Hello everyone and welcome to the first edition of the Community Overwatch League Power Rankings. High Noon Podcast is happy to bring Power Ranking Analysis and updates as the OWL season progresses. Before we get into it, I’d like to provide a little color as to what exactly Power Rankings are in this series. Deathblow put it best by defining the power rankings as a snapshot look at who you would least like to face in the league. Power Rankings are NOT a prediction of who we think will be the season 1 champion, who our favorite team is, or even where we necessarily think the team will end up. Power Rankings are going to change week to week based on performance, in and out of game factors, and just a little bit of gut instinct from the people putting them out there, so don’t give anyone too much slack! I can’t speak for everyone, but I know DeathBlow and I will personally fight anyone who disagrees with our rankings ;).

For this first edition, we were fortunate enough to get a large number of OW community members to contribute their personal power rankings for us to average out and compile the list that you’re about to see. First, huge shout out to Asmith, who really did the leg work in regards to getting the community involved. Second, here is the list of everyone who contributed to the overall list:

Here is the final community power rankings, as well as the out of division (OOD) opponents they play against the extra time. There are 20 OOD matches. Four OOD opponents will be played against 3 times with the two listed teams being played against a 4th time.

Team OOD opps they vs 4x

1.Seoul Dynasty Spitfire & Excelsior

2.London Spitfire Shock & Dynasty

3.Dallas Fuel Uprising & Fusion

4.New York Excelsior Dynasty & Dragons

5.Houston Outlaws Gladiators & Shock

6.Shanghai Dragons Excelsior & Fusion

7.Los Angeles Valiant Uprising & Mayhem

8.Florida Mayhem Valiant & Gladiators

9.Philadelphia Fusion Fuel & Dragons

10.San Francisco Shock Spitfire & Outlaws

11.Los Angeles Gladiators Outlaws & Mayhem

12.Boston Uprising Fuel & Valiant

This is the initial list that I think a lot of folks who haven’t paid much attention to OW esports up until now should use as their base for understanding going into the preseason. I have some personal grievances which I’ll go over in another post, but overall this will give you a good understanding of the the perceptions of teams going into the preseason. I’ll close out this post with a little bit of color on the different rankings. Keep an eye out for the future posts, as you’ll start to get a better idea of the ever changing landscape of the league as it develops!

1-4 Dynasty, Spitfire, Fuel, and Excelsior

The big four going into the league. The “Apex” group if you will. Three korean teams and Envyus who has won Apex. Almost everyone we asked had some variation of these four teams in the top four. Without any games having been played, these are your safest bets to be at the top of the standings, and since they’re all in some form or another prebuilt teams, there are at least some prior results that these rankings are based off of. These are four teams that are all billed as playoff contenders, and are expected to be fighting for the stage bonuses. With that being said, they really only have the ability to maintain or go down, and DeathBlow predicts that we’ll see at least 1 of these 4 titans fall into the middle of the pack before the end of the season.

5-9 Outlaws, Dragons, Valiant, Mayhem

I’ll be honest about these, many of the community members as well as myself and Deathblow admit to basically having to nitpick over minor difference for many of these rankings, as there isn’t a ton of precedent to differentiate them at this poin. This is where we start to see the rosters that have a core from a preexisting team, but have additions from the free agent pool. The notable exception here is Florida who only has six players to their roster going into the preseason. Florida is possibly the most hotly debated roster in the league right now (at least by me), and there are arguments to be heard for and against them. I’ll dive deeper into that discussion in another post, but what I will say is that we need to see what moves they’re willing to make in terms of roster as the season pans out.

10-12 Fusion, Shock, Gladiators, Uprising

This is the tier where we saw what I’ve coined as the “Junkenstein’s Rosters” (I may not be the first person to have said that). These teams started from scratch and formed rosters based entirely on individual performance rather than picking up a pre-existing roster. It’s yet to be seen how well this team building strategy will work, but what we can say is that as a whole, the community does not seem to value it very highly. I expect it to be a mixed bag, with one or two of the rosters shooting up in the rankings with the others flopping. In contrast to the top four, these teams have nowhere to go but up, so expectations are tempered. If they make even a bit of a run for a playoff spot, it will likely be a huge story, which is going to be big for the brand if nothing else. Notably, the Shock’s roster will unlock when two of their players (Sinnatra and Super) turn 18 and are eligible to play. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw them flounder in the first stage, and make a glorious run after their roster is filled out.

In case you are wondering how this all works, here is the grid of individual rankings in no particular order. The identities of the individual rankings are remaining anonymous per the request of many of the contributors. We made our personal rankings available for you to scrutinize and argue with us about. If you’re curious about anyone else’s specific list, you go go right ahead and ask them. 🙂

Like I mentioned earlier, DeathBlow and I are going to be continuing this series at the very least with our own power rankings on a consistent basis. We’re also going to try to keep the community input up as it serves as a nice barometer for what the average perceptions of the teams are, and will lessen the effect of our individual outlier opinions. If you know anyone in the competitive OW and OWL community who would like to contribute, have them tweet @highnoonpodcast on twitter, or join the public Discord community: https://discord.gg/3W2nXZm .

That’s going to be it for this very first edition of the power rankings. Let us know what you think in Discord, Twitter, or in the comments below! You can always find everything we do over at HighNoonPodcast.com or catch the live podcast over at Twitch.tv/highnoonpodcast. Thanks a lot for reading and remember….

ITZ HI NUN

John “TheBlevins” Blevins

@the_Blevins

HighNoonPodcast@gmail.com