A madman's rantings

Before i get into what i'm looking for with this week's bans I want to say that with this week's hero pool i'm more confident than ever that blizzard is using hero pools as i originally thought - to gather data on heroes and how to better balance the game.  The issue with any experimental card or PTR data is that we don't get a lot of players playing on it and; lets finally agree, people don't try as hard in other game modes.  We need to see what the best players do and how players of all ranks play when faced with specific challenges.  It provides much more useful data that we can act on.  They mentioned aggressive patching, we haven't seen anything that resembles that or any patches that target meta heroes, which Jeff mentioned in his developer update.  My only guess is that we're going to get a large patch after all of the hero pool information is gathered.  I'm hoping for the best. It's easy to talk about this weeks bans, its targeted at hi

The second week of ladder bans have been heavily switched up.  Much to Blizzard's promise originally, they were not kept to banning 1 tank, 2 DPS and 1 support.  This week's bans are Reinhardt, Reaper, Ana and Moira.  The immediate response has been wonderfully ironic.  Many of the players who wanted this feature are now on the forums and heavily questioning hero bans.  It seems like it was a great idea to the community who all said "they won't ban my hero" and then their hero got banned.  More importantly, this significantly changes up the game, which Blizzard has stated is its primary feature. Working as designed. To me what the hero pool provides more than anything is data. The community relies too much on feelings and not enough on reality.  What data are we going to get confirmation on this time? Firstly, with Reinhardt out what will the tank lineup be?  Historically we have two main compositions without Reinhardt; dive and double shield.  Of course t

Just a quick post before I finish my overall thoughts on hero pools. As bad as it looks I do have some hope. This week Winston, S76, Sombra and Lucio are banned. On the tank front, not too big of an impact with Winston being taken out of the pool. The first thought is that this may protect enemy widows a little bit more but with the current state of widow in OWL is that if shes viable, the only way to deal with her is with another widow.  I don't see any team going full dive with their tank line to deal with widow so overall, no real loss here. The DPS bans are even worse.  With widow, mei and mccree in the pool there is little to no use for Soldier 76.  Make no mistake, Soldier is still very strong, he's just weak when compared to the meta heroes.  This is why the latest patch is a little concerning, no nerfs on the DPS line up.  Sombra is in the same state, few teams are running her against the current meta line up.  While she has utility she lacks damage for an up-fron