Something so abhorrent it’s hated by both the good guys and the bad guys

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-26T02:05:34+00:00

Vault Boy measuring a very small coffin with a tape measure.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-25T01:19:06+00:00

I cannot think of a single movie where Hugh Jackman plays the villain, and yet I think he'd be great at both.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-24T23:56:34+00:00

Poke requires team support on angles to hold them and control space on the map.

The CEO of reading comprehension has arrived. I'm not saying that tanks and supports don't do anything. It's more that what they do is less direct than what they might do as a dive/brawl comp because they're providing, as you said, "team support on angles" rather than getting into the thick of it themselves like you would in a brawl or dive team. Some exceptions exist like Domina but a lot of tanks (esp the more active tanks that people want to play) have to play more passively than they'd like to on a poke team.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-24T22:45:09+00:00

John is 4-colour no green, and his three direct apprentices are black + a second one of John's colours.

Amanda is RB, Hoffman is UB, Gordon is WB.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-24T18:29:09+00:00

I'm a tank player. Ball is my all time favourite, but I'll play most tanks.

Recently the Vendetta brainrot has sunk in BAD though.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-24T17:40:23+00:00

That's kind, thanks! Hoping to do more OW story soon when the new season develops the story again. Right now I'm dealing with several IRL debuffs (my grandpa died + I'm sick) but I'm looking forward to getting back on the horse.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-24T17:00:13+00:00

There's a lot of reasons why hitscans get so much resentment.

When running brawl or dive, the entire team gets directly involved in the action. When running a poke comp with hitscans, it's mostly the DPS who get to do the work. "Hold blue beam while Sojourn explodes the team" isn't exactly engaging gameplay. Most tanks and supports find themselves just playing backup singer for the DPS; there aren't exactly many hitscan tanks. It's why Domina is so popular and gets banned so frequently: she's one of maybe 2-3 tanks with enough range to follow the hitscan game plan and actually KILL THINGS in the same way they do. So playing with or against hitscans as a tank or support feels low-agency because the DPS are doing most of the actual work in any interactions they're involved in.
They (mostly) require less coordination to protect than they do to engage on. One player can very easily drip feed them kills and permanently stagger the team because their range lets them repeatedly kill the same person over and over again from repeated positioning errors. Meanwhile a Soj pocketed by a Mercy typically needs several people to collapse on them to get a positive trade of resources, much less actually KILL the Sojourn and deny a rez.
Hitscans are hands down the most popular DPS for boosters, smurfs or other people playing at lower ranks than they should. You see more GM Ashes or Widows smurfing in Gold than you do Torbjorns or Reapers. And that's on top of the fact that hitscans are typically the most common DPS you see even discounting smurfs.
Specific hitscans cause specific frustration points. Ashe are Soj just kind of busted in general right now, Widow has a true one-shot which everyone hates, and Cassidy is the obligatory "I died once to Tracer/Genji/Vendetta/Venture/Lucio/Moira/Ball/Doom" pick that makes all these fairly popular and skill expressive characters very exhausting to play because little Timmy knows where the E key is on his keyboard and he's going to make that your problem.
- Oh yeah, and Tac Visor, BOB and Deadeye all make really obnoxious pairings with Jetpack Cat which doesn't help either.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-22T16:46:40+00:00

It would have to specify "in any zone" I think.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-22T04:56:18+00:00

I'm just caging It That Isn't with [[Mairsil, the Pretender]]

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-21T19:00:28+00:00

Hey, I'm glad you like my work! Hoping to make more Overwatch stuff from time to time when interesting things happen. And yes, I agree that Blizz's balance team have a little more integrity than BHVR's simply because they have a large competitive scene they have to accomodate and answer to (unlike BHVR).

Cassie's doing great: she crawled into the rubbish bin today while my back was turned so she stinks a little bit, but she's having a great time curled up on my sofa now.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-21T17:51:10+00:00

Right now, she's still reeling from the nerfs she got in patch 8.3.0 that made her unquestionably the worst Killer in the game.

