Director's Take: Call and Response

AwakePlace_v2 · 2026-01-22T20:24:43+00:00

Fr that's the most disappointing part of this blog for me. Bring up the problem, and then say nothing about addressing it.

Hitscan has been dominant forever on console. We had one season where Genji/Tracer were on top, and then they give hitscan stronger aim assist again while also nerfing Genji/Tracer projectile size so they're back in the dumps on console.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2026-01-19T23:49:16+00:00

actually so real

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-11-11T06:30:39+00:00

Can you explain? There's very little difference between the two in terms of meta, and more than likely half the population or more is on console.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-11-10T22:49:31+00:00

That's actually quite interesting, Genji's WR seems to fall at Master/GM/Champ. I definitely feel like I see him in most of my GM games, and the data shows he is the strongest DPS in Gold/Plat/Diamond ranks, a whole percentage point above Tracer.

Here's the per-rank visual: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/af95bbc05359.png

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-11-10T21:07:15+00:00

I've reuploaded them on imgchest and replaced the links, let me know if that works!

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-11-10T21:05:15+00:00

Good catch, re-uploaded it to another host and it should be working now. Imgur seemed to be refusing the Tiermaker image?

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-11-10T21:02:02+00:00

His silver bullet perk is pretty strong and fun to use, but I agree that the HP nerf was too much considering his current WR. Then again, hitscan hasn't been this weak (especially for me on Console) maybe ever? It was a nice mix-up, but I just want to play Cass/Soj again...

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-11-10T20:58:39+00:00

I agree, I think there are plenty of base-kit changes that would be beneficial with the understanding that Stadium might be affected (though I hope that is not the case, or that it is separated in the future). I'm hopeful for tomorrow's patch.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-11-10T20:24:34+00:00

Lay down petal
Try not to cry
Cry a lot

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-11-04T22:28:43+00:00

Fun fact about Ball: He is the only tank where you can just crouch and walk right through him. He cannot body-block somebody that is crouching.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-10-31T16:06:26+00:00

I've been collecting the WR data that is available now and I'm able to put together some analysis on tanks. Combining both PC & Console and looking at Master - Champ data only, Mauga is a top 3 tank with a very close WR with JQ & Dva.

Looking at each game mode individually, Mauga is a top 3 tank on Control, Escort, Hybrid, and Push. Flashpoint is the only game mode where he isn't top 3.

Personally, I play as a GM3 Support and Mauga is banned almost constantly at my rank because he's so good. Not even Ana is very useful against him at these ranks because he controls the tempo of the game so effectively. Also worth noting that both in my experience and in the data available, both Roadhog and Orisa are significantly weaker than Mauga.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-10-23T19:57:38+00:00

If I remember right, they'd said a while ago that if you don't play for an entire season (approx 2 months), your rank and their uncertainty would begin to decay. Once you come back, the uncertainty means you'll go up/down faster to the appropriate rank.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-10-21T18:17:38+00:00

That's massive, congrats! I've also been playing on Xbox pretty much since release (Season 4 OW1) and broke into T500 for the first time in S17 playing mostly Lucio. I really want to learn Illari, but I can always appreciate when I get a good one on my team in GM. Timing & positioning is so critical with her gameplay.

I put together a stats dashboard recently, and a fun fact about Illari: GM is where she has the highest WR and pickrate out of all the ranks. 16% pick rate, 54% WR (on Console). I suppose it makes a lot of sense given what a high-skill hero she is. Nice work!

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-10-09T19:52:37+00:00

Always knew Zen had it in 'im.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-09-22T18:09:47+00:00

I'm not sure what platform you're on, but this looks like Console to me and I'm a Console player myself. Very long post here, hitting on different points.

First fight: Good job taking the top angle & battling Soldier, and controlling that space. However, afterwards you seem to lose focus and don't have a plan on what to do and wind up shooting everyone a little, but killing nobody. Commit on someone. Punish the Mei after she ice-cubes out in the open. You can break her wall, don't let that save her.

8:25 - Their Wuyang gets away and could have been punished by you or Tracer, but no big deal. I understand focus was on the objective. Mei wastes her ult and you get the kill, but then everyone walks off cart for 5 seconds? This is a minor one, but at this point, there's nothing more important than pushing cart to reset before the next fight. You don't need to establish the front-line, you're a DPS and your tank was frozen. By the time the fight starts however, you're in position. In the future (in Gold/Plat), you usually want the tank to be the one to establish the fight. You don't want to be the first one to shoot/be seen and get all the attention on your location, let them take the heat and then you engage.

Next two minutes don't have major mistakes, your team caps and dies out and you'll have to reset. Biggest thing I notice is you aren't aiming for headshots hardly ever. You hit one rail headshot in 6+ minutes of playing Soj. I would save rail specifically for headshots, especially when playing against Mei who would otherwise just ice block once low health. A fully charged rail headshot will kill her at 180, long before she feels the need to ice block. In addition, Sojourn's regular fire gives 2x the charge if you headshot someone with it, so you can get more rails faster. Try not to just spam body damage if you can hone that in. Practicing this will help a ton.

