After the Outlaws’ match against Seoul in week 5 of Stage 2, I sat down with Jake to chat about some of the fundamentals of competitive Overwatch. We talked about some of the pitfalls of Overwatch map design, as well as how this plays into the dominance of dive compositions and whether Brigitte might help enact change in the meta.

The following is the second part of a 2-part interview. If you missed the first part, you can take a look at it here.

In general, do you have any ideas on what kind of shifts you would expect to see in the meta in Stage 3? The Sombra changes will go through and assuming that’s the only change, do you think that will have a huge impact?

I think right now Sombra’s in a weird spot. I thought it was very important when she was initially patched that she not be sent to the live client, because I felt that the hack was a really anti-fun mechanic. It’s relatively easy to do and shuts down all the high skill characters in the game like Tracer and Genji and D.Va. You have to build around just not being hacked. The whole game plan is don’t get hacked and try and hack them, which is very slow and stagnant.

And very similar to the Mercy meta, in some ways. Playing around a certain mechanic.

Yeah and there was a worry that it would be too strong. I think I realised over time that in a competitive environment, it’s not too strong. When you’re all working together, you’re all calling out the Sombra and you’re all doing damage to her to prevent getting hacked, it’s much harder for her to execute a hack successfully than it is in a ranked situation. But in ranked, it was incredibly bad for the game. With that lack of coordination, Sombra was very reliably hacking and picking off targets individually, which I thought would really hurt the game, at least in public play.

It’s good that she got nerfed, but at the same time with the new nerfs I don’t think she’ll see much play. EMP just takes so long to charge now without the health packs that she just does not build ultimate fast enough to be effective. The modern game is very, very ultimate-centric. Every strategy has micro-plays without ultimates, but which are also looking to build up to those macro-plays with ultimates and get ultimate synergy. Sombra will really struggle in that area, especially because if you’re hacking packs and using those to heal, you’re not getting ultimate. You’re also depriving your supports of ultimate. So I don’t expect to see too much change in the meta. I think there’s some question as to whether Brigitte will be in the game for Stage 3…

Yeah, I don’t think she’s in competitive until Season 10 so it’s like…

Yeah it seems insane to me to give it to Overwatch League if it’s not in ranked so I hope that doesn’t happen. It would be a mistake. [Author’s note: Brigitte will not be available in Stage 3] Honestly, I don’t think the meta will change too much. Realistically, dive has been the best since the game came out and I think people just didn’t realise that in the very beginning when everyone was playing Reinhardt. Maybe people just didn’t understand how to play dive because it was far more complex than Reinhardt compositions. The game is going to need some radical changes to help remove dive.

Do you think Brigitte will help that?

She might. It’s hard to say right now because obviously when a new character comes out, there’s a lag time before anybody is really that good with her. It takes practice, it takes exploration, figuring out what comp to build and how to run it. It seems like Brigitte is only going to be viable as a tank support. She really thrives on that AoE healing, so you’re looking to play in a small ball so you’re all getting that healing. Obviously she’s very focused on the melee, so she really wants to be in a deathball. The character really seems to be built for a deathball composition.

My problem with it is that I don’t see how it solves the fundamental problem with tank compositions. If a dive composition just goes one by one on the point very conservatively and with a lot of discipline… There’s going to be a Soldier, there’s going to be Zenyatta and they’re just going to be pounding you. Eventually, your shield will break and there’s that clock on the Reinhardt composition, where once your shield breaks, you die and your whole team just dies. That clock is so scary that it forces you to play in a very fast way that is very predictable. And I think the flexibility and mobility of dive is just going to make it the strongest composition unless there’s really deep changes to the game.

I don’t want to see Winston and D.Va nerfed. I’d actually like to see more fundamental game mechanics changed, like the way contesting objectives works. Currently, you can contest an objective and back off and you’ve still got like half a second where the cart won’t move, even though you’re not on it. I think that half-second really greases the wheels of the dive composition. One by one contesting is now even easier because you have a little bit of leeway. Even if that cart is right at the end, it’s still pretty easy to make it on there. Your Winston says, “I’ve got to get off” and your Tracer has that half a second to get to point and that’s all you really need.

If that game mechanic were changed, you might see tank comps that threaten objectives become more effective. But right now, it’s just too easy to outplay tanks and it’s just too risky. When tanks lose a fight, there’s so much HP in that pool that they basically feed a whole stack of ultimates to the dive team. Then, re-pushing into that is almost impossible. Even getting ultimates out of a fully-stacked dive team is really hard for tanks. So I honestly don’t see much change in the meta coming.

