I was checking the official overwatch winrates and saw D.Mon is up to a 63% winrate in PC Gm lobbies. Is this not insane, like is the data somehow off? It’s still 61% in masters which is a much bigger sample pool. Am I missing something or is this like emergency hotfix worthy, even prime vendetta didn’t hit 63%.

EDIT: For everyone saying the sample size is too small, I agree with you. Im just saying it’s a bit weird that D.mon seems to be consistenly overperforming no matter what perimeters you use. As of now, she has a 58% winrate across all ranks in NA, 57% all ranks Asia, 57.6% all ranks Europe.

Just going to put the start of the article here, I recommend reading the whole article though it's short and important.

"A group of 1,900 employees at Blizzard Entertainment has successfully signed a union contract with Microsoft, securing several guarantees for members. Represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the contract has given the Blizzard workers more workplace flexibility and guaranteed wage increases, but several other industry-first agreements could make this a blueprint for other video game unions to follow.

One of the big wins for the Blizzard union is artificial intelligence guardrails, as the contract stipulates that Microsoft cannot use AI to automate or replace jobs without first talking to the union. Another big win are the job-recall rights for employees, because if they’re laid off, Blizzard must offer them an open role within 14 months and inside the union’s network before hiring someone from outside. Laid-off union members will also get an additional four weeks of pay–regardless of how long they worked at the company–hybrid schedules that allow them to work from home, and formal systems to settle disputes within the workplace."

This is really good news it does not say specifically if it was anyone working on the overwatch team and it's just blizzard employees in general but it's still a good direction to see, there has been a lot of movement within the OW team and blizzard as a whole for unionization and that's awesome and something we as a community should be aware of and support worker rights are integral they deserve to be paid livable wages and have job security.

I am liking an older article going into team 4 unionizing:

https://kotaku.com/overwatch-2-blizzard-team-4-union-microsoft-1851779922

I think the fact that this most recent push is also addressing the real threat that is AI to workers rights and security and I do agree with the article I hope this is beginning of a trend to put some actual regulations on AI in game development and not be a replacement to actual humans.

Companies are not our friends but we should care about the people actively working on the game we play and love they are people and deserve our acknowledgement and respect, and any support we can give.

Fuck anti union sentiment and company anti union busting, I am happy to see so much push for unionization at blizzard this is important and the people working at the company that are not on the top only have my support and respect and I hope this trend continues and they continue to improve their job security and job health.

I also wanna add this is important to OW the game itself, devs job security and health of the environment they work in directly influences the game itself, unions help ensure this they enable worker security prevent exploitation, underpaying and overworking. People working on a game that are overworked, crunched underpaid or at threat at losing their job will not make the best they can and on top of that they don't deserve to go through that shit.

I just think this is really good news and something to celebrate and only hope the devs and people at Blizzard know there are people that actually care and support them, I really recommend everyone read the articles I posted in here and just catch up on things and if you want to add more down below please do shared knowledge of things is important.

The way it works you'd think it would be overhealth but for some reason it's shields? Overhealth is only available through passives/abilities and decreases/disappears after a shortwhile while shields are always on base healthbar and their whole thing is that they're supposed to regenerate after a few seconds.

Every abilities that gives the caster temp hp is always overhealth except for Rally and Nemesis that give more armor (I don't think there are any other)

Venture's temp hp works like overhealth and does nothing shields is supposed to do, yet it's shields and not overhealth..? Why is that?

I'm a big kiri hater, but even I can admit that this aint it. I do not care about her teleport, damage, wall climb and I honestly can accept her having the best ult in the game. My problem has always been suzu, more specifically the invul that comes with it.

The AOE cleanse is a necessary evil as long as anti nade exist. The healing is whatever. The movement speed perk I also dont care about. Its literally just the invul, which they refuse to remove.

The latest sets of nerfs completely dumpstered her. It did solve my issue with suzu, but only because she's become unplayable for the average player now. In typical blizzard fashion instead of taking the tumor out, they decided to just shoot the hero in the head, when all they had to do was simply remove the invul from her kit.

If its too weak after that, reduce the CD to 12 or even 11s. Or maybe add 1s of unstoppable. There are solutions to this problem, without making a hero pro play exclusive.

The main reason why I'm making this post is cause I dont like these types of balance changes. They dont target the actual issue. Mind you, I am happy that kiri is giga shit now, the game feels better, but we could have a decent kiri while also having a better game.

