Team CC defeated Capere Cat 4-1 in the Grand Final and became the back-to-back champions!

Liquipedia page

Bilibili VOD - Not up yet but I will update when it's posted (if I remember)

It was also announced that both Once Again and Once Again Academy will be participating in Season 3.

I don’t see this discussed much here but is it just me or 2 of the current competitive game modes in the game are conceptually broken and unfair. I’m talking about push and clash.

These game modes are quite literally broken because they are objectively one sided. It’s so frustrating to lose 2 or 3 fights in push and then you can win almost every other fight but the robot has to walk the enemy’s entire progress before you can make any progress. This is infernally infuriating because it’s like if in KOTH or control you have to run their progress percentage down before you can build your own. How are people not like losing their minds over this. I cannot tell you how many games our team has won significantly more fights through the course of the game but because their team won the first 3 fights, it’s impossible to comeback. It’s just a snowbally game mode and it’s just outright unbalanced.

Clash on the other hand is so defender heavy as well. You cap a point and your reward is…fight the enemy team closer to their spawn? Then if you cap the first 2 points (middle and 4th point), your next cap is this nigh impossible right-outside-their-spawn objective and so 9/10 times once you cap the first 2 points they just auto win a free point. What?? Who thought of this? Just today we played a game of clash where our team continentally diffed the enemy team by every metric imaginable and they almost won because every time we won a fight, it just got harder for us to win the next one.

I’m just at a loss for words how this is in line with any balance philosophy of any game ever. These should not be competitive game modes.

With placements not counting for competitive drive currently, it pretty much incentivises you to throw them. As a pc player, i quickly realized i could just jump on console for way easier games, and also soon realized its even quicker to just throw my placement games as well since they dont count. This is made even more doable with the rank resets. Placements should 100% count because its really dumb to win all your placements, place mid masters and have to sweat another 20+ games because the initial 10 dont count, so its much easier to just throw the first 10 games and after placements win 10 games in a row in gold/plat without trying. That doesnt sound very competitive or rewarding to me.

Comp on overwatch is pretty bad right now but drives makes it even worse all of these quick play players are playing comp now. I was masters 4 tank before drives winning most of my games but now since all of the quick play players are playing the game my lobbies are filled with mercy’s and life weavers every time and usually the game like all ways is decided by a widow player overwatch comp is all ready pretty bad right now but drives makes it even worse and apparently drives make it harder for solo q players not sure how true tho anyway im just gonna wait for the next season where hopefully widow is nerfed to the ground

They suck. They're uncompetitive. They gaslight you into thinking you're better or worse than you are. They disproportionately force loss streaks on below-average players who got pushed up to G2, which is where ~60% of the players are anyway (Bronze: 4.5%, Silver: 20.2%, Gold: 36.7%). They take away any achievment above-average players have grinding for a rank by kicking you back down. They don't embolden you "wow I got masters and the ranks just reset! I bet I can do it again!" It's "Wow, I worked my ass off for 3 seasons to get masters, and now I'm back down to Diamond and have to ***** do it again? I'm gonna go play Elden Ring."

What ever engagement algo they were looking at that that incentivized them to push the resets, they need to scrap. The S9 changes happened a while ago and since it's been some time, I can firmly say that I hate every change they made to the resets and distributions. The ranking system FEELS like suck. It doens't matter what it's supposed to do on paper, it FEELS like suck, man. Just do away with it. I will die on this hill.

I don't have an alternative to them. Ranting isn't constructive. But I got nothing. I just don't want to feel that bite every 6 months. I don't want to work hard and be scrapped repeatedly. idk. Blizzard might praise their matchmaker on Spilo's interviews, but their actual ranked SR system itself is sloppy.

Source for rank distribution

So a couple of friends and I were queueing for games last night and noticed something funky going on.

One of them queues only support and is Bronze 3.

The other one is Silver 2 Tank, and Gold something for both support and DPS.

I am Silver 3 Tank and DPS, Silver 4 support.

Now obviously the 3 of us queueing is a wide queue as it should be - however the other 2 (The bronze and the silver/gold player) can queue as a duo without it being a wide queue? How is this possible :/ ???

