The state of Overwatch 2’s meta
With Season 13 just over 2 weeks away (plus another season if you’re waiting for that non-existent Venture skin like I am!), I feel like I could share my thoughts on the state of Overwatch 2’s meta, both before the season 12 midseason patch and after. Keep in mind, I am on average a mid-diamond player on all roles (I got Masters DPS last season before the rank reset and was Masters on Tank before the big competitive rework a couple of seasons ago) so my opinion on this matter won’t necessarily reflect that of people who are in GM+ who play this game for a living. With that being said, however, some of my thoughts do manage to align with theirs to…some degree, so I feel there are some takes I have that are somewhat correct, haha. With all that out of the way, I’d like to first start off by talking about the release of the newest Overwatch support hero, Juno!
Already has a new legendary skin coming out instead of Vent-ok, ok I'll move on LOL
Juno has possibly everything you want in a support: mobility to an ABSURD degree thanks to a double jump and hover passive combo, Glide Boosters to further boost her crazy mobility, speed utility with her Hyper Ring, an impressive damage AND healing output with auto aim Pulsar Torpedoes and her primary fire in general, Orbital Ray is arguably one of the current strongest fight winning ultimates in the entire game (and is also a great way to shut down Kitsune Rush), and on top of it all she’s adorable. She’s also voiced by Xanthe Huynh, the same actress who played Haru in Persona 5 which is a definite bonus. Despite all of these factors and the fact that she is one of the most popular support picks at the moment, she doesn’t necessarily feel oppressive or overpowered. She’s slippery but still very much divable since she doesn’t have a get-out-of-jail-free card like Kiriko or Lifeweaver, and she isn’t frustrating to play against as she doesn’t have a powerful immortality ability like Lifegrip, Suzu, or Lamp (yes it’s Immortality Field but I already used the word “immortality” previously in the same sentence cut me some slack bruh). She initially had a broken interaction with Dva where Hyper Ring would stack with her boosters which allowed Dva to one tap a vulnerable support from all the way across the map, but that was fixed with the midseason patch.
In terms of playing her, she fits nice and snug in a variety of dive, brawl and rush comps. Despite sharing a similar ability to Lucio, she doesn’t replace him much at all. She can work as a substitute in some situations but overall, they actually tend to be better in different maps. Juno works really well in hybrid maps like Blizzard World, especially in places where team fights take place in a stacked single location where her Hyper Ring can be most effective, while Lucio is a preferred choice on Flashpoint maps for example. She can even be paired WITH Lucio if you really want to make a super fun ultra-speed focused dive style comp. She works just as well with nearly any support as she’s fairly versatile, though Juno Brig is a popular comp that’s starting to get played more often in the higher ranks. Her mobility allows her to take high ground or off-angles that a slower hero like Ana would otherwise struggle. Because of this and her speed ring, she does a great job keeping up with much quicker heroes like Genji, Echo, Tracer, and Venture. Both brawl and dive tanks are also great pairings with Juno, though slower brawl tanks like Ram, Rein and Zarya benefit more from her speed ring to engage with their team than faster dive tanks like Doom, Winton or Dva. Queen is an especially great pairing with Juno considering you can save your shout for later moments mid-fight thanks to her speed ring, and depending on how the balance is for season 13, hopefully we get to see more Queen Juno rush comps as it’s a blast to play (speaking as a Queen main myself).
Overall though, I think they genuinely hit a home run with balancing this support hero. She’s still very popular, but I think she should stay that way for a while as she’s a very versatile yet fair hero and is overall healthy for the meta of the game. If she were to receive any changes later down the line, I would focus on reducing the damage dealt on her Torpedoes, as they deal a surprisingly large amount of damage and I would be very cautious about the strength of lower skill floor auto-aim abilities, and later down the line we could talk about toning down her ultimate a smidge as it is very VERY strong.