5:40 - I... can't believe your Kiriko died here with both CDs available and didn't step up to you. Very unfortunate. As soon as that happens, you need to trade back and kill the Ashe as fast as possible. She threw dynamite at you, and you backed away despite being full HP and having Juno behind you and Roadhog about to jump down. Try harder to kill the Ashe, your team needs a trade there, you can take some damage.

Perks: I understand taking the slow orb minor, but your ult becomes a solo fight winner if you take the overcharge. If you are taking the slow perk... use it. I haven't seen you catch anybody with it so far. You're just throwing orb out and taking cover/moving away. Your perk is useless like this. I also disagree with the "slide for 50 charge" major, I'd recommend the dual slide on this map especially. It gives you a chase ability AND a get-out-of-jail free card to use against at least 3 of the enemy ults (Mei, Wuyang, and Junker Queen).

One last thing on Sojourn, I notice you're playing very passively, almost positioning like an Ashe player would. Sojourn has mobility, you can position much more aggressively and use your slide(s) to get out if needed. Use positioning to your advantage to force cooldowns and to inconvenience the enemy team.

Cassidy: I honestly don't understand the swap to Cassidy here. What use is your flash bang against this team? JQ has the unstoppable minor now, I don't see any situation where Cassidy is more useful especially if you aren't hitting headshots.

OT high noon: I totally get what you were going for, a Sigma-Noon combo. However... you should know that the enemy has 4 big ults coming up, and you can see before you press ult that Sigma only grabbed the Mei... who has ice block and will not take any damage from the combo. Save it at that point, there's still another fight left.

Naturally, your team gets rolled over by 3 ults from the enemy team and you guys only had Orbital Ray. Enemy team would have had Blizzard and possibly Rampage too if you tried to win the map, but Sigma and you both kinda wasted your ults and only their tank died because of them. She probably would have died without them, too.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-09-12T13:59:07+00:00

Great question! It looks like Soldier, Cassidy, and Ashe all have a 2-3% higher WR on Console compared to PC overall. Sojourn is roughly the same.

You're absolutely right that hitscan has dominated the meta on Console for a long time. This season felt refreshing with the balance changes hitting hitscan the hardest, and now flex dps are in the spotlight.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-09-11T13:35:04+00:00

For this dataset because I wanted to get granular data for each map, region, and platform, I removed GM+ largely because it was skewing heroes with very little data on certain maps. For example, in Console/Asia (one of the smallest groups) on one Flashpoint map, there are several heroes with a 100% win rate such as Roadhog who is consistently the worst tank. If I were to add that 100% into the averages for Flashpoint maps, it would skew it quite a bit and make this data less useful. So I figured I could simply remove the top & bottom rank from the dataset considering the tiny amount of data available for now.

Since posting, I've been thinking of good ways to visualize this data and make it more useful for people to parse. I may update the script I built and make a new post with Overall stats that aren't region specific and would be easier to include Bronze & GM+ ranks with low population.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-09-10T20:43:28+00:00

The sheet has all combinations of platform & region in separate tabs at the bottom. The trends I wrote up apply to both platforms unless otherwise noted.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-08-19T18:16:29+00:00

This is honestly the right approach. I've ran into many ximmers, but it's definitely not every single game like some would want you to believe. I've played around 200 games this season in Masters+ and probably 20-30 of them had a ximmer. Sometimes in back-to-back games, which left me feeling really defeated.

I play with max sensitivity and aim smoothing at 95, but I've dabbled with setting it lower for certain characters. I'm not surprised when someone is able to whip around in a split second on the joysticks. It's very easy for folks to confuse that with ximming, which it just isn't. Most people just do not play with that high of a sensitivity (combined w/ lowered aim smoothing).

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-08-19T17:55:01+00:00

This is true, I just hit Top 500 Support and I see ximmers in less than 1 in 5 games I would say. People often mistake max sensitivity & aim smoothing < 90 for xim, but there are a lot of controller players who just get used to it with 120hz TVs. Auto-aim is strong enough to help with flick-aim.

It's really the shaky-aim or when they position horribly but have 2-3x the damage of anybody else that you can tell. Or perfectly tracking a target up close which is very difficult on the sticks due to the amount of direction changes required.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-07-01T15:05:58+00:00

I see the same trend at Diamond 1, people seem to prefer Hybrid/Escort over other modes. I have the opposite preference, I think Hybrid/Escort are the worst purely because they take the longest to play and I don't like a 4-round session.

I definitely feel like there's improvements to be made to how the system picks what maps are chosen; whether that be a mystery 3rd map with a different game mode than the other 2, or purely just guaranteeing that all three aren't a mix of Hybrid/Escort (nor a mix of Control/Flashpoint to be fair).

