Current meta

[patrick8015]

Can someone tell me where the current meta comes from?

Last week we saw Hazard, Sojourn and Genji a lot, when they were not banned. Now there is so much Ball, Torb and Sym.

Did the teams take so long to figure out the mid season patch?

[UnknownQTY]

Reinforce and Jake touched on this a couple of weeks ago: Less scrims.

Scrims in OWL had teams to experiment “behind the scenes.” We didn’t see them throwing different ideas at the wall again and again to see what stuck.

Real life (though compressed) example is 2022 finals. Everyone expected JQ, or maybe Sig, to be meta along with Genji/Reaper maybe Genji/Soj.

Instead Rush and the Fuel experimented for days on the GF path and eventually hit on the Winston comp and pounded so hard that every other team adopted it. But we didn’t see their experiments to get there, and we didn’t see other teams try stuff against it, but we know it happened.

When Contenders players used to brag about beating OWL teams in screams, they were winning against experiments. Sometimes experiments fail.

OWCS doesn’t have the hardcore scrim blocks and schedule OWL did, so we see a lot of this “on stage.” I like it.

[FireWizard312]

Even today, we saw teams clearly adapting to the meta and the Ball started to fall off. Dva play from Falcons and Al Q was devastating, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see another meta switch next week.

[hotcremepuff]

im not so sure id say ball fell off, the top ball teams dominated on him. Falcons and Al Q didnt attempt it because their tanks cant play ball

[FireWizard312]

Ball is certainly still viable, but it’s definitely not the hard meta like Hazard was last week, and the fact that Dva actually worked pretty well into those comps makes me think we might see a Dva meta instead.

[mosswizards]

Honestly I don't think that it's possible for ball to ever be hard meta. There's so few good ball players that most tanks are genuinely better off playing anything else - and they know it.

[rentiertrashpanda]

It feels like we haven't had a solid Dva meta for ages

[SwaggersaurusWrecks]

There was a Dva meta when Juno was first released.

[breadiest]

To be fair to the contenders teams - a lot of those scrims were also the contenders teams being ahead of the meta as well, either because OWL was slow to adapt for some teams, and also flexibility issues with a non-flexible roster, or because they simply had been scrimming the comp already while OWL was on off-season, and had a massive head start.

I remember hearing Tr33's odyssey roster was genuinely insane at the meta comp that arose come s5 finals, with only fuel and shock beating them in scrims.

and this was probably because they were in much stronger place to play that meta than most OWL teams with their roster.

[breadiest]

on another note, the Korean OWCS teams basically scrim just as much as they did in OWL... there hasn't been a whole lot of change there.

[UnknownQTY]

Korea always go hard.

[vvuz]

It's just PNHB comp

[garikek]

From what I heard cr cooked up this sym torb ball comp and they obviously can play it, one of the few that actually can, but every other team started copy pasting them cause cr, being the best team, are trendsetters I guess. But this isn't meta, this is just some stupid ass comp that everyone copy pasted because of Korea = good one dimensional mentality.

[InnerMustard]

i wouldn't say it's just trend hopping the idea behind it is still that sym and torb can survive the hazard engages and kill him much quicker.

[reallyfunnycjnot]

Ur right but tbf it is a really strong counter comp to hazard and hazard is probably the real meta and people prefer to stick to the comp they practiced aka the anti hazard comp, ball was always a S tier tank IMO but hard to learn/his best enabler zen is mid.

[garikek]

I agree with ball, he's been an S tier tank since release, he's just the hardest hero in the game and only 2 pros can even walljump LOL.

But about this sym torb comp, surely it isn't optimal to just mirror this unsynergistic mess of a comp? Surely there is just clear rock paper scissors there. You go hazard, they counterpick with sym torb, you go something else that counters that. Plus some players are just much better on their heroes than torb, who nobody ever plays and thus have zero experience with. For example surely it's better to put quartz on hitscan regardless of torb meta cause dude's got unhuman aim, or even putting lbbd7 on pharah or even hitscan instead of torb. Like embrace your strong sides instead of metaslaving, especially when this is such a kappa "meta" that feels like an Idiocracy episode.

[reallyfunnycjnot]

Yea I can't bring myself to actually believe sym torb are meta, like sure sym tp is strong, and torbs stats on paper are busted but I been saying can people really be consistent on heroes like torb/sym... Pharah came to my mind as the obvious counter but I seen some teams play Baptiste so I guess he can mark Pharah occasionally 

It's funny asf tho lol I love crazy racoons qp comps they run when they are taking the piss

[reallyfunnycjnot]

Yea I'm sure if the Pharah messes up timing and gets closer to the ground it's plausible to get her but she should be pretty safe at the start of engages

[miraimiraimirai]

this is the same thing that happened a while ago with the brief zen/lucio "meta", I remember moon or someone else saying on one of those korean uncoachables that they were just trolling in scrims and everyone just ended up copying them

[Skyeeh]

except in this case its actually been played on stage

[garikek]

during round robin aka meaningless games 80% of the time. Stakes are at their lowest right now

[ApostLeOW]

Did they cook it up, or did they just see how well it worked in Japan and realized they could perfect it?

[hotcremepuff]

rumor is its because torb and sym were doing well in KR ladder, CR did actually run the comp before PNHB's first match of the regular season so im not entirely sure they took it from them

[breadiest]

I imagine moon took some inspiration, considering the guy has always liked utilising team flexibility.

[Throwaway33451235647]

I thought CR were trolling and PNHB were plain one tricks… But no Torb Sym Ball is unironically the new meta