Pharah POV: you are ulting and about to die because everyone looked at you
In terms of other new additions to Season 12, we got the release of 2 new maps, Hanaoka and Throne of Anubis, to coincide with a brand new game mode: Clash. You remember those 2CP maps in Overwatch 1 that nobody enjoyed playing? Of course you do. They were AWFUL. That’s why they REMOVED them in Overwatch 2, and thank god for that. I cannot believe I’m starting to see people gaslight themselves and get nostalgic for this horrendous game mode. And no guys, I was THERE to experience it in the original version of Overwatch, every 2CP map was awful in every way, not a single one of them was fun to experience (in fact one was so bad they actually removed it from the game entirely). The only fun I’ve ever had in 2CP is when I was able to pick Junkrat on Temple of Anubis defense and just spam the chokepoints and get free kills in the process because getting to the first point on attack was so ridiculously suffocating, but I’m getting way off topic here…
For these new maps, they aim to bring back the aesthetic (the thing that everyone actually liked about the original 2CP maps) and apply them to a brand new game mode. They aren’t a “reimagined” version of these old stages either; in fact, they’re sections of the area of the world the original maps are located in. For example, on Hanaoka you can go to a sectioned off portion of the street and see the arcade starting spawn area of the original Hanamura temple off to the side. Nice bit of world building there.
As for the game mode itself it’s…mixed, to tell you the truth. At its worst it’s relatively inoffensive. Both teams fight for five control points in total, placed out in a linear way along the map. Each capture earns a point, with 5 points needed to win. The final capture points near the end of the teams’ spawn rooms, however, are segmented into 3 sections, each worth one point if captured. If there’s one point of praise I can offer to Clash, it’s an incredibly fast paced game mode. Games go by in the blink of an eye and objective fights are usually not very long either. Naturally, it also allows for more faster paced team compositions to dominate. Dive and especially Brawl comps are much more effective on these types of maps, especially with the amount of flank routes available. The final capture point, however, is INCREDIBLY hard to capture. It’s by design of course, otherwise the games would lead to a snowball stomp fest if one team managed to get the upper hand early on in the match. That being said, the way the defending team keeps pouring into the final point from spawn reminds me a bit too much of the old 2CP format in all the wrong ways. It’s a nice addition to variety, and I do enjoy Throne of Anubis in particular, but Clash still needs a fair bit of work in order to reach its fullest potential if you ask me. Although, again, I do enjoy how ridiculously fast paced Clash games are, even if to a fault. Games never drag in Clash, which is great compared to something like Escort. If I get the misfortune of having Rialto or Circuit Royale forced onto me, I’m stuck with those maps for a good 15 agonizing minutes or so.
Yeah yeah, Ram should've been the one to receive the mythic skin this season, but this Reaper mythic is SICK. Totally not biased btw.
Let’s talk balance, that nebulous word that Overwatch can just never seem to get right no matter what. The strongest pick right now is still undisputedly Dva. Despite the recent nerf to her armor pool and the nerf to armor across the board AS WELL as her interaction with Hyper Ring fixed in the midseason patch, Dva still comes out on top as the best tank to play as of lately. The main issue with Dva is that she currently does it all: tons of armor to mitigate damage, amazing mobility, one of the best defensive cooldowns in the game (3 second defense matrix), and if that weren’t enough, she also has very strong offensive power with micro missiles. She’s very hard to kill thanks to her armor, mobility and second life, while also being a tank that demands respect at all times. It isn’t even as simple as “pick a beam character to deal with her”, because that’s not a be all end all solution for dealing with Dva. Zarya is someone who is very easy to play around as Dva, especially on maps with loads of high ground. Her still being the top pick makes a lot of other buffs in the midseason patch (such as Bastion, Hanzo, Zen, etc) fairly pointless.
