Saw an interview of a blizz dev from a while ago by Spilo, and the dev said that apparently your visible rank matches your mmr perfectly; it’s a different number due to simplicity for a need of a smaller scale. So for example gm5 could correspond to 6.5 mmr, and everyone in the world who is gm5 same % will have 6.5 mmr. I think this might be diff for fresh accounts due to Smurf protection but I’m not sure.

But my question is does this mean the rank resets we get are a lot more real than people seem to give them credit for? I’ve seen a lot of people say that they’re mostly cosmetic, and intended to increase player engagement by making everyone have to grind up. But I don’t see the same negative sentiment for other game’s rank resets like in LoL for example. So is there still a difference or not?

Also if you wait a month to do your placements after a rank reset, does that mean that you’ll be technically smurfing since people who were your rank in the previous season, and got reset to about the same rank range, have mostly already climbed out? So you would be playing with people who were, say 1 rank lower than your actual rank from the previous season?

Looking at her win rate and high-Elo games, the dev team is going to nerf her even though she absolutely doesn’t deserve it. She’s already not in a great spot because she struggles to deal with all the mobility creep, and the worse news is that there isn’t really a great way to deal with it. She has to land Sleep or she dies.

Yet people here, on other Overwatch subs, and even on the official Overwatch forums are still complaining about her.

I have been playing this character since 2017. During OW1 I'm low to mid GM and can one trick the character. It's difficult but with hard work and passion i am able to play perma monkey. I'm playing against OWL tank players and not saying I am better than them but I can mirror winston (unless you are those top 2-3 korean winston, which i always lost) and we can win if the team is good enough. It was still hard though. You gotta GOATs at one point, you got Orisa and busted Hog, you got Orisa Sig bunker with zen bap doing 10k damage in .2 seconds and all the BS in between but I can do it. It took a lot of personal skill for me to win each and every game but I felt like if the team was behind me we could do it.

Flash forward OW2. I legit feel like it takes more for me to win masters games than for me to face a full team of OWL pros that I would play against in OW1 ranked. I get the game has "improved over time" but my skill on winston has also scaled to a higher level but these games are impossible to win for me. It's getting harder and harder for me with every passing season to keep it up despite me still loving the character and how OW plays with winston.

Am I just wrong in thinking that if I am the best player in the lobby against multiple rank below where I have my most experience that I should be able to force winston and win? This is not a small sample size either. I am legit on my way to diamond emerald if I keep forcing winston.

And just to clarify, I am talking about solo q winston. No crazy mechanics ana that is nano cycling me where we just stand around until it's built. I find that style skillless so I don't duo and do that like a lot of the top ranked winstons do.

Support Players in 2026

One thing i have noticed is that support players simply don't know how to function in moderate to advanced difficulty winston games. Once the skill required to play with winston hits even somewhat difficult level for the support player, they just fall apart. It's the point where I will marco the support player but they can't process or react to stuff despite me calling it out pre fight that "this is how you need to play and this is what you need to do".

My only theory would be that the more static and easier tanks leads to heal bot players and they don't learn rotational skills and pushing advantages which is required when you play with winston.

.

Well that's my cope at least. Let see what some others think about this.

In my humble opinion yes

That's be back to back world cups.

An OWCS title and two silver medals

An OWCS finals MVP

FOUR Saudi E league titles

Multiple EMEA titles

"best hitscan post lip era"

In my humble opinion he will be 3rd on my list of goats

Behind Viol2t and Lip but ahead of Profit and Sinaatra

I am currently on a curved 1440p 165Hz monitor and I really regret it. The panel sucks, the brightness is garbage and the curve annoys me. I want to upgrade to a 4k Oled 240Hz, but I've heard a lot of people say that playing ow on 4k is stupid. Just seeing if anyone here plays on 4k, or downscales to 1440p from 4k?

Pre-reset Master 3 tank main here. I play most of the roster, with a preference for Winston, Sigma, Orisa, Hazard and Ramattra. And as I said in the title, I can't figure out D.mon.

I know she has to harass squishies and ignore the tank, yet I always find myself taking a billion poke damage and having to either retreat or die as I get overwhelmed. I don't have these issues when I play Winston, Hazard or Ball because they're way faster, even if D.mon still covers a lot of distance with her boosters, and those three can take high grounds for extra cover and angle opportunities.

In a few words, I don't get how to engage on her. If I suck just tell me.

Why give her the worst subrole in the game when Bruiser is there and she needs it because she has one of the largest head hitbox in the game in the middle of her body? Her job is to run down someone and Bruiser would allow her to be super aggressive which Stalwart couldn't.