My main goals with these changes are to pull Mauga's playstyle away from focusing on shooting the tank to poking enemies while looking for the opportunity to engage a target with Overrun, while also keeping the "Chainguns go BRRR" identity, but at a more limited state that requires more precise timing.
He should still be weak to CC and status effects, since he's huge, but he'll have more tools to survive against his counters without needing constant source of outside healing.
The goal of the ultimate changes is for Cage Fight's power to be more equal between heroes that rely on movement abilities and those who do not, and letting him squish enemies with Overrun since he won't be able to burn down targets caught in the Cage with his guns and live.

Incendiary and Volatile Chainguns:

• Ammo decreased from 300 to 275
• Weapon spread reduced by 15%
• Single Fire movement penalty removed
• Firing both weapons progressively overloads them over 2 seconds, this affects multiple weapon attributes:
• Weapon Spread gets increased by up to 30% (includes Single Fire)
• Ammo consumption while firing both weapons gets increased by up to 400% (from normal 200% rate)
• Rate of Fire gets increased by up to 40%, but only while firing both weapons
• The effects of overloading the chainguns gradually revert at the same rate as they accumulate.
• Dual Fire self slow increased from 30% to 40%
• Dual Fire no longer gains the benefits of setting enemies on fire or dealing critical damage to burning targets (Single Fire retains these passives)

Note: Hitting small hitbox heroes with single fire and farming overhealth from them should be easier now, and shooting only one weapon should be less punishing without the movement penalty. The overloading effect makes Dual Fire much more situational, and its main purpose should be quickly burning down close targets with pure damage, without providing too much sustain and at the cost of needing to reload after firing for about 4 seconds..

Overrun:

• Using this ability for its full duration reloads Mauga's Chainguns
• Holding down the backward input while leaping causes Mauga to jump a shorter distance

Note: With the speedboost buff to Overrun, hitting enemies that are already close to you became harder, and this should help Mauga hit more precise squishes, this is to help offset his less lethal weapons, and to offset the high ammo consumption from overloading his weapons, Mauga will passively reload while running, like other heroes do when their weapons aren't active.

Cardiac Overdive:

• Cooldown reduced from 12 to 10 seconds
• Duration reduced from 3 to 2.5 seconds
• Activating Cardiac Overdrive now fully fills Mauga's Berserker Overhealth (150)
• Lifesteal reduced from 100% to 30%
• On activation grants 25 overhealth to teammates within the ability's range that lasts for the ability's duration
• Damage reduction on teammates reduced from 20% to 10%
• No longer grants teammates Lifesteal

Note: Currently for Mauga to survive, he is forced to deal as much damage as possible, which forces him to focus on dealing damage to the easiest target, the tank. I believe these changes shift him towards a playstyle that takes away from the effectiveness of shooting just to live, but overall grants him more freedom to play how he wants to.

The on-demand overhealth gives him a way to not get blown up instantly when tanks stand in his face or his target receives an invulnerability ability that fully mitigates his shots, and since the overhealth is tied to his passive he will have it active for longer than the duration of Cardiac.
The current impact of Cardiac on teammates is underutilized by the majority of players, but it's really strong with high coordination, my hope with these changes here is to normalize its effects between ladder and pro play.

Berserker:

• Critical hits to Overhealth conversion rate increased from 50% to 100%.

Note: Now that Mauga can't benefit from dealing Critical damage on burning targets with Dual Fire, his passive's strength can be increased to give him some mitigation while Cardiac is on cooldown without making spray and pray more effective.

Cage Fight:

• Duration reduced from 8 to 6 seconds
• Cage radius reduced from 7 to 6 meters
• No longer disables enemy movement abilitites and Mauga's Overrun
• Mauga cannot escape his own Cage Fight with Overrun
• Enemies caught in the Cage are now afflicted with the "Chained" effect
• If an enemy inflicted with "Chained" manages to escape Cage Fight with a teleport ability, they will quickly be pulled back in the Cage (pull speed/strength relative to distance from Cage)
• "Chained" effect cannot be removed or cleansed by any ability, including invulnerability and CC immunity effects, and targets with those effects active will still be pulled towards the Cage.
• If an enemy manages to gain a 30 meter distance between the edge of the Cage and themselves the "Chained" effect is removed

Note: As commented above, my hope with these changes is to reduce Cage's effectiveness against mobility reliant heroes by no longer nullifying movement abilities whilewhile still making teleport escapes difficult unless the player completely leaves the teamfight area. Having Overrun gives Mauga a way to finish off heroes caught in the Cage since they have less space to escape to and he can easily curve it on the Cage Wall to land a crit stomp, but it's also a higher risk ult with Cardiac's low lifesteal.

