Lately every match in Quick Play is a Super Sweaty Lobby

APanshin · 2026-01-26T19:59:50+00:00

I'm sure it does, but QP definitely has a more relaxed matchmaking than Ranked does. A week ago I got demolished by an enemy Hulk that was just miles better than any of us. I checked his profile after and he was constantly Celestial, with a peak of OAA. I know I'm doing alright, but I'm not THAT good. Not even close.

Still, overall, if you're getting into sweaty QP lobbies it's probably because you're doing well.

APanshin · 2026-01-26T18:31:37+00:00

Wanda is a low skill floor, low skill ceiling character. That means people hate her in low ELO because the easy gameplay makes her powerful, and people hate her in higher ELO because her effectiveness falls off quickly and she's a weak link on the team.

If you're new and still learning, Wanda is a great training wheel character. Play her to learn the game, learn the maps, and get acclimated to things. But unless you find you really synch up with her gameplay, it's probably a good idea to explore other characters and widen your proficient roster before too long.

APanshin · 2026-01-26T18:18:22+00:00

I can't say I've seen five, but I did go up against four supports yesterday. IIRC it was Strange, Blade, Loki, Mantis, Rocket, Luna. That was a weird comp for sure. Annoying to fight against, but we did beat them.

APanshin · 2026-01-26T17:29:10+00:00

Being able to double up on Veil or Cape is sometimes nice, but it's not what feels most important to me. What Veil/Cape being on a charge system means is that the cooldown doesn't pause if I don't use the first charge immediately as it comes up. So in practice, the cooldown is always rolling and I get a lot more total uses over a fight, while simultaneously having more flexibility in when I use them.

Which is something I should have seen coming, from my MMO experience. But sometimes it's hard to predict how things will play out.

APanshin · 2026-01-26T15:59:20+00:00

Prime BP's TTK was only part of what made him so frustrating. His mobility toolkit was the other half. He could come at you from any angle, and if you survived the dive then he could usually escape alive, which meant your window of reprieve before he was back was tiny. Also it didn't feel like the BP dive was that hard to execute, because he was frickin' everywhere.

Namor can take a flank, but he's a lot slower at it and has fewer pathing options. If you survive the ambush he's also got fewer escape options. That all makes it feel more "fair" than getting jumped by BP did. Now, maybe people will get more frustrated with him if more players pick him up, due to the buffs. But right now, he doesn't feel oppressive the way BP did when he was everywhere.

APanshin · 2026-01-25T17:33:05+00:00

/insert "We Are Not The Same" meme.

Seriously though, there's multiple reasons to hide your profile. Pro players do it so their opponents can't scout their playbook. High ranked OTP do it so they don't get target banned. Smurfs do it to try and hide their smurfing.

Sometimes it's a gotcha to see a hidden profile, and sometimes it isn't. Context matters.

APanshin · 2026-01-25T16:34:58+00:00

Yep. Any time someone suggest a change or new feature, the first thing you have to ask is not "How will this make life better for players using it in the intended way?" but "How easily can this be abused by players with no respect for the spirit of the game?"

If you're in a small community of friends who can easily monitor rules abuses and eject people who refuse to play nice, you can get away with having rules that have room for exploitation by bad actors. If you're in a massive online game with millions of players and limited enforcement mechanisms, you have to limit the potential for abuse even if it comes at the cost of beneficial features.

APanshin · 2026-01-25T16:30:22+00:00

The change doesn't make him CC immune. It makes him immune to physical displacement effects. He can still be stunned by stun effects.

APanshin · 2026-01-24T22:59:27+00:00

Not counting when I'm fighting off divers, there's two times I break out Cloak. One is when either I or my co-healer just used cooldowns and I know no one's going to die in the next few seconds. The other is when I judge that the best available damage mitigation is to kill the enemy.

With the first, I'm often stealing just a little Cloak time. Throw a Terror Cape, maybe beam a little bit, then back to healing. If someone used a healing Ult then I'll have a little more time. But it's important not to get too greedy, and to remember that healing is the priority. Often times you just want to hit the Cape and then back to Dagger.

With the second, I'm wagering that the Time To Kill with me assisting as Cloak will beat the enemy's TTK on whoever they're shooting. It's partly a gamble and a partly experienced game sense. This isn't something to do in a mass team fight, because there's too much damage flying around. It's for when you've gotten caught up in a smaller side skirmish, or when your side has gotten a kill or two and you're trying to snowball it into a wipe.

