Genji has one of the most influential ultimates in the game. With one blade a Genji can pick up multiple kills and swing the tide of the fight. In the Overwatch League, he is one of the most picked DPS, only beaten in pickrate by Tracer. My initial focus was going to be on Shadowburn, but CaptainPlanet wrote a very good analysis on Shadowburn here ; as a result, I’m going to analyze the blades of the Genji players in OWL.

Let’s first describe the stats of Genji’s ultimate. Blade has a cast time of 1 second and lasts for 6 seconds after that, making the overall duration 7 seconds. When Genji casts this ability, his swift strike cooldown is reset. Each swing of the blade does 120 damage, and he can swing at maximum 7 times. With the swing+swift strike combo and a discord orb to assist, a 200 hp squishy gets deleted. Since the swift strike is reset each time a elimination happens, an unchecked Genji can eviscerate the enemy backline very quickly. Shadowburn’s blade against the Houston Outlaws results in 4 kills and a capture of the point in the clip below.

Shadowburn 4k

There are some drawbacks to Genji’s ultimate. The ultimate only allows Genji to attack in melee range, and Genji can still die in the middle of the blade, dying around 28% of the time. While he can still use deflect, Genji is still vulnerable to stun effects like Mccree’s flashbang or Roadhog’s hook. Using reflect also denies Genji from using all of his possible swings. A common way that Genji dies is from taking chip damage from a Mccree or Zenyatta shot and dying to a Junkrat mine. In the short clip below, Dream attempts to go for the blade, but due to Jjonak tagging Dream with a discord and damaging him with a 120 damage headshot, Libero goes for the easy mine kill.

Dream dying

In fact, Junkrat seems to be one of the best characters to shut down Genji. Despite Junkrat’s playtime being much less than Dva and Zenyatta in comparison, he leads the group in killing a Genji in blade form as seen below.

What makes Junkrat so good at countering Genji? Junkrat’s mine has two mines that each have a 8 second cooldown. When a Junkrat releases a mine, there is a short window of 0.3 seconds where he can not detonate it. If we assume that a person playing Genji has an average of 0.2 seconds to acknowledge the mine, the Genji only has 0.1 second window to press the deflect button. This means that Genji usually has to anticipate the mine before it is thrown.

15.3s -> 15.4s -> 15.61s

If Genji fails to anticipate the mine, he suffers 120 damage under normal circumstances, and chip damage from a Zenyatta or Mccree can kill the Genji. With a 30% damage boost from Zenyatta and 30% boost from Mercy, Junkrat can actually deal more than the 200(120*1.3*1.3 =202.8) damage required to kill a Genji with just a solo mine. The Junkrat and Mercy nerf should prevent the instagib mine in season from being so common, but Junkrat can still easily kill Genji with a little help from the teammates with his mine.

Another notable counter of Genji is McCree. McCree has a flashbang that can stun Genji after 0.5 seconds of throwing it, allowing teammates to burst down Genji within the 0.7 seconds of stun. While it can be deflected, a Genji often is forced to use deflect beforehand in a previous fight. Even if Genji has deflect up, the McCree flashbang radius is big enough to go around the deflect hitbox. Outside of flashbang, McCree can also 3 shot a Genji with his 70 damage bullets, or 2 if Mccree manages to land a headshot. If Mccree has his Deadeye up he can even one shot the Genji mid blade.

Here Fleta uses his deflect before hand and tries to go in with blade against Dreamkazper, but Dreamkazper stuns a Fleta with no deflecct and kills him with a few well placed shots. Notably Fleta most likely wouldn’t have been able to secure the kills anyway due to Neko’s transcendence, but Mccree’s burst manages to go through Ryujehong’s transcendence. From these clips of McCree and Junkrat, it is easy to see why anti-dive comps favor running these two DPS as a pair.

In order for a Genji to have a successful play, he must avoid the flashbang from McCree, the mine of Junkrat, and secure kills while under fire from the rest of the enemy team. Support ults also can prevent Genji from getting the resets he needs to kill the enemy team. It isn’t easy to blade into a prepared team, making big blade plays some of the most crowd-pleasing in OWL.

Knowing the details about Genji’s ultimate, let’s take a look at some stats for the Genji players of OWL. All stats are sourced from Winston’s Lab and will only include Genjis that have bladed 10 or more times. Possible errors might exist due to how Winston’s Lab records the stats. The stats used to calculate my results are located in a Tableau notebook here .

Stat Analysis

Final Blows Per Blade: Average amount of kills Genji achieved in a teamfight.

Ult held: The average amount of seconds Genji holds an ultimate between gaining it and using it.

Ult/10: How much the Genji player uses his ult per 10 minutes.