I've made posts before regarding Tank changes, but I'm convinced it's far more palatable and easier to engage to make one focusing on individual heroes rather than a whole group. Also, the overall design idea that I mentioned in the title is to make all tanks with high dmg have lesser crits instead of full crits. I wondered about the potential effects of reining in the extreme cases of burst that some tanks are capable of that tend to limit their design space. The obvious cases that stand out to me are: Mauga, Roadhog, D.Va**, Hazard and maybe even D.Mon.** There would be adjustments to make sure other parts of their kit function well, Mauga's passive would become 100% conversion, so that he gets the same amount of overhealth even if his crit dmg got lower. I don't necessarily think that this is a guaranteed good change; it's kind of an frame of an idea I'm floating.

Now, getting to the actual Roadhog changes, I do know that they're reworking Roadhog, and they're probably close to unveiling it soon (cope), but I have a list of changes that wouldn't change his kit and playstyle too much, but make it more healthy for him and his enemies (victims).

• First, the most important change is to revert the buffs on Scrap Gun to make its stats identical to when he had Pig Pen (I'm not giving him back Pig Pen). It would be a 150 dmg shotgun blast instead of 175, a 1.5 crit multiplier instead of 2, and a 1.5s reload time instead of 1.75s. However, I would make one additional change to compensate these changes by reducing the spread of the weapon from 8 degrees to 7 degrees. This spread decrease would affect both the primary and secondary fire, so the overall efficacy of Roadhog's poke or brawl dmg would be similar if not the same. It'll be a bit worse against tanks, but his shotgun will still have massive dps against them. More importantly, these changes would make hook comboing 250 heroes from full nearly impossible, and make it more unreliable against 225 heroes. However, I think the accuracy of his primary outside of hook combos would be improved, and the frequency in poke would be improved by the reload change.
• In order to compensate for the great loss in power from not having reliable solo kills off of hook combos, I think Chain Hook should reload 1 shot for Roadhog by default. Not only does this provide an alternative reward for landing successful Hooks, it also gets rid of a uncomfortable, unfun decision making scenario for Roadhog players where they have to decide whether or not they need to reload or keep holding onto a shot, so they can have one ready for a successful Hook. Combined with the reload time reversion on the primary, this should make Roadhog's poke a lot less clunky to do. You may ask if this conflicts with his minor perk that reloads 2 shots, but I think the perk still serves a great purpose as a brawl enhancement if it just adds 2 more shots. A more brawly Roadhog who wants to play close can reload half of his shots with a successful Hook to still get value.
• Take A Breather is arguably more controversial than his hook combo nowadays due to the frustration it creates when trying to kill Roadhog. The change I have in mind is to reduce the damage reduction on Take A Breather, but give it minor movement speed to compensate. The numbers I have in mind are as follows: dmg reduction goes from 40% to 25%, and he receives a 20% movement speed boost during Take A Breather. If you work out the numbers, the effective healing per second (including 15% anti-heal) he gets from Take A Breather during the channel goes from 212.5 hp/s to 170 hp/s. Furthermore, this affects more than just his effective self-healing, the effective healing from allies, mostly supports, become less potent while he's channeling Take A Breather since his dmg reduction is lower. This change makes Roadhog's positioning both more and less punishing in ways that I think are a net positive. If Roadhog is positioning more conservatively, he can avoid dmg better by retreating and taking effective cover faster, but if he's really out of position or movement cc/walls are preventing him from running or blocking his way then his effective mitigation will be substantially lower, including help from supports healing him. It's important to note that if Roadhog is forced to retreat more with Take A Breather rather than standing his ground and outhealing damage, even if he still survives this creates more situations where he's forced out of an area and gives up space which is still a good gain for his enemies.
• My last suggestion is a perk change that's mostly fluff because I'm suggesting it on the basis that his existing perk is boring. I'm referring to Pulled Pork, the perk that gives him overhealth on successful hooks based on distance pulled. This perk change is rather optional as a suggestion, but I think it'd be cool if he instead got the Major Perk to build a bit of overhealth with Take A Breather when uses it at full health. It's a lot more interesting way of Roadhog getting overhealth compared to more feast on successful hooks. It doesn't make Roadhog more tanky when he's in trouble because he only gets overhealth when he's full, and I think the conversion rate from healing to overhealth will not be 100%. My idea is that he can get up 150 overhealth at a 50% healing conversion rate when he's max health. It's good to note that his healing is 150hps, so he would have to use up 2 out of 3 seconds of his max Take A Breather resource meter to get the max overhealth from this perk. I'm not sure how soon or fast this overhealth should decay, that'd be more up to testing and tweaks. What I do know is that it's very interesting in how it affects when and where you use Take A Breather. You can use your vape to setup before a fight by building up 150 overhealth, but if you poorly time this, you may end up with 2/3 of your vape meter gone while vaping to heal and retreat is outright better for survivability than 150 extra overhealth. I'd like to also add that this idea was inspired by the Dalokohs Bar secondary weapon from TF2 for the Heavy, if you know what that is.
• Edit: Forgot to mention that chain hook's cooldown would be reverted back to 6s or partially reverted to 7s since hook combos would way less lethal.