Is the Dallas Major like Midseason Madness in OWL and Stockholm Finals like OWL final? I thought they are the same level

Hi i play since a kid shooter and competitive games but since 1 year i get many times eye pain, i never had this... my eyes feel hard and it hurts if i play just 2-3 hours, i have the feel i have to relax them more but how? Not plaing for some days brings me nothing because they are really subsceptible in general now, do you know some things to relax them? As a kid i was able to play 10 hours without pain but now i get really fast headache and eye pain but i dont really play much anymore to be honest, but if it just start really fast that my eyes feel stressed so do you know what can help? No i never stop gaming.

The biggest is Mauga. But that's way too cold to even talk about. This is probably about as cold but I digress.

Lifeweaver is, in my opinion, the close second to Mauga in terms of horrendous hero design.

First off, his first iteration featuring the on-death heal flower. Fucking dumb, no offense. Doesn't really do anything to fix the absence of his healing, while strengthening and increasing uptime of enemy dives. I mean what the fuck guys. What even is the flavor vision or functional purpose of enemies being able to eat it too?

Now Lifeweaver after receiving 30 buffs. What does he do? Sustain single target heal, create safe positions, save someone, and AoE burst healing. How does a kit such as this impact the state of a given fight? Well for starters, he's a tad bit beefy. His sustained healing works well to negate light poke/soft engages so the overall threat of those is severely dampened. The possibilities really are endless with petal platform but unfortunately the best possibility is often just making a dude (often yourself) harder to reach. So it also negates the threat of close-range brawlers as well as heroes that simply lack the verticality. Life grip, funnily enough, not only negates the near-death of a teammate but also resets their positioning. So unlike lamp or suzu where the two keep fighting, they have now officially returned to a neutral state, or square one, where they must now restart the fight. Tree is just more healing, as well as overhealth in case burst protection is desired. Dash is less relevant but, importantly, is also exclusively a sustain ability. Even his damage is too poor to actually proactively apply offensive pressure, and serves better as a defensive tool. All this comes together to create an absolutely dreadful experience in which the absence of a 5th damage source coupled with the nigh-infinite sustain creates a war of attrition which the playerbase has historically hated.

Can this be fixed? Probably not without another rework, this is an intrinsic nature of his kit, not something that arose due to any specific numbers that can simply be tweaked. The world is your oyster when it comes to biolight so they could easily make something interesting. Something something vine whips something something seed bombs something something life drain

Is it possible to climb ranks solo, or do you need a group to succeed? I was Platinum, but I’ve been solo queueing, which has led to losing streaks and ultimately deranking to Gold across all roles. Despite having decent in-game stats, I struggle to make consistent progress. When I gain a percentage, a single loss often drops me back by the same amount or more, leaving me stuck in the same spot or continuing to derank. I’m unsure if it’s possible to rank up alone or if the system heavily favors group coordination. Can someone clarify what the game is looking for in terms of gameplay and whether it’s better to just find a solid stack to climb with?

For lower ranks I've noticed that narrow ranks are played way better than wider ranks (e.g. in Silver 1 - Silver 2 matches the quality is way higher than matches that are Silver 2 - Silver 4). There should be a change where the matchmaker prioritizes narrow matches than wider matches. I don't know about you but I would match rather prefer wait 30 minutes for a good quality match where I KNOW I am playing in a game where its all fair and well than waiting 3 minutes for a game where there is an obvious team diff where I have to avoid teammates in low silver consistently. Let me know what you guys think of it.

