Overwatch: The Week of Craziness

Hey Animated World!

Usually with the final week of a Competitive Season and in-game Event in Overwatch, they tend to be what’s on everyone’s mind in the community. Making last efforts to get to a certain rank or lootbox grinding to get one last legendary event skin.

Yea…. we weren’t focused on that.. AT ALL.

These have been some crazy last couple days for Overwatch, in a very good way. From a new animated short, a new cinematic, MAJOR character balancing, a new map,  inclusion of Team Deathmatch in the most recent patch and Season 6 changes, its been a good couple days for most of the Overwatch community.

So let’s recap all the craziness that has taken place!

• JUNKERTOWN!!!

This is probably my favorite video on Overwatch’s YouTube channel. Call it an animated short, a trailer, or a cinematic. The Junkertown reveal video was fantastic! It was short, sweet, and to the point. All while having a comical charm to it. We even got quite a bit of backstory on Junkrat and Roadhog is just a small short. The duo made the short fun to watch and even got a few laughs out of me. If you’d like to see the short it is right below!

Oh yea… and we’re getting a new map…

XD

UPDATE: Junkertown is available to play on the PTR. 🙂

• Rise and Shine!

I remember reading that a Mei cinematic was coming when Sombra was being revealed. Yes, the cinematic has been in the rumor-mill for quite sometime now. But we finally received our Mei cinematic, and it was well worth the wait. Sure, there were absolutely somethings I could be a little nit-picky. However, Mei’s charm along with Snowball made the cinematic for me. Also I was pretty impressed with how accurate they made the cinematic to fit to the Ecopoint: Antarctica map. The cinematic was charming and much like the other cinematics gave quite a bit of info into the lore behind Overwatch.

Now we just need that D.VA cinematic. ❤

Please, Blizzard…

• “Hero’s Never Die”, “Love, D.VA”

Goodluck trying to follow all the changes Blizzard is making to these two special characters. Literally today, more changes have been made as D.VA’s and Mercy’s changes have once again been nerfed. I can’t keep up with this, haha.

I’ll start off with my personal opinion, I think both changed to both characters are good.

This is coming from someone with over 200 hours on D.VA and 150 hours on Mercy. They are basically, (with the exception of when I play on my smurf), the two characters I play in competitive. Although I can hold my own with Lucio in Diamond rank as well.

D.VA CHANGES:D.VA was too reliant on her Matrix, I’ll be dead honest. I like the fact you are now going to have to use your defense matrix as D.VA a lot more efficiently. The up time for it is basically being cut in half for those who don’t know. This means you can’t just sit there and hold L2. Something I see a lot of D.VA’s do. I’m only high platinum- low Diamond rank, but I watch pro D.Va play when I have time. The best of D.Va’s know how to get the most out of the matrix, while keeping themselves in their mech. I really like the fact she is getting a new ability with her new missiles (the damage on these got nerfed today 8/30). I think overall the changes to D.VA are good ones. She’ll need a little more skill to be effective with her than her previous build.

MERCY CHANGES: Being a support and telling people to die for a potential big rez is a bit counter-intuitive. That being said, I’m going to miss playing as Mercy and coming up with a clutch rez. Mercy, in my opinion, has the most different playstyle than any of the other heroes. It can be a pain getting the “I need healing” spam but her rez was such a satisfying reward that it made up for it. This is what I want to know about the new Mercy. Is the reward for playing a true support still satisfying enough to play her? I’d say in a way yes, but it is different now. Mercy was a hero that could come up big in a given situation. Outside of that situation however, you were mainly just healing, damage boosting, or trying to stay alive. A team fight would break out and you’d basically try to go hide somewhere. The new Mercy, in my opinion, is more engaging in even more situations. Get picked off early on defense on Hanamura? Mercy can rez you to keep a 6v6 rather than waiting for her ult to charge. I really like her new ult also because it gives her a lot more options to be effective. You can easily get back-to-back rez off when you ult as her since the cooldown resets when she utls, you can damage boost/heal all team members within a certain radius, or …

You can get nano-boosted by Ana and become a flying apache helicopter raining havoc from the skies. (This was nerfed today 8/30)

(Yes, we are still talking about Mercy.)