Number of Blades: The amount of blades a Genji player has used.

% of Ult in Trans: Percentage of whether an opposing Zenyatta casted Transcendence in between Genji’s start and end of ult.

As we can see, Surefour, Wekeed, and Shadowburn lead the pack in average final blows of per blade. Somewhat surprisingly, despite all of the hype surrounding Fleta, Fleta doesn’t seem to get as many kills with his blade. His teammate Wekeed seems to get more kills on average with more ults/10 min., maybe explaining why the Seoul coach opted to play Wekeed over Fleta for certain maps. On the other side of things, despite Tviq being on one of the weaker teams of the league, his average kills per blade is among the top Genjis, suggesting that Tviq might be held back by his team.

Dreamkazper and Shadowburn use Genji much more than any team at 90 times and 102 times respectively. On the contrary, Houston and Shanghai use Genji the least. Shanghai rarely opts to use Genji with Undead only blading once and Diya blading 10 times. Houston doesn’t use much Genji either despite Linkzr being known as world class at the hero, mostly opting to use him as a hitscan specialist instead. Jake used a good amount of Genji in the beginning of the season, but it dropped as the stage went by, mainly focusing on Junkrat/Soldier and adding some Tracer to the mix.

While most of the top Genjis tend to avoid blading into transcendence, Profit is a notable deviation from the average, blading into transcendence over 25% of the time. In a clip shown below, Profit demonstrates how a Genji can still achieve a multikill in an opposing Zenyatta’s ult.

Profit blading through the transcendence

Despite Boombox immediately using the transcendence after Profit blades, Profit first manages to blade the Mercy that was not included within the transcendence radius. Profit also manages to burst through a discorded soldier with the help of his teammates, showing that while transcendence is a strong ultimate, enough burst can still finish off opponents.

Let’s try evaluating with some more team-based stats. A teamfight is won if the player’s team happens to get more kills than the opposing team within a set interval. The other stat displayed here would be eliminations, marking the eliminations of the team between the start of Genji’s blade and the end of Genji’s blade.

Notably, Surefour leads in all these stats in eliminations, final blows, and win percentage, having a whopping win percentage of 81.8%. Given that Hydration’s numbers seem to be much worse on Genji, perhaps the Gladiatiors should consider utilizing Surefour much more as their main Genji. We do have to keep in mind that Surefour has only bladed 12 times, though. Scrims might be telling a different story as towards why Hydration is considered the better Genji, and there is more to Genji than his blades.

While most of the Genji players with weaker win percentages happen to have a worse final blows per blade, Shadowburn has one of the worst win percentages, with Shadowburn barely winning more than 50% of teamfights with his blade. Shadowburn does manage to kill the soldier and supports in this clip, but none of LA Valiant’s tank line died from the blade, allowing the Valiant to wipe the heavily damaged teammates of Philly.

Being baffled by Shadowburn’s lackluster win percentage, I dove further into the stats. I first investigated Shadowburn’s win percentage when he had multikills, but those win percentages seemed to be well within what was expected. I investigated further and looked to the instances where Shadowburn completely whiffs. The results I found were quite shocking.

0 kill Genji Blades. More than 10 needed to be on this chart.

Compared to all of the other Genjis, Shadowburn has a 22% teamfight win percentage when he gets 0 kills, worse than any other Genji. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence either, with Shadowburn whiffing his blades around 36% of the time. Given that Shadowburn plays Genji the most out of any player, these results are not due to low sample size. This data oddity can either mean one of two things.

Shadowburn’s teammates aren’t carrying their worth in weight. Since Shadowburn tends to wait before everyone uses their ultimates, Shadowburn needs to win hard with his blade in a fight that is already very unfavored from not using the ultimate earlier.

Conclusion

Profit and Wekeed seem to be the top tier Genjis , with Shadowburn seeming to excel in most stats despite his team’s weakness in teamfights. For a player that isn’t the dedicated Genji player of his team, Surefour seems to excel in all of the categories I have recorded, from final blows to team win percentage, possibly indicating that he should be used more on Genji. Looking at these stats, it seems to me that final blows is the best way to judge how good a Genji is with his blades. Other stats like holding blade and blades/per 10 min. seem to be overly reliant on player playstyle and allied and opposing team comps.

Unfortunately, there are certain stats like kill contribution, damage, and eliminations that cannot be recorded just from viewing the video. Also, the focus of this article was primarily on Genji’s ultimate. Perhaps evaluating his other stats like kills against other DPS would give a deeper overview on Genji. I am personally very excited to see how much the meta shifts with the Junkrat and Mercy nerf and see if there are new top Genji blade users.

Thanks for reading! If possible, I would love to get a suggestion on future topics to work on. Some topics i’ve considered below: