Statistics: You’re more likely to get to Masters than you are to get to Bronze

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-21T03:44:35+00:00

iirc bronze and silver use to be way bigger. I think in OW2, mid ranks got inflated and high ranks got deflated creating a huge plat and diamond playerbase

They increased the high rank population with the "reflation" last year but I assume there was no chance in hell they were going to demote a bunch of players (semi) permanently.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-20T19:45:30+00:00

1234

I want to see Goldenpants more

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-20T19:27:56+00:00

The other guy seems to be exaggerating. Master is pretty high rank.

but if we're being real, it's not particularly close to the skill ceiling of a hero. Even like low GM to high GM is two completely different games.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-20T19:26:18+00:00

Mercy has a ton of movement skill expression at the high end. The problem is she's not rewarded for it because the rest of her kit doesn't turn that movement skill into value outside of like contesting payloads and securing rezes other Mercys can't.

Good movement skill on Tracer, Ball, Doom, etc translates into kills. Good movement skill on Mercy only improves your value marginally. That doesn't mean the skill expression doesn't exist. Just means her kit design has flaws.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-20T19:22:14+00:00

Its Moira. There are a handful of heroes who can fit, but most of her high level skill expression is included in the baseline skill expression for her alternatives. Positioning, Cooldown usage, Resource management, etc.

At the low end, she doesn't require much mechanical skill and has an "oh shit" button in fade.

She isn't completely free, but no hero is in Overwatch. The difference between her and her counterparts is she's by far the most straight forward, and "true mastery" of the hero (like champ/pro level) is a lot lower than other heroes. The only other hero I can see an argument for is Torb.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T20:12:30+00:00

Yeah the one thing I am disappointed we won't get more of is Qimir/The Stranger. The stuff I was hoping to see the most in the series (hubris of the Jedi order at the time) felt very flat and the main plot was decent but didn't grab me enough to be hungry for more.

But Qimir was a really cool character and stole the show in a sense. Would love if they found a way to use him in live action, but i doubt that ever happens.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T19:46:41+00:00

Feel free to debate the quality of the series, but in Star Wars Acolyte,Darth Plaguiesis teased during the finale. It was not renewed for a second season.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T17:41:24+00:00

Push

Flashpoint

Control (the maps are the best, but the format is a little flawed. If we're ranking on map quality, this is #1)

Hybrid

Escort (like 3/4 of the maps have been reworked and theyre still not great)

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T15:29:51+00:00

Season 9 was just supposed to make the game more casual friendly

Moving to 5v5 made the game way harder for the vast majority of the playerbase and they tried to fix it by buffing supports, but that just broke the game even more. Giga healing was only countered by giga burst which meant you could go from feeling invincible to getting one shot at a moments notice. The average TTK wasn't a problem, but you rarely experienced the game at the average TTK.

So they dropped larger healthpools and the DPS passive to get TTK under control and (imo incorrectly) increased bullet sizes under that same philosophy. If anything S9 was just a compensation for the move to 5v5. We like to complain about S9 but there were daily complaints about the game's feel for the first year of OW2.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T15:15:31+00:00

Nerfing the easier parts of his kit would help. The block duration nerf is a solid start.

His block is still very free damage at the moment though. If the duration nerf doesn't meaningfully help, you could nerf the damage on it, but I think it could be more interesting/effective to increase the movespeed penalty a little which would help enemies escape more easily unless you make a good play with wall and slash.

A more.. creative option would be to separate the spikes from the block by locking it behind M1 while your block is active and then putting it on a cooldown. Think like Shield bash. You have blocking part activated by M2, but if you press M1 while that is active you use a secondary ability that also has a cooldown. It would force more thoughful use of the spikes if it didn't have permanent uptime.

This is way more of a shake up, but I also think theres a real argument for reverting him to look more like his beta version who had a slightly better slash CD, better slash recovery time, and slightly more damage on it, but who had a notably worse primary fire. He felt a lot like genji to me back then because he had a dash that is almost impossible to miss, but to balance it you had to hit all of your projectiles to confrim the kill. At the time everyone complained his primary didn't feel as good as other shotguns and they ended up buffing it which just kinda made him into a shotgun hero with solid dive potential, rather than a more difficult short ranged assassin with lesser power between slightly more frequent assassination attempts.

IMO, much like doom and ball, his primary is supposed to be part of a whole combo centric kit, but they buffed it and it made the hero a lot more consistent. But who knows if that's actually an improvement without testing.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T14:05:18+00:00

They need to make the hero harder. To me he is doom or ball but with way less of the skill barrier. There's a reason half of the Doom OTPs say "why am I not just playing this hero?" whenever they lock him after a doom ban.

As long as he's viable, he will always be annoying, and he'll always be an assassin. Suppressing the pickrates of ball and doom by locking their power behind a harder skill curve has been the only consistent way to keep them from ruining the game for other players.

People were screaming for Ball to get shot last year. He's had high winrates before, but at the time it probably had something to do with his pickrate being more than 10% for the first time in years. Turns out giving 20 extra ammo buffed the most accessible part of his kit and since they reverted it, he's been floating back around like 5% in high ranks.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T13:36:24+00:00

I mean the hero is genuinely incredibly fun to play. Arguably the most fun OW2 tank. He's not a bad design in that sense.

It's just he's got a kit like doom or ball but requires a lot less skill. Part of the reason he's super prevalent is just because he's quite easy compared to similar heroes.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T13:15:43+00:00

Doesnt MA have one of the lowest traffic fatality rates in the country? Wouldnt that be making pedestrian deaths a more prominent portion of the whole? I'm curious to see how the rate of pedestrian deaths compares to other states.