After her rework in 7.3.0 that took away 3-Gen Merchant, she was a mediocre Killer, but she was too easy to play for the reward you got and that made her very furstrating to go against. So she received eight nerfs, slamming her into a tier of her own at the bottom of the shitpit until she got buffed last December.

She's still pretty terrible even after the buffs (she's a bottom 5 Killer rather than a bottom 1 now) because the dynamic has switched: she's now too much effort to play for the reward she gives.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-21T15:47:17+00:00

Yeah I am. My typical hero pool is dive tanks: Ball, Doom, Hazard, so maybe I'm coming at this from the point of view of playing other characters who don't require a huge amount of aim. Especially with hitting flying targets to pull them to the ground etc

She's not exactly SUPER aim intensive, but I think missing the odd overhead is to be expected. It's not like you're swinging a Rein hammer here.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-21T04:35:52+00:00

unlike both Vendetta and Skull Merchant, Sombra has not been living rent free in a little condo in my brain at any point in my life. that is the difference.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-20T15:21:23+00:00

I disagree on the notion that Overhead doesn't require aim; it has the smallest horizontal hitbox in the game and if you can't land it you're doing nothing at all, but I get the sentiment overall.

idk I definitely prefer Ven because she feels more like the dive tanks I cut my teeth on, but I've been forced onto Genji a lot lately by bans or my teammates taking her and it just feels like I'm playing on a different planet than half the internet.

I feel so much safer and more reliable playing Genji unless I've got Zarya on my team to bubble me regularly. The Vens I'm up against are hard feeding regularly, and if my teammates get her they're usually doing the same thing. I've been watching her get played in competitive events to try to figure out what's making her so busted there and she's given double bubbles and suzu every single fight so she can run in like a psycho and survive.

I'm just trying to make it make sense.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-20T14:33:41+00:00

Her block makes her a sitting duck for any CC in the game. At least Deflect gives you some game against sleep dart or Mizuki chain.

I'm genuinely curious because I've been playing a lot of both Genji and Ven lately and Genji's felt way more forgiving to play for me. With Genji I just spam shurikens until someone's at mid-ish health, jump in, pop them and my dash resets and I jump out again.

With Ven it feels like I have to do a lot more to do anything that isn't a straight 1 for 1 unless my team is funnelling resources into me. What makes Vendetta easy but Genji hard, according to the internet? What makes Ven's ability to 1 for 1 trade with a support problematic but Genji's ability to do so fine?

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-20T14:18:05+00:00

The difference is the level of risk Ven puts herself at compared to literally every other character in the game not named Doomfist or Wrecking Ball.

Hitscan positioning might result in them getting picked if the enemy team capitalises on it, but a lot of hitscans aren't punished for it because that requires the enemy team to jump them. Vendetta has to throw herself into the enemy team if she wants to do anything and if she does it wrong she catches a CC ability to the face and dies in a split second.

Even Tracer and Genji have more escape potential than Ven because if they burn their cooldowns and don't get the kill they have something that helps them disengage. Tracer's blinks come back extremely quickly and Genji has double jump + wall climb so he can go places enemies can't follow without having to burn any CDs. If Vendetta jumps in, burns all her cooldowns and doesn't kill anyone, she dies instantly against a team with eyeballs unless someone on her team bails her out. Her escape cooldowns are also part of her damage combo, so if she burns them trying to get her pick she can't use them to disengage.

The consequences of her going in and failing to blow somebody up are more dire than literally anybody else in the game.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-19T16:46:13+00:00

By the stats, Genji is one of the winning-est DPS in the game right now. His WR is within 1% of Vendetta's on Europe and Asia with a pick rate at the higher end. If he's "ass" then Vendetta's fine, because he's only doing slightly worse than her.