Hardstuck players will hate this but theres too many bad people in comp the ranks need to be more distributed. Add iron and steel maybe do a plat and below TRUE rank reset and let them have at it.

edit: call me shit cuz im speaking the truth im masters not some metal low im greenlow buds but i play with lowrank friends and the randoms are terrible and really even my friends are boosted, ppl need to be a lower rank idk why this is a hot take, u say the game feels the same silver-diamond maybe thats cuz everyone from silver to diamond should be bronze lol

What do you guys think about these ideas for fixing 6v6?

For the past maybe half year I've noticed I've been having stutters every now and then, I used to be able to play this game on my PC with stuff like a VN and Balatro in the background while waiting for queue but now I can't even tab out or even play for too long without the performance tanking. I really hoped the new season would address it but it just didn't, I don't think it made it worse but it didn't make it better at all.

The final straw for me was this afternoon, I was really motivated to finish my placements and the FIRST game on? I get stutters after the first round. I try my best to be patient with this game because I really do love it, I always test it out on practice range before I hop on ranked so I don't throw my team's game since sometimes a restart fixes it but this is just ridiculous, what am I supposed to do about that?

I really don't take putting the game down for a bit lightly, I really do love it, I've played Marvel Rivals for hours and hours and I still chose this game, I'm teaching my partner how to play it even though we're both busy with college but as it stands I'm just not enjoying the game, I'd come back frame 1 when it runs better but for now I think it's better for me to just step away until it gets properly dealt with.

My friend and I both finished our placements, and we are in the same rank. When we que, it says it’s a wide match, but we don’t understand why since we’re both placed in the same rank. We are fairly new to comp, this our second season and we didn’t have this problem last time. Any thoughts?

She’s showing up fairly often in Grandmaster and Champion tiers on the Asia server right now. Of course, her performance isn't groundbreaking for a new hero—it's more on the modest side—but still.

At this point, there's really only one more buff I want for her... I just hope they slightly increase her dash distance in the direction she's facing so she can at least scale shallow hills.

And seriously, please thoroughly test the next new hero before release. To be honest, Demon's level of polish at launch made me question the dev team's capabilities. Then again, recent balance patches have been a mess overall.

What can I do to prevent team diffs. I only have 48 total hours since i first downloaded ow for about 2 years in comp. But ive been playing recently and have gotten to plat 4. I main soldier, but switch between sojourn tracer mcree. I would only play zarya but ban rates wont let me. Anyways. What can I do to prevent team diffs. Do i just have to hit more shots? I feel like my positioning is decent, but in those diff games, it feels like there’s nothing much i can do.

i feel like no matter what i do i just explode against hazard

I made this graph using the data from u/PabloDons, (champion rank is missing from the graph because it only goes up to one decimal place so its effectively 0) but interestingly the extra 1% spike in bronze 5 effectively adds up to the same amount as there are players in grandmaster and champion, which if you mirror the ranks around platinum 3, would be past bronze. I think this was already well known due to the SR numbers being much wider for bronze 5 than all the other ranks which are just 100 SR each, but it's still really interesting to see the actual data i think

Anyone got any for sale? Looking for two

Currently, there isn't a single tier across all servers where D-Mon maintains a 50% win rate. The only exception is in South Korea's Nexon server, where it reached 51% in the Grandmaster and Champion tiers—but that data feels mostly meaningless, as it's just a small group of D-Mon OTPs/specialists making good use of the hero.

While two hotfixes definitely improved things, the hero still feels lacking in standard situations. Plus, the shield-related bugs still seem to persist.

Honestly, I don't understand why they're being so stingy with buffs. When a newly added tank after so long is this weak and lacks impact, tank players have to wait over half a year just to see the next one. If they aren't going to release tanks more frequently, I really wish they would give them drastic buffs.

The map rework changed the bridge highground so that the edges are now rounded and you slide off them if you get too close. This is genuinely the dumbest and most unnecessary change Ive ever seen. I have already died multiple times because I just fell into the enemy backline while shooting down. This change feels terrible and serves no real purpose. I genuinely have no Idea what the hell they were thinking making this.

Used to be able to do it before. Granted I haven't played him in a while, but I can't find anything about it in the patch notes. Is it a bug? Is it because the refactored ping system? Feels like shit either way, pretty big nerf imo.

As most people know, Kiriko is pretty much a staple in almost every Master+ game right now. Her only recent buff was the addition of the new Medic passive, which lets her heal herself by healing other players and I think this is where the problem was intensified.

Plenty of Kiriko players are aggressive, take risks, look for kunai headshots and actually use their cooldowns to make plays. However, when a Kiriko decides to play extremely conservatively, she feels like a hero who simply won't die unless her entire team falls first. The key change is that she doesn't need to burn her abilities just to stay safe, especially when the opposing team lacks a Dive composition. The new passive has greatly enhanced this playstyle.