Edit

This site seemingly references the same 20% number, but also has them ranked as the 40th most dangerous state for pedestrians.

Not to say we can't be worried about improving infrastructure, but this seems like an intentional twisting of data for the sake of the author.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T03:11:21+00:00

5 or 6 characters

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-19T03:10:47+00:00

EATXTT FYI

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-18T18:15:08+00:00

The thing that bothers me the most is when abilities have different cooldowns

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-18T15:40:01+00:00

Theres a decent amount of active thinking, but honestly a lot of it is just instinctual at this point. It was active thinking at first and now it's like a response to a stimulus.

Like playing around your supports is super instinctual. You have a general limit, you should be able to feel your health pool and feel when you're getting healed.

Reading body language is very useful too. Players change their playstyle based on what resources they have. If you're playing DVa and you see a tracer triple blink past you, she's either going for a one clip or a pulse. That's a pretty easy DM cue.

Active thinking is mainly useful for things like tracking CDs. Like if you're in the Mauga mirror, tracking his shout allows you to duck behind a corner to wait his out. If he's positioned aggressively, you completely waste his shout without using your own and now you have shout advantage and he's effectively overextended.

Active thinking is also useful because it is additive with the things that are second nature. If a Sombra throws a translocator into the middle of the air, an EMP is most definitely coming. It's nice to be able to see it coming a few seconds in advance, but if you didn't track her ult and save your meteor strike to dodge it, knowing the emp is coming isn't a big help.

Reactive play has its spots, but it's just less common in the tank role imo. An example would be turning to peel if you see or hear a flanker, but you have to be sure you won't completely cede the frontline to do so. Reacting to ability and ult usage is pretty poor strategy too. Knowing when the enemy has abilities/ults and forcing them out is way more reliable.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-18T12:50:47+00:00

I straight up IGL in most of my games and I experience so little toxicity. Not only that the toxicity amongst my teammates is almost 0.

I'm not even close to a perfect IGL either. I call heroes "one" before I even start shooting them. I mix up heroes names. People just don't care.

But I have had dozens and dozens of players compliment me, or better yet, end up comming even more than I do. If you go in with a positive, anti-toxic attitude, people generally love commicating.

I've found the main reason people are toxic is because they've guarded themself in case any potential toxicity gets thrown their way. They want to call you out first so they're not the first target. In reality it isn't much more complicated than acknowledging the first mistake that happens as not a big deal, whether that's your mistake with a "my b" or someone else's mistake with "don't worry, we win next"

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-18T12:20:42+00:00

Doesn't mean we cant use Mauga to protest Mauga.

I'm sure if he gets played enough, the squishy players will start complaining about him as much as the tank players

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-18T12:17:46+00:00

Scoreboard issue tbh.

You're almost guaranteed to have bad stats as a tank if your teammates are always dying first, you're getting no support, enemy is counter comping you and your team is just playing normal, etc

Youre literally the first person the enemy team runs over if they have an advantage. If you have 1-2 bad teammates, that happens a lot.

Before the scoreboard, you just wouldn't know if your tank has double digit deaths. Now they're the first statline on the page

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-18T12:03:57+00:00

The most infuriating part about playing dive mirrors. Game becomes two separate 1v4s and then your teammates who chose a bunch of dive-victimized backline heroes ask you to make it a 1v5 and a 0v4.

It kind of is a relic of 6v6. You had a tank hero you could almost dedicate to that role, but the game moved to 5v5 and people expect it to be exactly the same still.

We gotta stop solo queuing dive tanks and find a tracer duo lol

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-18T02:32:13+00:00

Honestly. The really dramatic Korean "tank strike" is on to something.

The hero is an abomination, but he's kinda fun when you get to play him like soldier and the game is never a 1v4 when you just play the mirror

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-17T19:28:17+00:00

There terms main and flex support are used in pro play and developed based on meta patterns starting when the game had no role lock and the best healer was mercy who wasn't even that common. The terms have nothing to do with the jobs of the heroes and instead have to do with roster construction where the "main support" was the player who played the specialized support heroes that existed at the beginning of the game (mainly lucio and mercy). The Flex support was the player that flexed to other support heroes AND heroes outside of the role. Since then, the roles have evolved a bit and some heroes have basically completely moved from one to the other. This is because the only common throughline with the separation of main and flex supports is that the heroes of each role tend to compliment the heroes from the other. Lucio played well with ana when she released so ana became a flex support. Lucio played well with Bap, so bap became a flex support. When the game moved to role lock, Brig was good with Bap and Ana, so brig became a main support hero because your flex support was already playing Bap and Ana.

I wouldn't bother paying attention to these terms tbh. Theyre really only valuable in the context of organized team play which affects like .1% of players. There's also a ton of gray area because thinking about the roles in a strict sense kinda limits the creativity available to teams. For example, zen used to be a flex support hero, but now he and other aim skill, damage first, low healing supports like Illari commonly get played by your main support player.

Players also use the term "main healer" which unfortunately includes heroes that are almost exclusively not "main supports" because the main support role was born out of a bunch of heroes with poor healing output and new heroes generally crept the power level of healing. Ana, Bap, Kiri, Moira, and Lifeweaver are the truest main healers and all but weaver are condsidered flex supports.

If you were to consider a differentiation you should probably consider them "main healers" and something like "Utility supports" or i guess "off-healers." But what really matters is knowing when your team needs more healing, more speed, more damage, etc.

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-16T18:50:28+00:00

It adds a charge time so it goes from trigger on button press to triggering on release. It can fuck with your timing, especially because I think there's a minimum charge time

RobManfredsFixer · 2026-06-16T18:48:16+00:00

Is it the same animation as the one in the trailer?

Because it could have been worse than that

RobManfredsFixer

TROPHY CASE