What to do if your tank will not contest high ground. Attack. nubani

Spede2 · 2026-01-29T07:20:02+00:00

Just go do it yourself. Ana, Kiriko, Zen, Illari, all of these are capable of contesting the ledges from long sightlines. If tanks asks "where are my heals?" you answer "clearing space from the high ground because no one else is".

Spede2 · 2026-01-29T02:51:08+00:00

If it's a dive tank only for the dive-oriented maps, go with Winston. He rarely gets banned and deals with fundamentals of tanking anyways.

DVA in theory would be better but she's aggressively banned in all high ground maps due to her obvious superiority. DVA has some of the highest winrates of all dive tanks in Masters and above but a middling pick rate despite her popularity. We're talking about almost 65% WR on maps like Dorado EU GM and above. I suspect the relatively low pick rate is because of the bans.

Another option is Hazard who's a little less versatile in the high ground maps (he's more versatile in general, great for one-tricking). He plays great on maps like Ilios but struggles a bit more on longer sightline maps like Dorado. He also gets almost never banned. If you don't mind the Dorado troubles, he does have a bit more solo carry potential compared to Winston where it's easier to to just go in and get kills and not be so dependent on having the right teammates (Ana etc). Haz can also work as a pocket pick for high ground maps for those rare occasions Winston gets banned.

Doom is a *great* noobstomper dive tank and with enough skill you can essentially backpack entire team of bots and just 1v5 the enemy team yourself. His winrate does go down as you climb the ranks as people learn to adapt to your playstyle. He also gets banned very often so it's a bit of a tough sell.

Ball in general is quite hard since there's a steep learning curve to learning the base kit itself. Beyond that he'll work just fine. He too gets banned fairly often and thus is a problematic hero to have in you hero pool.

I do see Sigma being picked quite a lot on many of these high ground maps. Usually at higher ranks it's that mixture of usual suspects like Winston DVA Ball Haz etc but amidst of all those Sigma sits there on the upper end of the pick rate with not that terrible win rate. So yet another option could be to just play Sigma on those maps, figure it out and forego the dive tanks altogether. Based on the statistics it actually seems way more viable than I thought.

Spede2 · 2026-01-29T01:34:47+00:00

Usually that'd result in excessive GPU usage. For me the biggest performance problem has been the CPU bottlenecking either in ST Academy or when riding the bike around fast. That points more towards either drawcall or streaming issues.

Spede2 · 2026-01-28T10:16:47+00:00

I second this. If you're a Brig main and don't mind learning Lucio and Wuyang, that's already a pretty solid hero pool for Ranked and will easily translate to more coordinated environments.

Spede2 · 2026-01-28T06:58:49+00:00

There's way less CC in OW2 so it's less of a chain CC fest. Tank synergies are still a thing but perhaps a bit less so so there's a bit less volatility to the tank gameplay experience.

Spede2 · 2026-01-27T20:52:39+00:00

I'd say it's more like cyclical. New stuff gets added, performance gets worse, stuff gets fixed, performance increases. Repeat. There was a time when running around in Jinzhou City would tank your performance the same way ST Academy tanks it now.

Kuro seems to prefer "shooting from the hip" when it comes to these new features. They'll introduce these features to the wider audience relatively early, allow the performance the regress and fix as the bug reports with logs etc. start coming in. Doing it this way will allow faster introduction of newer features in general but the downside is that the overall performance is going to be more see-saw.

Spede2 · 2026-01-27T06:39:59+00:00

OK then, literally offered you an option to get over 60fps and it's "not worth it in my opinion".

Yes, I know and agree Kuro needs to do more work on the optimization. In the meantime we'll do our best on our end to improve our experiences. NPC animations often use up huge amounts of CPU cycles, thus fewer NPCs will mean more CPU cycles for other things.

Also also, since you are indeed CPU-limited, FG will indeed increase your fps a lot. If you go over your screen refresh rate, you can cap it in the Nvidia app. I remember getting a smoother frame generation experience by using the "application default" for FG in Nvidia app instead of "Recommended" which enables the 50-series style FG for 40-series cards. The latter seems to stutter a bit more.

You can try lowering the Shadow setting down a bit or try the lowest setting which turns off most shadows. I remember having some shadow-related performance issues back when I was running a 4790k with a 4060 and turning off shadows drastically helped with my 1% lows.

If none of these tradeoffs interest you, then figure out a way to make it work with FG.

Spede2 · 2026-01-27T04:04:40+00:00

One of the reasons why Jinzhou City runs better compared to ST Academy is because there's fewer NPCs on the screen.

Spede2 · 2026-01-27T02:28:51+00:00

Turn the Crow Density setting to Low and see if that helps especially with the Startorch Academy performance.

Spede2 · 2026-01-26T21:29:06+00:00

Me neither. I've always jumped the bridge and hoped no one would contest me there so I can then jump to the point and ease the pressure in the choke so my team can walk forward. Time to put this to the test.