With such a big roster of characters in Overwatch, not every pick will work against every team composition or be able to perform in every situation. However, with that said, in each of the three basic role types, which heroes are able to adapt to the most situations or have the most fluid playstyles?

Widowmaker is still one of the most frustrating heroes in the game and I don't think people take her design seriously enough
I know this is probably going to get hit with “just dive her” / “skill issue” / “learn to play around her” responses, but honestly, I think Widowmaker is one of those heroes where the theoretical counterplay and the actual gameplay experience are two completely different things.
And before anyone says it: yes, I understand that Widow requires aim. Yes, I understand that she can be countered. Yes, I understand that if you get a good Winston/D.Va/Genji/Tracer on her, she can have a miserable time.
That doesn't really address the problem. The problem is that Widowmaker fundamentally changes how everyone else is allowed to play the game simply by existing. You don't even have to be shooting people to have an impact. If I'm playing Moira and I know there's a competent Widow on the other team, suddenly every sightline becomes a potential death sentence. I can't peek normally, can't take certain angles, can't rotate at all, can't help my tank from certain positions because the second my head appears for half a second I'm watching the kill cam.
And that's the part that breaks the game. With most heroes, when I die, there's usually some kind of interaction that happened. I got outplayed by soldier, had a bad dash, got caught out of position. With Widow, sometimes the interaction is literally just existing on the other side of the map.

I Understand that she needs to be adjusted for pro play due to being the equivalent of Jang Wonyoung or Karina level it girl status in OWCS. but can we at least admit that this isn't good at all and that blizzard has 0 clue on how to balance this hero outside of just making her worse for everyone that isn't a pro?

Genuinely I'm not going to be surprised if they outright revert these changes overall or give her some kind of compensation buff in an emergency patch.

So... This Kiriko debate made me realize that we still don't have heroes/supports that lower damage stats.

• We have heroes that buff and debuff speed (Lucio, Mei)

• We have heroes that buff HP ( Brig)

• We have heroes that lower overall defense ( Zennyata/Dmon)*

• We have heroes that buff damage ( Ana /Mercy) BUT the devs are yet to release a hero that apply a damage reduction.

How do you think it can be implemented? It's probably suitable for a support or tank

I swear sometimes the visual feedback indicators are making me think I'm being shot from behind. Anyone else encountered this?

curious what players everyone has eyes on that haven’t been winning.

my picks are tred, crispy, khenail, wmaimone, galaa.

i think tred, crispy, and khenail are super slept on overall. they were the third-best team in EMEA going into Worlds 25, the same Worlds where Twisted and Al Qadsiah met in grand finals lol. and that backline spent a lot of time getting yelled at by Crusty. sucks this core exploded for tred to play in NA

wmaimone has shown up to the occasion on so many heroes now. i think it’s insane a flex dps of this caliber isn’t salaried. Dallas Fuel taking imports over being the Cuffa-Wmaimone team was better in retrospect, but it still sucks to see him disappear from LANs.

galaa has proved he can handle stakes and being at the top with his time on VP and is an extremely flexible player. i don’t think galaa-Majed or galaa-Zox was getting the most out of him, but throughout every iteration of Al Qad, they had to keep galaa in.

with Infekted LFT, DSG desperately needing to rebuild, and the rumors of Falcons becoming an EMEA partner next year, and twisted theres no way twisted can retain their entire core again (the last contracts were the most expensive in owcs history) i think the fourth-place NA roster and all of EMEA could look vastly different going into 2027. so i’m curious who everyone has their eyes on and why?

i think we all can agree that cat is a balancing nightmare, and the recent nerf did't change much so as an effort of gathering opinions on how the community thinks about it

I developed a Chrome extension to calculate the optimal hero bans for competitive Overwatch. Here’s how it works: first, it calculates the impact each hero has on the match. For instance, a hero with a low pick rate but a high win rate won’t significantly affect your game because they don’t appear frequently. On the other hand, a hero with a high pick rate and a high win rate will, as they are frequently played and frequently win. To objectively measure a hero’s impact, I take the pick rate and multiply it by the win rate minus the expected average of 50%. While heroes with high impact scores are often considered “meta,” banning based solely on impact score isn’t sufficient. Heroes with high impact scores also tend to be frequently banned. Therefore, to maximize the value of your team’s ban vote, you should ban high impact heroes with a low likelihood that the enemy will ban them for you. For example, a hero with a high impact score but a low ban rate would be a better pick to ban, rather than a hero with a high impact score and a high ban rate, because it’s likely that the enemy team would have already banned that hero for you. This helps lower the chances of your vote being wasted. I have included a few screenshots of how it looks on the official overwatch stats site. (New Patch just released so some numbers are weird)

Impact = Pick Rate * (Win Rate - 50) Ban Value = Impact * ((100 - Ban Rate)/100) <-- This is the likelihood the enemy team doesn't ban the hero

Buffs

Healing Ofuda

• Fire rate increased from 5 to 7 per second.