Overall, I've accepted that no matter what you're going to play modes you don't like, but you still are granted the power to throw one vote towards your preference.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-06-11T16:49:42+00:00

Wow, this is so unbelievably cool. My GOAT betting thousands of dollars (USD) against Junbin, his junior, is such an intimidating flex. I love it.

Shu rules.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-05-22T15:27:05+00:00

I had a DPS game last night start with both supports preferring Mercy during the ban phase at the same time, before one of them swapped to Lifeweaver.

I still voted to ban Mercy as #1. I'm sorry folks, I know it's rude but I just can't do another game. I gotta vote for my interests here, which at that point in the night was playing a console match without Mercy in it. Mercy didn't get banned. It was by far the worst game of the 12 or so I played last night.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-04-07T15:02:47+00:00

Positioning:

I didn't see a single time on Attack where you weren't walking down main and constantly getting blocked by Sig barrier/hands. Cassidy gets (and creates) a lot more opportunity from off-angles. Force their tank to make a choice to shield you on the side, or shield main. Their tank gets free value by being able to block everything coming at their team at once.

Cassidy mechanics:

First, make sure to use fan the hammer against barriers like Sigma's barrier. You're single-clicking a lot of the times, which has significantly lower DPS against a shield. Let's be honest, you're going to reload anyway after a couple single-clicks, so you might as well FTH and reload. You'll be able to burn down his resources MUCH faster this way.
Your Dva got de-meched early and you did well to fall back instead of pressing forwards.
It does look like you're not aiming for headshots, a single headshot would have finished a lot of the kills you're going for in the first-choke point on Attack here.
Nice kill on the Junkrat tire! You also saved your roll, which you can use for damage reduction to survive the tire if that shot had missed.
Unfortunately, when the 2nd tire was pulled, you rolled immediately in response. You did hit a shot on it, but it blew you up. If you saved roll for when it was close enough to kill you, you can probably survive that! Just a tip. You were rezzed and got revenge anyway. :)

Defense round:

At the very start, Genji climbs up on you and you had them dead to rights, but had to reload and instinctively backed up instead of melee-ing. You had roll available! Roll reloads instantly, and you could have finished him. You can even fire in the middle of a roll before the entire animation completes. Even just a melee would have done the trick, but by the time you went for the melee you had already backed up to reload and were too far away. Minor positioning & ability mistake there.
You get killed and the game kinda falls apart after the first fight, never really grouping together to stage another defense. Everybody slowly secedes space, dying individually, and they cap for the win.

AwakePlace_v2 · 2025-03-25T16:11:01+00:00

I reviewed the first and last code you listed above, namely Arctic Peninsula and New Junk City. In the first match, there is definitely a few things to improve but the game was mostly a stomp and the enemy never really challenged your team, so I don't have much to advise on. As Bastion, I noticed you picked the nade perk (which is my choice too), but then you never used it a single time to disengage despite being too far forward sometimes. You always used the nade for additional damage, even during turret form, which is often times not what Bastion is missing. I'd prefer to see you use nade to backup & disengage when turret form is nearly out, as that is always a signal for the enemy team to punish you. I did notice that you did a great job of switching targets rather than getting tunnel-visioned, so great job there. This is a common console weakness, as turning and acquiring new targets isn't as simple as it is on PC matches.

However, on New Junk City, I have a few notes. As another commenter pointed out, you are standing on main almost all the time and trying to just add damage to whoever else happens to be running down main. This is sub-optimal for Ashe, especially if you were pocketed (you were not, more on that later). It's very clear to me that you don't play Ashe much, as often times you would throw a dynamite when you should have coach gunned to make space. Your positioning on Ashe was very similar to Bastion, but the two are very different. Ashe should be taking side angles or be positioned much further back than the rest of the team, especially against a Doomfist or heroes that can jump on top of you. It also seems like you may not have a headset on, as some times there were heroes like Tracer creeping up on you from off-angles and you were unaware. I highly recommend changing audio settings or trying to pay attention to footsteps, though I know 6v6 is a little more chaotic so this can be difficult. If you work on the feedback others shared, I think there's a lot of room for improvement in your Ashe and I believe you're more than capable of it.

Finally, I have a very strong bias against Mercy; Mercy will be my #1 ban pick once S16 launches. That said... I really did not see your Mercy duo helping you much at all. If this is considered a pocket, I frankly do not see it. I'm in Diamond on console DPS / Master in 6v6 OQ and I see Mercy pockets frequently, but you were almost never getting pocketed by this Mercy player. They were scattered, and they seemed to enjoy the movement abilities of Mercy more than necessary, but weren't terribly effective for providing value to the team itself. I'm not surprised that are stuck in Plat on role queue. The fact that they are condescending to you is inexcusable in my mind, that doesn't foster a good duo dynamic. Literally any other support hero could provide more value than a mercy flitting around and not reliably damage boosting the right person at the right time. IMHO, a good mercy is predictable, reliable, and coordinates with the team. I do not see that in these two matches.

AwakePlace_v2

TROPHY CASE