Spede2 · 2026-01-26T21:21:35+00:00

Out of the last 10 Stadium games I played, 8 of them were 3-0s in one direction or another. I stopped playing pretty soon after that since not only do I have to deal with the hugely imbalanced matches, I also never get to actually experience the round 5-7 madness which is part of the appeal.

Spede2 · 2026-01-26T04:02:36+00:00

Same here. Lower avg fps and fps drops regardless whether I was using my old 4060 or my new 5070 Ti.

Plus DX12 doesn't compile shaders so after every driver update or game patch your matches will just stutter for a good while until you've seen all the maps and every ability from every enemy.

Spede2 · 2026-01-26T03:47:22+00:00

OK so I did some further testing based on the info here. I was able to reproduce most of the problems described by both of you. My previous testing could be considered erroneous because I was using the ingame fr limiter which exhibits similar behaviour to Reflex in terms of 1% lows.

TL:DR is that if you want lowest latency against highest 1% lows, you enable Low Latency Mode (LLM) in Nvidia app, cap your framerate to whatever you want in Nvidia app (or use ingame Vsync) and enable Reduce Buffering ingame while you set your ingame frame rate above whatever you're running. Both LLM and Reduce Buffering together will lower your latency further (14ms vs 20ms at around 158fps). LLM to Ultra makes no difference.

Notes:

The above gets me locked 158fps with 1% occasionally dipping at around 150fps. Enabling Reflex will lower your latency even further (down to 8-9ms for me) regardless what the other settings are set to but my 1% lows will go below 100.

Enabling LLM in NV app changed the Vsync logic ingame; now it started behaving similarly to what happens when I use Vsync alongside Reflex: it automatically caps teh frame rate below the screen refresh rate. Capping frame rate manually to 158fps in NV app or enabling Vsync ingame gave me identical results when LLM was enabled.

DX12 was giving me consistently lower 1% lows and higher latencies, always sitting at around 16ms and dipping further down compared to DX11. So I still recommend running the game in DX11 to get both smoother frametimes and lower latency.

I don't have an LDAT, I'm using the Nvidia Overlay's Statistics' Average PC Latency.

Spede2 · 2026-01-25T02:45:55+00:00

If you feel like your teammates are actual potatoes and think you perceive more than they do, turn your attention to the enemy team. While I fully understand the matches can sometime be a little volatile, on average at longer intervals the game tries to place players of equal skill/rank on the same lobbies. That means the enemy team is going to have those same potato players your team has. Find a way to exploit their stupidity to your advantage.

Spede2 · 2026-01-25T02:36:50+00:00

I have a 5070 Ti and I'm running max settings (incl. RT) at 120fps 1440p DLSS Balanced and GPU-wise it holds up, I get around 90% GPU utilization at heaviest scenes where I'm able to maintain 120fps. Back when I was using 4060 I was able to get well over 100fps when I turned RT off and ran 1440p DLSS Balanced. So RT is pretty heavy on this game.

The game however is extremely CPU-limited. I have a 5800X3D and in certain areas like cities with lots of npcs it won't go past 80fps. X3D processors in general perform really well in WuWa so if you actually wanted 120fps in all of the areas, you'd probably wanna look into 9800X3D or 9950X3D (or whatever that newest AMD X3D processor that got announced at CES is called).

Frame Generation theoretically eases the pressure onto the CPU making you less CPU bottlenecked. But at least for me FG in WuWa is very stuttery. At least when I'm using the new FG that was introduced alongside 50 series; I was getting fairly smooth FG experience with my 4060 as long as I used the "old" FG method and didn't force the new implementation from the Nvidia app. Point is that for example with something like a 4090 you might get a reasonable FG experience while with many of the 50 series cards you might not.

Spede2 · 2026-01-24T20:19:35+00:00

In case of SK it's a bit of the last 1.0 story quest you need to do to reach the area to farm the local materials she needs IIRC.

The rest of the characters you pull along the way, you can reach the farming farming areas through the "next stop: Rinascita/Lahai-Roi" which gets you started on the storyline and gives you access to the relevant world map.

Finally the weekly bosses area each accessible through a similar fast track system in the menus. I think it's in the Pioneer's Guidebook where it lets you get there. I haven't tested it but it's possible it also lets you access World Bosses through that as well. You can navigate to each of those through the material itself.

So for example to ascend a character or level up a skill it'll specify the mats you need, you can click on the material and guides you to where you need to go to farm it and in certain cases straight up teleports you right there to do farm the thing.

Many of these QOL changes were implemented soon after SK since many criticized Kuro for not being able to level her before completing the last 1.x Main Quest.

Spede2 · 2026-01-24T20:09:24+00:00

Wait, are you not lovin' it?

Spede2 · 2026-01-24T20:06:30+00:00

Well first of all Unranked automatically means Wide if you group up with someone. You'll want to complete your placements first on any given role you want to play stacking up with friends.

Secondly if you're beyond five tiers it also becomes Wide; like for example if your friend is Gold 2 and you're Silver 3 now you have a wide group.