Goals: Make Mauga less annoying to deal with in the Tank 1v1, while still allowing him to self-sustain effectively. Make changes that aren't hard to implement visually (make asset reuse easy).

I really love the ideas they tried to hit when designing Mauga, but feel like they ended up making a tank that is absolutely dreadful to go up against in a lot of situations. I've had some ideas knocking around my head these past couple of days, and was hoping for some feedback!

(a lot of numbers/names are up in the air, I'm just hoping to get the general idea across :D)

Passive - Fiery Passion

• Heal 200% of damage dealt by fire.
  • Sounds pretty high, but I'm fairly certain current fire damage is very low.

Primary/Alt Fire - Chainguns

• Chainguns no longer fire separately on left/right click.
• Chainguns no longer proc fire/crit when used.
• Primary Fire now shoots both guns immediately, starting with a larger spread that tightens as you fire.
• Alt fire can now be held to rev chainguns, allowing you to start shooting with the tightened spread.

E - Incendiary Rounds

• Duration - 7 seconds
• Damage dealt by Primary Fire now sets enemies on fire.
  • Might be too annoying/too easy to proc, old 10-shot requirment might help.

Shift - Overrun

• No longer immune to cc during use.
  • I'm very iffy on this change, might be a better idea to make him vulnerable to slows only (like mei primary)
• Crashdown radius increased, now sets enemies within the radius on fire.

Ultimate - Volcanic Aura

• Mauga surrounds himself in an aura that sets enemies inside on fire
• While active, Mauga's Passive can overheal to a max of +150 hp
• Cleanses debuffs on use
  • Very iffy on this, but its gives him a risky option to fend off annoying debuffs like anti in a pinch.

If you read the whole post, thank you!!! I love you!!!!

hello im new to overwatch, ive been playing valorant ranked before where the rr you get depends on the the people you play against and your performance (for example if you play against higher mmr players and you win you get more rr and if you lose you lose less rr bc its at the end they are higher than you)

anyways, when i started playing comp in overwatch i noticed its a bit hard to get alot of rank rating on support (i only get 10% for win) and lose the same, even tho my performance is good, i drop more than 10k healing and 20+ assists although i try so hard i dont get above 10% meanwhile when i play dps even if i do bare minimum i get 20%+ and its sad to see considering i like playing support more but its actually impossible for me to rank up on it considering how much i get per win

can anyone explain what im doing wrong? or is it just harder to rank up in support?

if the entire enemy team leaves during comp (after first minute grace period), obviously you will get a free win, but would you gain rank progression?

Need to settle this debate with my wife, thank yall gamers🙏

By people I mean me.

While it isn't entirely untrue that they are derived of a similar hero archetype, it would be best to describe Venture as the Overwatch 2 version of DPS Doomfist specifically, as much of the modern design philosophy that revolves around smoothing the edges and creating overall roundness in hero design is very much on display. Some of it is fair, and a step forward in my opinion such as expanding the effective poke range, or stretching the ups and downs of damage output thinner as to not create these pockets of making people explode and then being AFK while waiting for CDs.

However, I think much of this roundness directly contradicts and works against the design concepts which the hero archetype is entirely founded on. To start, risk/reward relations. As many of us remember, DPS Doomfist was the high-roller hero. Unless he had meteor, there was no such thing as a safe engage for him and a lot of his committal plays either resulted in either him or an opponent blowing up. Is this healthy game design? No. It's the opposite end of the spectrum from which Venture lies, where they are not nearly as deadly, naturally, as a tradeoff for facing considerably low risk in playmaking. Is this an improvement? Not really, in my opinion.

One of the best designed aspects of Doomfist as both DPS and tank is that he needs to hit an ability to be rewarded for it. Missed your slam/punch/uppercut? No shield for you. Used block poorly? No punch for you. As simple as it is, this is 50% of what makes Doomfist as well as many other heroes (i.e. dash resets, aim-intensive heroes, etc.) truly exciting, and this simply doesn't apply much to Venture. Missed all your abilities? Here, have some shield anyway. Missed all your 30m long shockwaves? Here, have some shield anyway. Completely botched your engage and whiffed your drill dash? Here, use your non-ultimate cross-map escape tool. In other words, I feel that there had to have been a much healthier middle ground between the "all or nothing" nature of Doomfist and this odd "something or something" nature of Venture.