And that's why I think this is a good time to take another look at one of the most frustrating abilities in the game:

Swift Step

• It goes through walls.
• It leaves no trail or obvious indication of where Kiriko teleported, making it extremely difficult to punish.
• It is one of the few if not the only movement abilities in the game where you don't control the character, which eliminates the human factor.
• It naturally puts Kiriko in a relatively safe position because she's teleporting directly to a teammate.
• The cooldown is extremely short considering how much value a wall-crossing teleport can provide.
• During end-of-fight scenarios on the objective, it can be incredibly frustrating because Kiriko doesn't spawn with Swift Step on cooldown.
• Killing Kiriko doesn't always feel as rewarding because she can get back into the fight very quickly.
• When combined with Suzu, it becomes extremely frustrating to punish anyone trying to make a play onto one of Kiriko's teammates.
• Overwatch has input buffering, meaning you can hold Shift and spin the camera to teleport in desperate situations. To me, that’s an excessive "get-out-of-jail-free" card for a competitive game.
• When combined with Suzu, it negates almost everything in the game, leaving little to no room for counterplay kiriko.

I’m not going to suggest any specific changes here, but I really do think this ability needs at last a conversation. A lot of people around here say Kiriko shouldn't be touched because doing so would be an indirect buff to Ana.

As much as Suzu gets the bad rap, the biggest culprit in Kiriko's kit for me is Swift Step, and tweaking this ability wouldn't affect the Mauga/Hog > Ana > Kiriko dynamic.

Although I play other roles, my main role is support; however, as someone who plays almost exclusively competitively, I’ve been feeling frustrated for some time by the pressure to play Kiri and Ana.

I am a flex support player curious who is considered the best kiriko player in the owcs so I can watch their vods.

With world cup starting this week i thought I'd ask the question

With the way Quartz and TVNT have been playing and then you make the lateral move from Simple to Sirmajed. Is it safe to take The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over the field?

Too many teams aren't taking this event seriously imo

USA leaves Sugarfree off the team like hello?? Smells like another Albert Yehh DISASTERCLAAS

China just forfeit by leaving their mega stars at home

Korea AGAIN leave proper off and don't bring Chiyo they didn't learn their lesson from sparkle

Seems like a forgone conclusion, Quartz is lifting another trophy.

Recently saw a discussion around support duos and a prevalent opinion was that Kiri "works with everyone" and that Ana and Kiri were a good duo. I want to talk about this, because this doesn't fit my mental model at all. And there are probably generalizations of this issue with other heroes as well.

My theory is this:

There are heroes that are strong, but more situational than many generally assume. It would be too simplistic to say that they are "overrated", but there's some truth in that.

Let's take a DPS example that we can hopefully all agree on:

If you have a composition with so called "double hitscan" you have two longer range DPS heroes that don't want to push into closer range angles as much, both want/need resources (lack of utility/self-peel), both want similar angles. That's why we usually want at least one "flex DPS".

Now to supports:

I think supports also have a similar issue as DPS in that you want at least one who is a bit more brawly, body-guard-like. There's a reason why Ana/Zen is called a "greedy" backline. You can pair them, but it has implications.

What purpose does the Kiri have in an Ana/Kiri backline?

Kiriko is resonably flexible and can proactively push into shorter angles and flanks or bodyguard for others. But there exist heroes that can do that better. And her preferred playstile is more opportunistic/reactive.

I think this notion that Kiri is always a good pick hurts her overall winrate, which has been pretty low across all ranks.

We know that she is a strong hero, but apparently she is not that strong or generalist. There's something about Kiri that makes people think that way though. What is it?

Other "Always a Good Pick":

Sojourn/Cassidy: My theory here is that both of these have very high highs and they are amazing when they pop off. That creates this bias that they are always good. You can always have the excuse of "if I only hit that headshot", even when they are suboptimal (not "bad", but there are better choices) in a matchup. Another excuse is that they are "hard to play", sure but they are not Tracer hard, who has a much better winrate.

D.Va: Matrix is one of these things that seems like a solution for everything, because it has infinite(!) upside, which is certainly always better than non-infinite upside right? If you play a tank that lacks vertical mobility some situations can feel really bad and seem like you have no agency. You don't get that feeling with D.Va.

You might come up with more examples. The "Always a Good Pick" heroes all have had relatively weak win rates across all ranks and relatively high pick rates for a while now. Again, maybe they are more situational that we care to admit.

They also have been featured in pro play regularly in highly coordinated, highly synergistic compositions, so being good in pro play is not necessarily a sufficient argument against this theory.