What prevents Junkrat from being a staple is that rather than have opposing heroes he's weak against, he has several that are nearly hard counters to him, meaning that when a Junkrat is getting value on a map, there's a time limit until someone switches up to one of those counters. And in a more claustrophobic map, Junkrat's ultimate has a good chance of reaching a group of bunched heroes. He's a non-linear hero in that his Frag Launcher grenades can come in at all sorts of different angles and caroms and they can do their damage blindly, something a hitscan hero can not do. ![]() When you need to defend a very specific area, Junkrat's one of the most powerful heroes in his game. Even with a predictable location such as a payload, tourney players aren't just going to stand in a clump around the cart waiting for Hanzo to spam them. The Scatter Arrow is unpredictable, the Dragonstrike gives ample warning, and top players aren't just going to run into a choke point black ninja-style so that blind arrows kill them one-by-one. Hanzo's chief benefits just don't usually provide much trouble for an elite player. Widowmaker has weaknesses, but her sniper rifle is a hitscan weapon, and for a sniper, hitting what you want is obviously a highly desirable thing. The big problem for Hanzo, however, is that he's a far more inconsistent hero, even for a skilled player, than Widowmaker is. Hanzo has excellent mobility and is good at stopping large, slow targets (Roadhog) or the turret classes. In a King of the Hill match, Widowmaker's tunnel vision leaves her helpless against Reapers and Tracers. While the Grappling Hook allows her to escape to a degree, escaping, given how specific her general use is, is just as good for the other team as killing her in many cases. Once you know a map well enough to know where those best sight lines are and you know the other team has a Widowmaker, you also have excellent guesses where she is and what she's doing. Widowmaker's strengths also essentially make her a fairly predictable character. So if you need to guard a specific area at a particular point during the match, a skilled Widowmaker can be a valuable defender. Widowmaker can be deadly when she has clear sight lines, especially considering in most of the occasions she has that direct vision, the other player is at a disadvantage in retaliating instantly, something you can't say for another linear hero such as Bastion. ![]() So in tournament Overwatch, Defense heroes essentially become a specialist class, heroes that have some use, but are never the backbone of a team's lineup. Yes, a team that captures the point is technically the defender, but given the layout of most King of the Hill maps, which is decidedly non-linear at the center point, turtling and defending a point is typically a losing strategy. Why? King of the Hill, at an elite level, is an offense-focused mode. Offense is the name of the game when it comes to elite players, and given the number of King of the Hill maps that are played, it's not surprising to see the Defense heroes take a bit of a back seat. The Defense heroes, in Overwatch, play an undersized role in competitive Overwatch relative to how they're used in pub games. In gaming, we refer to this as "the meta," an endlessly evolving state that forms the backbone of tactics employed in the game. Any spectator sport, whether it's hitting a ball with a large stick or dispensing an animated fighter with a Shoryuken, quickly develops its own internal strategies and trends as the players become more experienced and the sport becomes more refined. ![]() With Overwatch's audience growing and Blizzard's focus on increasing the competitiveness of the game - as seen by the game's just-released Competitive Mode - there's an opportunity for Overwatch to flourish as an esport. What's more, this is a game that went the traditional sales route rather than the increasingly common free-to-play one, meaning that all those players plopped down a minimum of $40 to play Blizzard's newest IP.Įven before launch, there were a healthy number of professional Overwatch tournaments, populated by some of the biggest teams in eSports. ![]() You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browserīlizzard's newest game, Overwatch, officially launched last month and within a week of release, already had seven million players.
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