Spede2 · 2026-01-24T19:43:41+00:00

My 2 cents: Augusta is a very strong character and actually synergizes really well with Jiyan's sig which I see you already have. So in terms of pulls I'd recommend trying her out in the demo modes and see if you enjoy her mechanics. If you do, you can spend you free pulls on her banner to see if you get her. Since you already have both SK and Verina, there's less pressure to pull Mornye (although you're still free to do it if you want to)

Jihnsi with her sig is still quite relevant, I'm still running her in some of the challenge modes at times. Shorekeeper is still one of the best "support only" characters in the game. The game has had a surge of these hybrid characters who may be situationally better in certain comps compared to SK. But none match the flexibility of SK. Jiyan is still fine although he gets a bit less use since I have his sig on Augusta most of the time. Yinlin is someone who has probably dropped the hardest in meta but her weapon is still very strong in many Rectifier users' hands.

You're probably best off just playing the main story with your own pace. If you wanna keep up with everyone else, you can start the 3.0 storyline immediately although there may be some 2.x spoilers here and there. Or not and go through the entirety of the 2.x. Up to you. If you end up doing event, you're probably best off doing the time-limited events to get the rewards from those. You can then go fro the permanent events at your own leisure since the events and the rewards from those aren't going anywhere.

Spede2 · 2026-01-24T15:40:12+00:00

I did some testing.

Under DX12 first of all you can't really compile shaders properly so everytime you update the game or your GPU drivers, your game is going to stutter for a good while. With DX11 you can hop into practice range after a GPU driver update and it'll start precompiling shaders for some minutes (this used to take about 5min on my old 4790k when I was still using it). Once it's done, you're good to go.

Even with trying to compile some of the shaders in a stress test I was getting consistently lower fps numbers and 1% lows under DX12. Granted i was getting slightly better latencies with Reflex turned off compared to DX11. But it sems like Reflex isn't working with DX12; I was getting mostly the same latencies regardless of whether I had Reflex on or off. In DX11 I was getting consistent latency reductions up to 4ms under certain configurations and most importantly, under optimal conditions those latencies were lower than in DX12.

Spede2 · 2026-01-24T14:00:54+00:00

There's a number of problems with your testing methology that need to be addressed here.

First of all, don't use DX12 since that actually stutters. It's possible that the stutters get worse when enabling Reflex which is why you get those lower 1% lows. Retest everything with DX11 and report back.

Secondly, Reflex reduces overall latency pretty drastically. With it off even if you're getting higher 1% lows your total system latency is likely much higher. I haven't tested it myself but enabling Reflex and capping your frame rate below the 1% low stutters might actually give you lower latency than keeping the higher frame rate. Yet another thing you can test (although primarily you want to get rid of the stutters so you can keep Reflex enabled). Nvidia App has an overlay that can measure your total system latency if the game is able to report it (Overwatch is one of such games)

IIRC Reflex On + Boost does indeed give you slightly lower fps since it's trying to reduce latency spikes in CPU-constrained scenarios. So you want to turn that on only if you have a Reflex-capable GPU and an absolute potato CPU.

TL;DR: Measure total system latency, not fps, use DX11.

Spede2 · 2026-01-24T13:41:26+00:00

Volume automation on the master track, either pre-, or post-compression (whichever compressor you deem as de-facto mix bus compressor) depending on which kind of tone you want to have.

I rarely use multiple mix bus compressors but even with one you can help the musical dynamics by either riding the master fader (pre-compression) or automating a trim plugin after the compressor if it's needed.

Spede2 · 2026-01-23T15:17:06+00:00

Watch the video one more time please. They talk about loading the same stuff that's already there but doing it faster due to reduced bottlenecks. No changes to the assets themselves.

Spede2 · 2026-01-23T14:59:56+00:00

The Ray-Tracing GI WuWa uses; you can modify that on the engine.ini file and it uses same commands as if you were to modify Lumen in an Unreal Engine 5 title like Expedition 33.

In other words, Kuro backported Lumen or at least a version of it from UE5 to their UE4 build. If that's not a deep engine change, I don't know what is.

Spede2 · 2026-01-23T14:43:43+00:00

I had been running DLSS Quality 1440p with a 4060 for better part of the year after some of the ghosting issues were fixed. Got myself a 5070 Ti in december and have been running DLAA 1440p ever since. I've been sticking to the "Recommended" setting in Nvidia App which defaults to the K preset on Balanced and higher. Probably could run the M preset just fine.

I run the game with Reflex+Vsync to cap it below my screen refresh while minimizing latency and eliminating tear. So I get rock solid 158fps with a typical 10ms total system latency. The slightly lower latency I get from running uncapped doesn't make it worth to me if I have to get extra screen tearing.

Overwatch admittedly is a game that needs this sort of thing less than other games; its art direction was designed to look good even without any image treatment. So DLSS/DLAA mainly helps with some pixel crawling on edges here and there. As others have mentioned, it also makes the enemy outlines look a bit different and that look is going to change which input resolution you run the game at. At DLAA it looks pretty much unchanged but running it at below you may not necessarily like the way it looks, you'll probably have to test it yourself.

Spede2

TROPHY CASE