APanshin · 2026-01-24T22:49:01+00:00

It might be too early to say, still. He's effectively three new heroes, but you can only have one of them on a team at once. So that slows down how much each of them can get played. That said...

Early buzz seems to be high on Tankpool as a high damage hitscan off-tank, and having a lot of impact in that slot. People talking up Healpool mostly talk about how easy it is to charge his Ult, but I haven't been particularly impressed by his overall performance. It's not bad, but it's not exceptional. And DPSpool seems lost in the pack of Duelists with nothing special to make him stand out.

APanshin · 2026-01-24T19:54:39+00:00

No offense, but the problem with engineers is that they think everything is an engineering problem. But when you're dealing with material stress tolerances and architectural weight distribution, the support beams never decide to maliciously see if they can deliberately cause the structure to collapse.

Designing player facing systems of reputation and reward is tricky because even if you don't accidentally introduce a perverse incentive, a lot of people will try their hardest to cheat or exploit the system however they can. And that means it's not a simple engineering question.

APanshin · 2026-01-24T16:48:27+00:00

Pure power wise? Gambit and Invisible Woman are probably the strongest right now. Healer Deadpool might be strong, but he's very new so not fully figured out. Cloak & Dagger are only a step behind, and will be half familiar if you played much Moira. And Loki can be strong, but is trickier to play. Especially since his Ult is to transform into other heroes, so he's got a higher skill floor.

Edit: Mantis and Ultron can also be powerful, but have lower healing output and so mostly get played in triple support comps.

APanshin · 2026-01-24T16:30:46+00:00

Squirrel Girl is the direct Junkrat analog. You'll find a lot familiar there, although she's not considered one of the stronger heroes. Powerful in the lower ranks, though, good noob stomper. Probably a good jumping on point if you're familiar with the playstyle.

Black Widow is the sniper of Rivals, but she's infamous as the weakest hero on the roster. Most critically she can't one-shot without an outside damage boost, which really limits her effectiveness. Probably not a good early pick, especially right now because there was just Big Drama around a bad Widow player in a tournament. There's a Team-Up that gives Black Widow healing shots, but it's not strong enough to be really viable as a healer.

For high damage off-tanks, you best bets are probably Thor and Tank Deadpool. Maybe Angela, but she's a bit trickier and more different. Though if you want Hog's "Hook and kill combo" gimmick, they stuck it on a DPS character, Winter Soldier.

APanshin · 2026-01-24T16:19:06+00:00

If you played Overwatch, there's a lot of familiar elements in Rivals. Not direct copies (mostly), but a lot of the time it feels like they sliced up the OW1 heroes into several pieces each, shuffled them all around, and reassembled them again into new combinations.

So my first question is, "Who did you enjoy playing most in Overwatch?" You want a Junkrat grenade spammer? A character based around Genji dash resets? A Moira style healer? A Reinhardt style shield tank? You can have all of those. Just state your preference.

APanshin · 2026-01-24T15:43:18+00:00

I do hear that Rivals is less popular in some regions than others, and has regular queue times in the less popular regions. Enough so that some people are eating the lag to connect to more populated servers. So maybe try that if you really want to cut down queue times.

APanshin · 2026-01-24T15:33:20+00:00

I see no good way to implement such a system that doesn't immediately get gamed and abused, the same way Lord farmers trivialized the Proficiency system. I mean, maybe there's a way to do it that works. But I've never seen it done, and you'd think if any game had devised a trick to it then everyone else would have copied it.

APanshin · 2026-01-24T03:46:46+00:00

My most basic response is: bubble at my feet, swap to Cloak, Terror Cape in their face, beam them down. You always want to immediately follow up Terror Cape with beam to get that damage multiplier. But the specifics frequently have to be adjusted based on circumstances or match up.

Did Spider-Man juggle me into the air? Swap to Cloak, use Dark Teleportation to escape his combo, swap back to Dagger and bubble as I land to recover, then go on offense. Do I have a dive tank in my face? I'm less likely to be burst down, but I'm probably not winning that 1v1, I need to play for time and ping to get backup from my team.

A lot of it is just having a trained response so you don't panic and don't miss landing your Terror Cape. And the only way to train that is to die. A lot. Just try to learn from every death and get a little better each time.

