Overwatch Ladder Season 21 - Week 2 Bans
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 there's always room to run hog,zarya and Hammond but if something is "meta changing" then we should first to look at its effect on the primary strategies the community uses. I'm guessing this is why we didn't see any snipers banned this week, we can understand how much dive being favored will effect hanzo and widow. We also get to see how strong double shield is with and against snipers. Again - when you ban a hero out you don't want to also ban what it works well with.
Secondly, we get to see what Overwatch is like without it's primary healers. Ana and Moira are the two most powerful healers in the game. A big complaint recently is that it feels like some heroes never die when pocketed. Ana with her bionic grenade and moira's orb with primary heal can stack to immense amounts of healing. With the current ban's we now get to see how the game will deal with high burst damage but not as much burst healing. I'm worried that players may want to play tanks less because of a high death rate and the prospect of having to run orisa.
With dive we get a couple of interesting data points. First, we have moira banned, which if you browse the OW forums you'll see everyone complain about her and how she shuts down tracer/genji. While not completely true, she does fair better against dive than most supports. Not only that, genji is highly dependent on his ultimate. This week ana is banned as well, so we'll get to see genji's without nano boost but also with no moira to deal with as well. This strikes an interesting balance to genji and gives him more play with his normal abilities and harassment but not the 1-2 punch of nano blade to constantly win fights.
The next interesting point is that we don't have our burst healers in the game nor do we have the primary supports that are effective by D.va. D.va is really good at shutting down specific abilities, in our case moira's orb and ana's grenade/primary/sleep. Again it's a very middle of the road type look at it. While the massive healing to keep a target alive has been some what removed, you still get brigitte paired with another healer that cannot be shutdown with defensive matrix. We still have a strong line up against dive. On the flip side remember that burst healing is removed both for offense and defense so dvas and winstons won't be getting healed massively when they dive by their ana.
With bunker, we still keep one of our primary heroes Baptiste. The secondary support cannot be one of the main healers in OW. This gives us a glimpse of ways to burst through a bunker that wasn't possible before. While not a huge point, sometimes reaper was used to help against bunker and that close ranged tool has been removed this week.
To cut a long story short
-Generally, what are the tank lineups?
-How genji does without ana on his team and without a moira on the enemy team
-How do tanks survive without the biggest burst healers in OW
-How well does bunker do without a primary healer
-Do snipers get played more or less often with dive being prevalent
-Are tank queue rates up or down with less healing and mei back in the pool
-With the PTR buff of B.O.B not being slept, if there is no ana does ashe get played more?
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 there's always room to run hog,zarya and Hammond but if something is "meta changing" then we should first to look at its effect on the primary strategies the community uses. I'm guessing this is why we didn't see any snipers banned this week, we can understand how much dive being favored will effect hanzo and widow. We also get to see how strong double shield is with and against snipers. Again - when you ban a hero out you don't want to also ban what it works well with.
Secondly, we get to see what Overwatch is like without it's primary healers. Ana and Moira are the two most powerful healers in the game. A big complaint recently is that it feels like some heroes never die when pocketed. Ana with her bionic grenade and moira's orb with primary heal can stack to immense amounts of healing. With the current ban's we now get to see how the game will deal with high burst damage but not as much burst healing. I'm worried that players may want to play tanks less because of a high death rate and the prospect of having to run orisa.
With dive we get a couple of interesting data points. First, we have moira banned, which if you browse the OW forums you'll see everyone complain about her and how she shuts down tracer/genji. While not completely true, she does fair better against dive than most supports. Not only that, genji is highly dependent on his ultimate. This week ana is banned as well, so we'll get to see genji's without nano boost but also with no moira to deal with as well. This strikes an interesting balance to genji and gives him more play with his normal abilities and harassment but not the 1-2 punch of nano blade to constantly win fights.
The next interesting point is that we don't have our burst healers in the game nor do we have the primary supports that are effective by D.va. D.va is really good at shutting down specific abilities, in our case moira's orb and ana's grenade/primary/sleep. Again it's a very middle of the road type look at it. While the massive healing to keep a target alive has been some what removed, you still get brigitte paired with another healer that cannot be shutdown with defensive matrix. We still have a strong line up against dive. On the flip side remember that burst healing is removed both for offense and defense so dvas and winstons won't be getting healed massively when they dive by their ana.
With bunker, we still keep one of our primary heroes Baptiste. The secondary support cannot be one of the main healers in OW. This gives us a glimpse of ways to burst through a bunker that wasn't possible before. While not a huge point, sometimes reaper was used to help against bunker and that close ranged tool has been removed this week.
To cut a long story short
-Generally, what are the tank lineups?
-How genji does without ana on his team and without a moira on the enemy team
-How do tanks survive without the biggest burst healers in OW
-How well does bunker do without a primary healer
-Do snipers get played more or less often with dive being prevalent
-Are tank queue rates up or down with less healing and mei back in the pool
-With the PTR buff of B.O.B not being slept, if there is no ana does ashe get played more?