Winston is also still the other dominant tank alongside Dva. While nowhere near as frustrating, his ability to ignore armor with his tesla cannon makes him another prime choice in a dive-heavy meta. It also means his matchup into Dva isn’t as one-sided, so the two tanks, while competing for the top spot, aren’t necessarily outclassing the other to an absurd degree. In general, the game’s meta is still very much dive oriented, thanks to the health pool of many squishy targets being reduced to 225 HP (Sombra, Hanzo, Kirko, Echo, Pharah, Moira, Lucio and Juno), the backline of an enemy team is more vulnerable to an all-out assault from dive comps like Winton or Dva. Despite Zenyatta’s discord orb and damage getting a fairly big buff (and the addition of yet another Orisa microbuff; what is this the 7th time they’ve done this so far?), and Hanzo getting his one shot kill back on 250 HP targets, I feel it’s unlikely we’ll see a return to a poke oriented meta any time soon. As a Reaper main, Dva is still infuriating to go against so you need to play at your absolute peak for the most part, but the potential to down 225 HP targets in the backline makes his flanking playstyle more viable. However, at that point, Tracer is still a better pick and is more versatile of a hero as a whole. I think many are still waiting on that promised Reaper rework coming soon-ish to see where he’ll better fit in the meta and how he’ll perform. Only time will tell.
While I do think the meta is a smidge better than before, I feel at this point we’re starting to see the more sour points of the larger Season 9 changes start to rear their ugly head. For those who are unaware, Season 9 introduced a drastic amount of changes for every hero, increasing the base health pool across the board while making it easier to land shots and balancing breakpoints for all heroes. While this was a fresh change when it first released (and I also feel like things like the passive regen for all heroes are perfectly fine and can stay no problem), we’ve been slowly regressing in balance back to pre Season 9 numbers, and at that point, I feel there’s a conversation to be had where we need to go back to the drawing board for how to make each role feel impactful in a healthy way.
Oh yeah, and Ana got a new mythic weapon skin as well. Image obviously not mine.
In my personal opinion, there were two reasons Tank felt miserable to play pre season 9: healing and damage were WAY too high. With healing being way too high, the tanks couldn’t make any impactful plays and couldn’t kill anything, especially if squishies were being pocketed (wasn’t just a problem for tanks either, there’s a very famous clip out there of a Genji nanoblade in top 500 getting completely outhealed by an Illari Pylon and Kiriko suzu on a Cassidy. It was very funny and depressing at the same time). The extremely high damage also meant that if tanks did their job of, yknow, being aggressive and taking space, their health would explode in an instant. This was especially true in Season 8 where Mauga meta only exacerbated this problem. So what did you do instead? You just stood in the choke. Poking around a corner. You played to survive, not take space. The supports were the only ones who were allowed to have fun in the game. This could’ve been resolved by a decrease in damage and healing across the board so things would explode far less and healing would be much less impactful, but for some reason the Overwatch balance team really doesn’t like it when they have to bring the numbers down. So what did they do instead? They did the exact opposite: the brought all the numbers UP. That’s why we have all this health to combat the damage going around, and the DPS passive to deal with the healing problem. All this inevitably lead to is an insane amount of powercreep, and while DPS got to have fun now, tank was still left in a rut. So then they gigabuffed tanks even FURTHER. Nearly all of them are raid bosses with an enormous amount of health and headshot damage reduction, and while now they can have impact in the game, they still face the same issues of prior while being unfun for the other team to play against. And now we’re slowly regressing back to pre season 9 numbers little by little with each patch.
Look, I think that it’s possible to make tanks enjoyable to play in a 5v5 format without giving up and resorting to 6v6 again, they’ve done it before in the earlier seasons of Overwatch 2. But these recent changes haven’t really done anything beneficial either. I like that the balance team is able to take wild risks like this: it keeps the game fresh, but when it starts becoming evident that something isn’t working anymore, I’d say it’s about time we had “the talk” and go back to the drawing board for balance. I guess if anything else, I do appreciate how quickly patches are delivered to shift the meta in a substantial way. I remember how long metas tended to fester and rot in Overwatch 1, we had to put up with double shield for so incredibly long.
If anything else, the new hero additions (aside from Mauga and release Lifeweaver) have done well to add to the game in healthy ways, and the hero reworks for the most part have been a great step in the right direction for a healthier balance philosophy for characters like Pharah, Sombra, Bastion, etc. Even if balance isn’t quite where it should be, it’s always great to have something constantly to look forward to each season. And especially since almost every live service game as of recently has given up and flopped around hard, that’s certainly saying something for the amount of turmoil Overwatch has had to deal with over the years.