Do you think maybe maps are the solution. So, for example, changing future maps so that there are more King’s Row-style maps that are less susceptible to dive?

I think King’s Row is an example of an interesting type of map, because to be honest, I think even King’s Row… dive seems better on third. Even on first, there’s a pretty good argument to be made for dive. So in my eyes, I just don’t see… You can’t make every map like King’s Row, right? It’s super chokey. But I think the other problem with maps in general is that they’re built first for aesthetics. To be honest, there’s a lot of vertical buildings with rooftops that you can stand on. From a map design perspective, Hollywood is beautiful. It’s a movie set that’s also Western-themed. It looks awesome. It looks sick. But, in any arena FPS ever, having a vertical wall to a high ground that you can actually stand on, and somebody’s standing on what is essentially a wall and shooting down at you is such an immense advantage on every single character. Being able to get to the high ground is completely game defining. Compositions that don’t effectively get on high ground are just… dead in the water to a vertical high ground like that. You see in TF2 and other arena FPS games, there were a lot of ugly ramps. There was high ground and an ugly ramp…

It’s not a slow moving vertical…

Elevator! Yes. Looks nice. Terrible for the game. You can’t have high ground that is only accessible via elevators… If you want characters that can’t fly to be viable, do not make those! You have to sit still for essentially six seconds! And if you get unlucky, it’s like 10 seconds. There’s some RNG to it…

[Laughs] You’re running away from someone and you’re like, “damn… the elevator’s at the top.”

Yeah! Exactly! It’s like oh, um, we just need to get to the high ground… ok, we just missed the elevator… ok, let’s just not move for 10 seconds while the enemy sets up all around us on the high ground… and starts shooting down on us. To run a composition that relies on the elevators is to submit yourself to RNG. And no competitive gamer wants to do that.

You won’t see changes in the game unless the maps and the contest mechanics are deeply changed. You can’t just nerf D.Va and Winston. I mean, you could do that but personally I think you might start seeing triple DPS come back. I don’t think there’s any world where Reinhardt becomes really powerful again. Think about the times tanks have been really powerful: it was when Roadhog hook was insanely OP, it was very easy to reach out and touch people and kill them. That allowed them to stay on the cart more safely because you could actually do something about the divers. Right now, it just doesn’t feel like even hooking a D.Va is going to kill her. And if you hook anything else, the D.Va just saves them.

It doesn’t feel like the Reinhardt composition has any teeth, or any way to fight back against dive. They have to implement either a fundamental way to interact with dive or a way for everyone to get to high ground, like a new support for instance, that allows you to jump or fly to the high ground. Things like, that really deeply change the game, are good. But they can’t just remake every map, because there are some maps that are borderline unfixable, in terms of the high ground being too powerful.

Which would you say are unfixable?

Maps like Hollywood are kind of unfixable unless you just put ugly ramps that go up to the high ground.

Or jump pads.

Or jump pads… although I don’t really think that’s healthy at all for the game. [laughs] It’s like on Oasis, it just allows for these completely insane plays. And that’s cool but on KotH it’s isolated to one part of the map and it’s far away. You put jump pads on Hollywood and it’s just going to be insane…

Part of it is map design and part of it is fundamental mechanics. I think it will be a long time until the devs figure out what the right way to change the game is. You don’t want to make dive terrible, you want a balance. But balancing very low mobility characters and very high mobility characters is a fundamental problem, because the characters don’t match up evenly. They are inherently looking to match up with an advantage. They are looking to give themselves insurmountable advantages like high ground for dive.

When tank comps were so powerful it was because they had tools that were really oppressive to the rest of the game, like Roadhog one-shotting everything in existence, the immortal 400-armour D.Va that nothing in the world could fight… Those type of tools enable tanks to succeed, but we know that having those types of tools isn’t good for the game. It’s really frustrating to play against. They’ll have to strike a balance between giving powerful enough tools to the tank comp so that it is effective, while also ensuring that dive still has a place in the game. And they’ll have to ensure that high skill and high mobility characters are still very much playable and very exciting.

Photo by Robert Paul for Blizzard Entertainment. Some quotes were edited for clarity and flow, but their original intent remains the same.