviously just superior choices when you really get down to it. Bastion is waste of time when you have Soldier 76, who also has a high rate of fire/can do lots of damage quickly and heal himself. BUT he can also move and shoot as well as heal others and his ult is a literal aimbot, unlike Bastion's which requires much more accuracy.

Your entire argument is all assuming the character is played at peak skill and pit against a favourable match-up. The problem with this is that this just isn't a realistic scenario in 9/10 cases because people, even pros, generally prefer to play it safe.

Again, Hanzo has all of Widowmaker's abilities, but he has no recharge on his climbing, wide field of view, easier to aim with, and his ult does damage with a massive hitbox. Therefore, if it comes down to having a really skilled Widow or a really skilled Hanzo, I'll take the Hanzo or an Ana. 

I say go nuts in quick play, but I definitely would agree with the posters on the Blizz forums that in competitive, your teammates are in the right for giving you shit about offsetting the composition into something risky when the opponents are probably using something tried and true.

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I play on Xbox One under NoTux DC

I used to play all the time until that competitive mode thing came out.  It was so jacked up, I got pissed off and stopped playing it as often.  I could never get around the fact that my score is based on my team's performance.  If I'm a decent player, but my team just want to hang back and snipe and not play the objectives, I shouldn't get punished for that.  Plus, there were a few occasions where my team would actually win and I still lost points.  That made no sense.

Its been a while since I got on, but I still pop in every once in a while.

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The biggest problem I see with widow is that a bunch of maps just aren't set up for her. Lots of small corridors, or a control point with little visibility from the outside. On the maps where she has reasonable places to sit, she can get pretty good kills; she won't contest the point at all though, so she at minimum needs 1 kill every engagement just to break even.

She's also currently sitting at an abysmal win rate in ranked play. There's probably a reason for that. It probably isn't that "people can't aim".

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49 minutes ago, Newt said:

The biggest problem I see with widow is that a bunch of maps just aren't set up for her. Lots of small corridors, or a control point with little visibility from the outside. On the maps where she has reasonable places to sit, she can get pretty good kills; she won't contest the point at all though, so she at minimum needs 1 kill every engagement just to break even.

She's also currently sitting at an abysmal win rate in ranked play. There's probably a reason for that. It probably isn't that "people can't aim".

I agree with this.  Aside from a couple Payload map spots (Watchpoint: Gibraltar comes to mind), the maps tend to work against her -- this is particularly true of Nepal, in which basically none of the three maps provide her both a clean shot to and a safe distance from the point.  Her single best use case in ranked IMO is the Ilios map with the arena at the bottom of a flight of stairs as a hard counterpick to Pharah.  Otherwise, whatever you want to accomplish with her can probably be better done with a different character.

Keep in mind that for static defenses, Ana is at least as good as she is (turrets) or flat out better (putting Bastion to sleep forces him to stand in movement mode, allowing you enough time to kill him if he doesn't retreat immediately), and she also heals and has one of the game's best ults.  This completely kills one of the big use-cases Widow had going for her on release -- and she didn't get any to make up for it.  Tom's right that by and large, the people who do play her can shoot -- but they can shoot better with basically any other character right now.  

 

Potential changes to help her positioning:  (just for fun)

-Allow grappling hook to temporarily let her cling to a wall like a spider (say, for 2-3 shots worth of time)

-Allow grappling hook to let her descend and ascend in a straight vertical line, like the famous sequence from Mission: Impossible.

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19 minutes ago, DusK said:

Hahaha, are you kidding? A good Widowmaker on Shrine will have no trouble clearing the point.

A good Widowmaker on Shrine will die against a team of good everyone else

You're continually using skill as a way to try and shift the conversation of the viability of the character, when that's not really how it works. If you make suppositions like "if widowmaker player skill above a certain point and the enemy team is at or below that point or the players at or above that point are playing characters Widowmaker is strong against, then of course Widowmaker is OP HURR DURR"

We're not talking about that. We're talking about kit design, map design, overall meta (her winrate in competitive is bottom of the barrel). Skill is irrelevant; it's a team game, someone particularly good at something doesn't translate to how it interfaces with the other 11 players in the game so much as how that player is contributing to composition.

If your entire argument is that you get killstreaks with Widow, it's a really weak argument. The people you play against are shit. That is the far more likely scenario than that the general Overwatch community has no idea how to play Widowmaker effectively but you somehow do.

And for the record, Widowmaker is 4th place in KD despite her shitty winrate, so your citing of killstreaks isn't really contradicting anything; it's actually coinciding with the statistical trend that Widowmaker is good at killing people but not at winning the game.

On 10/16/2016 at 7:33 PM, AngelCityOutlaw said:

All of the defense characters except Junkrat and any support that can't heal (like Symmetra) are utterly useless.

Soldier 76, Genji and Pharah are by far the best offense. Tracer and McCree are completely useless.