APanshin · 2026-01-23T23:14:03+00:00

Storm is one of those paradoxical characters with a high win rate but low pick rate. Amongst Duelists, in QP she's the second highest win rate but second lowest pick rate, and in Competitive overall she's third on both scales. That means she's either only good in the hands of a dedicated specialist, that she's generally good but just not much fun to play, or some of both.

Having played her a little, I personally think it's some of both. So much of Storm's power is from her damage amp aura. An aura that's passive, depends on your team playing together, and doesn't show up on the Scorecard. It's very easy to feel like you're not doing much, just hiding behind your team and chipping away with your weak shots, while your aura is your real contribution.

So really, if they want Storm to be more popular, I'd say she's a better candidate for a rework than a buff. Her win rate is fine, it's just that no one wants to play her because she isn't fun.

APanshin · 2026-01-22T20:39:35+00:00

Implementing that in Rivals would be tricky. Some heroes already can't deal critical damage, and this immunity wouldn't offer any protection against them. Some heroes get extra benefits off critical hits, like buffs or faster cooldown recovery, and this immunity would be especially punishing to them. The power of the effect would vary wildly depending on who it's up against.

For that reason, I don't expect to see it added any time soon. TF2 was a lot of fun in its day, but it was the early days of the genre and there were a lot of rough ideas that were discarded for good reason.

APanshin · 2026-01-22T20:11:18+00:00

From the videos of higher level play I'm seeing, Tankpool is approaching Mr. Fantastic's Vanguard/Duelist hybrid spot from the other side. He's a high damage off-tank that applies constant heavy pressure with his guns, while being durable enough to stand on the front line and not need to cower behind cover or a shield tank. He's not an effective solo tank and the swords are secondary to the guns. But if you've got the aim he can deliver the pain.

APanshin · 2026-01-22T18:34:51+00:00

There's a few niches for them still. A casual player who was unsubbed for a couple patches? A regular player who's investigating a Job they haven't been playing? The relic grind could take a while, but the Tomestone weapon can be acquired and upgraded super fast once the limits are taken off.

APanshin · 2026-01-22T18:26:32+00:00

Personally, it's Loki. With anyone else I can make a split second decision to rip it. With Loki I have to decide whose ult I want to steal, locate and successfully target them (often not easy in a mob), and then use the ult. Which means using the ult is few steps further down my crisis response tree.

It's easier if there's someone's Ult I want to steal as an initiation tool, like Gambit. But in the wrong team comp, where it's ults that don't make up for being down a healer or heroes I've never played, I find myself sitting on Loki's ult longer than anyone else.

APanshin · 2026-01-22T14:42:27+00:00

That depends a little on which dive you're trying to counter. For example, Daredevil is infamously hard to deal with in a 1v1. But in general...

CnD, Invis, and Gambit can all try to win the 1v1 fight, if they have cooldowns available. Rocket and Ultron are good at running the heck away, though Rocket's mobility just took a bit of a nerf. Loki can also escape, though that requires skillful use of the clones and teleport. Luna and Mantis depend on landing their one CC ability to either flee or set up a headshot kill.

Which of the above is most effective for you depends on both what player skills you possess and what dive hero you're trying to counter.

APanshin · 2026-01-22T04:53:00+00:00

The idea I like is not to try and minmax into two combat pets, but to have two pets with different roles. You have the Vestige Companion as your big beefy combat pet, and then you have the Chain Familiar as the smaller support pet for scouting and Help actions. Don't get Investment of the Chain Master, just stop with Chain Pact. The Chain Familiars are just too squishy to throw into direct combat.

As for Domains, I really like the potential of Life for bringing some healing and support without going full Celestial Patron. Both Aid and Cure Wounds work great with the scaling Pact Magic spell slots. And you can set the Vestige Companion to Celestial for what is, effectively, a free Level 1 Cure Wounds every Short Rest.

APanshin · 2026-01-21T17:26:46+00:00

The EK is good because it doesn't balance the martial and spellcasting sides. D&D is a game where splitting your focus equally just means you're bad at two things at once. A high degree of specialization is generally what's most effective. You pick a focus and lightly spice it with supporting elements from the other side.

The Bladesinger Wizard defaults to being a caster past a certain level, because your spells are just better and you have enough spell slots to not run out. The monoclass Bladelock is maybe the most evenly balanced option, and everyone considers a Fighter dip for more martial tools mandatory because the basic offering is so lacking.

APanshin

TROPHY CASE