This is coupled with the overall roundness of the rest of the cast as well, where bash, flash, and 4 second hack are either gone or reduced in some way, creating this unnatural state in which they seemingly entirely lack the dips and spikes that make their hero archetype fun to begin with.

Some people like this roundness, some people spite them as a bastardization of their beloved flying one shot hero, I find them to just be the opposite side to the same coin, as well as somewhat unfaithful to the hero archetype. Love to hear your guys' thoughts and opinions. No hate to Venture players.

This week's Plat Chat. 37 mins in.

So it's almost ironic yet iconic that the first season of OWCS has a mirror GOATs meta to cement itself, and then we move onto more diverse play from here on out.

Now we just need Korea/Asia to have more teams.

Also if interested I've tried to start a small blog... More so what I tried transitioning on over from Medium, so I wrote about it there too (ignore some of the fluff for Google SEO requirements) - https://poggersmemes.com/hero-bans-are-coming-to-overwatch-esports/

What does that tell us about the level of play and how well Falcons did to execute upon it? What does it tell us about CR not being able to adapt as well to it?

And how he said Reaper of all Heroes was crucial to it.

It's just interesting as this Mauga meta and Reaper in general are seen as dumb play, but to pros this meta is actually quite difficult?

It's also worth nothing how he said they were able to nail down 2 distinct play styles. One for himself, and one for Smurf (besides the idea that Smurf plays when a Main Tank like Winston may be required as that's obvious).

It's just interesting cuz for the entire year Falcons struggled to synergistically integrate playing both Smurf and Hanbin (similar to Crusty trying both Junbin and Max)... Almost as if Crusty with prep time to fully cook out his inventions does really well. We also saw this during the Dallas Major where Falcons were playing Venture but it wasn't quite enough but both finals were quite close still even then.

But man, that Crusty+Proper 2022 decimation plus that 2022 Fuel Hivemind goes really hard. And same with how Crusty had experience with Smurf (Shock) who had experience with Stalker (Dynasty) who has experience with Chiyo (Reign) who has experience with Proper (O2 Blast).

(Of course, recency bias may play into it. For context, referring to the translation on the sub a few posts back.)

Season 13 has less than 2 weeks left, and this weekend we got the drives, so it's safe to say we're not getting Kingmaker this weekend. (For those who don't know, Kingmaker is a 5v5 playtest, with buffs for whoever is on a solo role).

The directors take from October 24 says that the Kingmaker is "For the Season 13 midcycle...", midcycle was 2 weeks ago. Did we get any updates on it or if it was delayed? I know they talked a bit about the passives of Kingmaker in the Spilo interview, but I don't think they said anything about it being delayed.

Does anyone know anything about it?

I often hear about how certain things you do outside of the game can affect how well you play (such as getting enough sleep or having a good diet), is temperature one of those things? In my case whenever the room is chilly and I’m somewhat cold I feel like my performance is a lot worse than usual, and I don’t know if that’s actually the case or if I’m just making things up.

My mental is shattered. I’ve been playing out of my mind too, dropping 30 bombs consistently almost every game. Low deaths. I’ve been getting great competent teammates too. But every single game there’s at least one stinker. One guy with double digit deaths. One tracer who keeps dying before they use their recall. One junk who has 1,000 damage in 5 minutes and refuses to switch. One widow frontlining and yelling that no one helped them. One torb running it down with the hammer and shouting slurs at my teammates. It’s. Without. Fail. I don’t even care about my rank, I just want to get the signature. I need someone to explain it to me. I need to know if there’s a science behind how I can get a thrower in every game. Or maybe I just need someone to hold me… and tell me everything is gonna be alright…cause I don’t know how much gg go next I have left in me

Thoughts on the scenario where Toronto actually leaves but both T1 and GenG rejoin? Both have shown interest and T1 is actively doing tryouts at the moment, meanwhile Toronto has be notable as a holdout currently among the active teams. With better parity between Korea and the rest of the regions I think this would be a good trade, however EMEA and NA is looking to be very interesting going forward.