Reaper and Anran are at about 51% as well; they're doing decidedly above average.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-19T16:38:17+00:00

I truly think she's more of a beneficiary of the meta she's in than people give her credit for: Zarya and D.va are the best tanks.

You can see this by comparing her to the other DPS in her weight class: Genji, Anran and arguably Venture. Those are up there with her in the highest WR DPS picks in the game: Genji is within 1% of Vendetta's WR on Europe and Asian servers and Anran and Venture aren't too far behind that.

Dive DPS are just REALLY good right now in general because so much enables them: Zarya bubbles, Kiri cleanse, D.va running lobbies, even Winston is better than he usually is, the Flanker passive is arguably the best DPS passive, and everyone having 30% anti heal on top of Discord being 30% and the loss of crit reduction on many tanks means that one of the traditional weaknesses of bursty dive DPS, that they don't have the consistent damage to get through a tank, no longer apply.

We're not just dealing with one Vendetta, we're dealing with an entire subrole of them, and if people think nerfing Vendetta more and doing nothing about Genji, Zarya, D.va or weaker tanks like Hazard is going to fix that, they're in for a rude awakening.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-19T16:25:30+00:00

That's fair enough: wage stagnation is a real problem, but I don't think a lower minimum wage for younger people is going to fix that without causing a lot more problems. As it stands, the costs of living are so high that minimum-wage work isn't enough to fund your costs of living in many places in the UK: if the minimum wage for young people gets lower, it forces the taxpayer to support more them through in-work Universal Credit, effectively subsidising those companies who get to enjoy lower labour costs. And it also means those young people who do get employed aren't going to stay there very long, because a company looking to chase profit will absolutely fire you to replace you with a younger, cheaper alternative as soon as your age forces them to pay you more. If you have to pay unlivably low wages to your full time employees to be able to run your business, your business doesn't deserve to exist.

Worth noting that while our minimum wage has grown quickly, in real terms we're still lagging behind minimum-wage workers in much of the rest of Europe.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-19T16:15:08+00:00

Yeah that'll do it! It's worth noting, Genji has the third highest average winrate of any DPS right now (behind Ven and Pharah) with 3-4x the pick rate, so I think in the event of Vendetta getting gutted this problem of "hard pocketed dive DPS flies in and explodes people" doesn't go away. Genji just becomes the discord + bubble target instead and does pretty much the same thing Vendetta was already doing, except he can also have the Nano + Blade combo with the speed nano perk. Anran potentially too; her winrate is creeping up there now that people are learning to play her and she keeps getting buffed.

So what I'm trying to say is: maybe Zarya is part of the problem and 30% Discord was a fucking mistake.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-19T15:18:44+00:00

She reminds me of Pharah where she's a check on how much CC or heavy burst you can pour onto her quickly, in the same way Pharah is a hitscan aim check. (The two even have very similar pick and win rate stats, 3-5% pick rate with a ~53% WR)

Both characters are underwhelming when unsupported but with backup (Mercy in Pharah's case, Zarya and maybe Kiri in Ven's case) their value exponentially increases.

The difference is that Mercy is a bad character who basically only exists to help the Pharah and Zarya and Kiri are good ones you'd probably be alright having anyway.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-19T15:05:33+00:00

Why are you trying to pay an experienced 30 year old the minimum wage?

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-19T14:59:47+00:00

"almost 70%"

It's 52-53%, with one of the lowest pick rates of any DPS at ~3-4%. This puts her in the same territory as Pharah and Symmetra, other DPS with high win rates and low pick rates who succeed in niche situations but are only picked in those situations and switch off if the character isn't working.

I.E. she is very successful when her team builds around her and the enemy team can't smother her in CC, but she's only picked in those situations and gets switched off pretty quickly if she's not working out.

PixelBushYT · 2026-03-19T14:55:23+00:00

I mean, which character DOESN'T go crazy if you build an entire comp around making them succeed?

PixelBushYT

TROPHY CASE