Just like any competitive game, the meta for Overwatch is ever evolving. The ability to hero switch on the fly and a myriad of different maps makes the action incredibly diverse, so much so that shifts may occur during a single map. With so much happening at once, it can be hard to keep track of. With this series, I aim to show what the meta as a whole looks like. Every week I manually record all the hero picks from that weekend’s tournaments and compile them into a by-the-numbers look at the current state of the game, including a tier list, summary of the week’s strategies, a look at each hero’s place in the meta, and more!
Highlights of this week’s meta
The continued fall of Zenyatta
A few weeks ago Zenyatta was nerfed in response to the Double Orb composition that had absolutely dominated the meta. While the nerf didn’t seem to have that much impact at the time, a couple of weeks down the line the effects are starting to show through. Zenyatta has seen consistent decreases in pickrate each week to the point that he is now on the cusp of the Rarely Used tier. It seems the nerf may have been a bit much as Zenyatta’s popularity is now at an all-time low.
Another component that may have affected Zenyatta’s popularity is the fact that Mercy is so popular right now. The nerf to Zenyatta made it so that he effectively has to follow around the dps hero he wants to heal if he wants to provide consistent healing. Mercy is much more effective in that role, and is also able to provide damage boosting more consistently than a Discord Orb can.
The poor keep getting poorer
Last week I mentioned that the same heroes who had been in the Rarely Used tier for many weeks now continued to remain there. A lot of you said that teams would find a way to make them work, but unfortunately that just hasn’t been the case. These heroes continue to be unplayed, and while I said in the last week that I felt they need buffs, a Redditor by the name of /u/ApexHawke raised a really good point that these heroes are hard to balance as they will always be outclassed by other heroes in the meta due to not being able to fill the more complex roles they take up.
This is just the beginning of the trends of this week. As always, there is much more that happened in this week, with many heroes stabilizing after the craziness of last week. To see the complete summary, including the full tier list and in-depth analysis of each hero’s place in the meta, watch the full video:
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