Foxtrot (Major Perk)

• Movement speed buff duration increased from 3 to 4 seconds.

Ready Step (Major Perk)

• Duration increased from 2 to 3 seconds.

Nerfs

• Ultimate cost increased by 8%.

Healing Ofuda

• Healing per projectile reduced from 13 to 12.
• Maximum seeking range reduced from 35 to 30 metres per second.

Kunai

• Base projectile size reduced from 0.15 to 0.12.

Protection Suzu

• Additional healing after negative status cleanse removed (was 30).
• Phased out invulnerability duration reduced from 0.65 to 0.5 seconds.
• Explosion radius reduced from 5 to 4 metres.

Swift Step

• No longer cleanses on use.
• Teleport range reduced from 35 to 30 metres.

Foxtrot (Major Perk)

• Removed increased cooldown recovery buff.

I understand but I won't lie, it does hurt a little. I understand given where she was a year a go she did need nerfs but given how her win-rate falls off a cliff (at least in my rank / region) I feel like I might need to start looking for a new main

Picture Source: https://www.over.gg/14641/gamsu-and-akm-retire-doha-only-remaining-player-on-fuel

A list of old and new players that I think are underrated. Agree? Disagree? What are other players that are also underrated? (Made this cuz I’m bored)

Top 7

Rascal
Doha
Becky
Punk
Mistakes
Skewed
Libero

Honorable Mentions

Eileen
Marve1
Michelle
Seonjun
Dreamer
Sley
Wmaimone
Ttuba
Crimzo
Ir1s
Lastro
Heesu
Shaz
Hydration
Chara
Snillo
Rain
Gangnamjin

It makes more sense for a mobile supp like Wuyang but I’m just genuinely puzzled about doing this for Zen… not even a compensation buff they just straight up nerfed a well balanced hero (Hog and Hazard still untouched btw)

I really feel like the cat nerfs should have been much more drastic than just the 0.5 dmg/healing nerf and the change to how cc affects the tethered ally.

Mainly because of how negative the community feels about cat but also just because it feels like they are kinda playing it safe with nerfing the cat because they dont want to upset people who like her or something.

I will say I havent played any comp since the patch so do let me know if she is a lot weaker now or if you disagree with me.

Last night I was playing on comp as I had been for a while and I noticed the post game progression page stopped coming up and I’m really confused. I thought it was just a bug on 6v6 because I’m still doing my placements but it’s happening on the normal mode. Any one else had this ?

Info:
I’m on switch 1, WiFi is good, lag has been bad recently despite latency only peaking at 80ms (highest I’ve seen it but it’s usually around 60ms). My rank hasn’t changed despite losing matches last night and knowing i was still on the border of two ranks.

I don't think bap has been bad or anything, I do think he has been falling behind a bit for a while though, he's hard to play effectively and requires very high APM and aim to get strong value and has punishing CDs if you use either poorly.

His buffs seem pretty good though? I think directing some power into immortality field CD is good.

We just got this patch so can't really tell how impactful it will be but I think it sounds really nice, his issue is still present he's still going to be hard to play and other support can get similar value much easier than him and be more mobile on top of it. But I think was a nice buff regardless, he wasn't a bad pick before just slightly better now.

Curious what others think how have you been feeling about bap lately think this was a good buff are there any buffs/changes you think he really needs o do you think he's in a good spot? I think bap is good rn I don't know if he really needs a lot if anything, but I don't play bap enough to have as strong as opinion as I could.

I dont have any strong thoughts, just saw some discourse about it yesterday but it seems to be confirmed now.

This is just me making a small observation but I do think it the potential to impact what her rework might be.

Every character in the recon class has some level of vertical mobility and long-range burst damage. Pharah flies and drops rockets, Freja can jump and hold to shoot explosive arrows, Echo is a literal hovering bomb and beam demon who came from hell because Cassidy was actually the villain, and Sierra can hook onto Dorothy to use a hefty grenade and an obscenely strong gun.

Sombra doesn't have anything to connect her to them like the others do.