Overwatch

Right, but 1. You need to be a really good fucking shot with Ana to be classified as a better healer than Mercy, and 2. Ana can just stay behind the frontlines and be safe whereas as a Mercy you need to be in the middle of it all to do your job, you can still hide behind a tank of course but usually you're much closer to danger. I don't know, that's my theory on why pro players avoid her for now.

I like Ana but i hate when i almost kill a sniper but a teammate walks past me and i end up healing a fully healed hero instead of killing that sniper, and then dying. Fml feeling

Quote from Tisky

58 minutes ago, Tisky said: I like Ana but i hate when i almost kill a sniper but a teammate walks past me and i end up healing a fully healed hero instead of killing that sniper, and then dying. Fml feeling

Yeah I really wish they would make shots pass through fully healed heroes. It's not like fully dead enemies stop the shots!

Mercy is fine as it is, it's just that discord orb is INSANE, and that Lucio's boost is very helpful when deathballing into a point, especially in pugs. I'm at 68 now and every match is a meta fest, but I'm OK with that. I have to say I love that the meta is 2 dps, 2 supp and 2 tank. Yeah it can use some tweaking, and it will, but I hope 2/2/2 stays.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

On 8/12/2016 at 7:40 PM, Jetsetlemming said: Ana can actually heal faster than her if she's accurate with her needle shots, incredibly. The most common hero that is hunting and murdering me as a healer, at my level of play, is Pharah, because she can fly over the heads of the frontline to shoot past them. She's really uncommon in that pro chart, though... huh. I'll see if I can find videos of some of these matches. Genji's the only really common flanker, and he's great in really skilled players' hands obv, but in my experience Symmetra actually hard counters him because he can't reflect or dodge her beam.

At high level play where McCree is some twitchy teenager on his 10th can of Red Bull I don't think Pharah being able to fly above things is such a great advantage.

I don't really see Symmetra hard countering Genji because he can just peace out with his dash. I also think Symmetra is probably the overall weakest hero because she gets dumpstered by people like Winston.

Quote from Taylor

2 hours ago, Taylor said: At high level play where McCree is some twitchy teenager on his 10th can of Red Bull I don't think Pharah being able to fly above things is such a great advantage.

I don't really see Symmetra hard countering Genji because he can just peace out with his dash. I also think Symmetra is probably the overall weakest hero because she gets dumpstered by people like Winston.

Winston easily kills her turrets, but actually he's easily killed by Symmetra: they're both range limited, and she has WAY higher DPS. He'll die before her, especially since he's a big boy and attracts way more extra damage from other people.

Genji *can* run away from Symmetra, but in my experience the only people who ever do are Mercies. Everyone else ignored her, or assumes they can take her. Mei, McCree, and Reaper definitely can take her, if they actually pay attention to her (another advantage of her beam is that people frequently don't know where they're being hit from), but for everyone else Symmetra stands a fair chance at melting their face off if they get in her range, even Reinhardt and D.Va. D.Va especially, they never try to fly away, they'll instead put up their deflection shield, not realizing Symmetra's beam goes right through it. Reinhardt can kill a Symm in two hammer blows, so I stay back from them, but if the team's shooting his shield? Rush through it, zap him, and if he drops to swing at you the focused fire from your team takes him down before he can hit you. If he doesn't, he's dead in three seconds.

Symmetra definitely needs teamwork to help her survive, but can be very effective at specialized tasks like that.

I assume a part of the problem is pros are so damned good at communicating her teleporter won't stay up for long, it's risky to play such a situational hero in most rounds. Reliability is the key. Having said that, next month she'll probably show up in some meta, so yeah, theory crafting for the win ...

These days I tend to place the teleporter as a lure to kill Tracers and Genjis, more than I expect it to survive to transport people. That's just a bonus. Drop it indoors close to your team (behind point A in London works extremely well), flank it with sentries, and ambush whoever comes for it. Kill one, and since they'll call out the location, multiple people will divert towards it next. It's like building waves in a tower defense game. Thankfully with Symmetra's damage output, it only takes like 20 seconds of fighting to charge it up again. Four charged alt-fires shot through a Reinhardt's shield, for example (or sometimes just one as it hits three people hiding behind Reiny, lol).