Like D.VA, Mercy is now going to be more engaged all around. Which means, players who main Mercy will need to be more engaged in the game flow, not just focusing on a timely multiple rez. A Mercy player now needs to be engaged with what exactly is going on to pull off a “tempo rez.”

What scares me a little about these changes is the fact that these are arguably the two most played heroes throughout the entire ladder. Meaning, whether your Bronze or Grandmaster, you have a lot of people who play Mercy and/or D.Va throughout the entire rank latter. It is going to take sometime to transition to it, but overall I think these changes may be able to help players understand the flow of the game and certain situations better.

• Goodbye Season 5, and Good Riddance!/ Season 6 Pressure is ON!

By the time this entry gets posted, Season 5 of Overwatch Competitive will be officially over. (Just incase, Season 5 ends August 28-29 depending on your time zone.)

All I have to say about Season 5, goodbye and good riddance. Season 5 was my worst Overwatch competitive season experience so far in this game. Mainly due the increase in leavers. For example, we’d only push the payload to the second point on Route 66. Well all we need to do is play some good defense on the first point. Then someone gets on the team chat with negative toxicity saying we’re about to get rolled. We could be winning the team fight, but as soon as that one person goes down, said person leaves the game. I just don’t get it. I was dual queueing with a friend and we lost 7 out of 7 games. We lost ONE game due to skill and just got outplayed. The other six were exactly of the nature like the previous given example.

And for the record… YES IT IS HARD, BUT YOU CAN COME BACK FROM A 2-0 DEFFICENT ON KING OF THE HILL MAPS.

I barely played Season 5 honestly. Between both my accounts I usually get anywhere between 300-400 matches in a season. Season 5, I think I may have just got to 100 matches summing up both accounts.

HOWEVER.. here is where I still have some hope.

I played half of my competitive games throughout this week after watching the Junkertown short. About 50 matches give or take. I think out of 50 between both accounts, maybe in 8 games I had someone leave. (This includes on the other team.) In half of those, the person came back. You can assume it was due to connection issues. Most of my games, I’d say about 70%, were competitive. Meaning, neither team was getting rolled. Some timely ults and good team play were making the difference in these games. This was in high platinum rank (2900) and high gold rank (2400).

Hopefully this is some type of indication that Season 6 will be better. I really hate it because, Season 4 we had about 6 dedicated gamers to Overwatch. We’d mainly 3-4 stack but even sometimes 6-stack. In Season 5, my friends were having such bad experiences they just completely stopped playing. One friend didn’t touch Season 5, one got to Diamond early and called it a season, three were playing dedicated like I was at first then after the experience of leavers and throwers stopped after about 50 games in the season. The last played very little due to he’s been on a massive losing streak since Season 3 when he went from 2900 to 1500. He is still trying to climb back into Platinum on that account. Hopefully this week of craziness and Season 6 approaching will re-ignite the Overwatch motivation they had to play!

• Deathmatch has Arrived!

Last but not least, yesterday Blizzard dropped a new patch including the new Deathmatch mode. I’m not super crazy about Deathmatch, but it is a lot of fun. I was playing yesterday trying out the new Roadhog and another player was playing Roadhog as well. We saw each other, emoted, and proceeded to find other heroes to pounce on. It was kind of funny that we had a peace treaty between Roadhogs until we were both getting close to winning.

On a serious note, Deatchmatch is fun and will definitely serve as my place to blow off some steam once Season 6 comes around (Tomorrow I believe).

Animated Tip: Junkrat is really funny to use,and Mei is great if you seriously want to play the mode.

THIS UPDATE ALSO BROUGHT A REPORT SYSTEM TO CONSOLES!

PHEW, that was a lot!

This may have been my longest post, so I’ll wrap this up pretty quickly.

Hope to bring more Overwatch coverage onto animated and maybe even stream some placement games for you all sometime in the coming weeks!

– Animated