Symmetra has the highest winrate in the entire roster, and Mei has a higher winrate than Junkrat. As for offense, Reaper has the highest winrate. McCree statistically fairs better then Pharah. Tracer fairs better than 76 (but they are both bottom of the barrel). You're right about Genji though; Shimada bro is dope.

http://masteroverwatch.com/heroes/pc/global/mode/ranked

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44 minutes ago, Nabeel Ansari said:

A good Widowmaker on Shrine will die against a team of good everyone else

You're continually using skill as a way to try and shift the conversation of the viability of the character, when that's not really how it works. If you make suppositions like "if widowmaker player skill above a certain point and the enemy team is at or below that point or the players at or above that point are playing characters Widowmaker is strong against, then of course Widowmaker is OP HURR DURR"

We're not talking about that. We're talking about kit design, map design, overall meta (her winrate in competitive is bottom of the barrel). Skill is irrelevant; it's a team game, someone particularly good at something doesn't translate to how it interfaces with the other 11 players in the game so much as how that player is contributing to composition.

If your entire argument is that you get killstreaks with Widow, it's a really weak argument. The people you play against are shit. That is the far more likely scenario than that the general Overwatch community has no idea how to play Widowmaker effectively but you somehow do.

And for the record, Widowmaker is 4th place in KD despite her shitty winrate, so your citing of killstreaks isn't really contradicting anything; it's actually coinciding with the statistical trend that Widowmaker is good at killing people but not at winning the game.

Symmetra has the highest winrate in the entire roster, and Mei has a higher winrate than Junkrat. As for offense, Reaper has the highest winrate. McCree statistically fairs better then Pharah. Tracer fairs better than 76 (but they are both bottom of the barrel). You're right about Genji though; Shimada bro is dope.

http://masteroverwatch.com/heroes/pc/global/mode/ranked

Interesting. My point about symmetra though is that I'd much rather have a healer support than her.

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2 hours ago, Nabeel Ansari said:

A good Widowmaker on Shrine will die against a team of good everyone else

You're continually using skill as a way to try and shift the conversation of the viability of the character, when that's not really how it works. If you make suppositions like "if widowmaker player skill above a certain point and the enemy team is at or below that point or the players at or above that point are playing characters Widowmaker is strong against, then of course Widowmaker is OP HURR DURR"

We're not talking about that. We're talking about kit design, map design, overall meta (her winrate in competitive is bottom of the barrel). Skill is irrelevant; it's a team game, someone particularly good at something doesn't translate to how it interfaces with the other 11 players in the game so much as how that player is contributing to composition.

If your entire argument is that you get killstreaks with Widow, it's a really weak argument. The people you play against are shit. That is the far more likely scenario than that the general Overwatch community has no idea how to play Widowmaker effectively but you somehow do.

And for the record, Widowmaker is 4th place in KD despite her shitty winrate, so your citing of killstreaks isn't really contradicting anything; it's actually coinciding with the statistical trend that Widowmaker is good at killing people but not at winning the game.

Other peoples' Widowmakers being unable to win games =/= my Widowmaker being unable to win games. This is still a L2P issue. Most people don't know how to play Widowmaker, I guess.

But I think it's strange that you're insisting that everyone I play against is bad. That'd insist I'm better than the vast majority of players by comparison. I'd disagree on both points, but hey, I'll take the compliment.

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1 hour ago, AngelCityOutlaw said:

Interesting. My point about symmetra though is that I'd much rather have a healer support than her.

If I'm at a point with a huge walk-up, I'd rather have the teleporter. Assuming the symmetra can keep it up.

Teleporter is an absolutely bananas decrease in time to effectiveness after a death. The problem is that if the symmetra can't keep the TP up, she's not very useful. Also assuming I have two supports..

I wish the stat sites had breakdowns by league. I don't particularly care who is good at silver or gold.

1 minute ago, DusK said:

Other peoples' Widowmakers being unable to win games =/= my Widowmaker being unable to win games. This is still a L2P issue. Most people don't know how to play Widowmaker, I guess.

You are so incredibly wrong. Unless you're ranked significantly higher than I would imagine. Even then, you're still wrong. Widowmaker globally is not as effective as other champions as the game stands today. Anyone with a consistently high win rate on her seems to have a consistently high (and generally higher) win rates on other characters.

It's not really a question of whether she has a bad win rate. Though it's an interesting question as to why. I've already posited my thoughts above.

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1 minute ago, DusK said:

I did. All that happened was I ranked up while playing Widowmaker. :(

 

Mercy
46.8%
Hanzo
47.7%
Ana
46.1%
Widowmaker
44.4%

Widowmaker is bad right now. You're just going to have to accept that. It's not like it's illegal to play her.

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24 minutes ago, Newt said:

Probably not as good as this person, and it looks like they still play genji because widow is bad. :<

http://masteroverwatch.com/profile/pc/eu/Hedish-21727

Or maybe personal preference, like so many other things?

I personally hate playing Genji. I only ever find myself rolling him to counter a Bastion, Torb, or sniper these days.

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