We're talking high level here, though. Why would these players purposely stand and fight a losing duel? How is Symmetra running through Reinhard shield, and why doesn't D.va know what her defense matrix counters?

There will definitely be some competitive game where Symmetra drops her teleporter behind enemy lines and epic levels of cheese occur.

Watching high level streams, pros don't seem any more immune to 'autopilot' than us normies.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

1 hour ago, Jetsetlemming said: Watching high level streams, pros don't seem any more immune to 'autopilot' than us normies.

hehe if you mean something like seaguls stream (it's awesome check it out), then that's just for the luls, competitions are very different it seems.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/08/14/ove…i-mercy-buffed/

Glad to hear they're looking at helping Mei and Mercy, but really annoyed by the idea of nerfing Zenyatta. Sure, he's powerful, but he's not OP. He's just not getting sniped anymore like he used to, because the meta has totally shit all over the snipers thanks to McCree. Similarly, Pharah gets rarer as you get higher in rank, because McCree. Basically, McCree's the entire reason Zenyatta can go on tears right now. Maybe don't ignore all that in favor of targeting Zenyatta, Blizzard.

Plus nerfing Zenyatta will make Lucio's position as an absolute irrefutable requirement to every fucking team an even more ridiculous situation. We've technically got 22 heroes, but only like eight actually get played! That's not great, and the solution isn't to nuke those eight!

Some changes coming to Competitive.

PS. I'm still at level 63, omfg getting to 65 is a fucking undertaking. When you get to this level, you know these people mean business.

Those changes sound pretty good. A big problem that wasn't explicitly mentioned is that, as more people started playing comp in the first week, it massively shifted the scale of the skill rankings so a bunch of people dropped MASSIVELY. Hopefully the way he describes tier titles being "sticky" helps with that, because it was fucking awful feeling.

Quote from (HP)

2 hours ago, (HP) said: Some changes coming to Competitive.

PS. I'm still at level 63, omfg getting to 65 is a fucking undertaking. When you get to this level, you know these people mean business.

You can do it! I hit 70 so I'm giving it some rest for now. Looking forward to the SC2 tier system, will be fun to see if I can break into master league next season.

Listening to the update, disliking a lot of what is being said there.

Quote from Bastion

8 minutes ago, Bastion said: Listening to the update, disliking a lot of what is being said there.

Elaborate? The only thing I'm concerned about is the new rather harsh limitation on playing with friends.

Quote from grapen

6 minutes ago, grapen said: Elaborate? The only thing I'm concerned about is the new rather harsh limitation on playing with friends.

Should've elaborated but I was too dealing with hammer, so frustrations were intense.

Here are my main issues

• Limitation on grouping with friends, sucked in cs:go so it'll likely suck here.
• Increasing the skill range to 5000, what?
• decrease of 50 skill points each day you are inactive

Quote from Bastion

27 minutes ago, Bastion said: Should've elaborated but I was too dealing with hammer, so frustrations were intense.

Here are my main issues

• Limitation on grouping with friends, sucked in cs:go so it'll likely suck here.
• Increasing the skill range to 5000, what?
• decrease of 50 skill points each day you are inactive

1. Yeah I'm not conviced they're doing the right thing here.
2. This is just to make certain players not feel as bad when they lose an entire rank or gain a sliver of a rank. Basically inflation. The main focus for most people will be your tier anyway, not your MMR/ELO.
3. Only applies if you haven't played for a week and you're in diamond, master or grand master. You stop decaying at the bottom of diamond.

Splitting players up into sticky tiers to solidify progress, stop them focusing on a MMR number, and give them short and long-term goals is the right thing to do. Most of this seems fairly standard. But I hope the team requirements are really loose near the bottom.

For all the talk of competitive points the system seems relatively stingy. If 60 represents the top 6% of players then having 65 as the "get this or you wasted months getting annoyed by competitive mode" target seems really steep. 22 of these guns exist and they are the main reason the rank and file are playing.