This week was pretty forgettable, despite the Shock putting up a 1–1 record. Sure, the Shock may be .500 for the stage, but if you look between the lines things aren’t really where they should be. While the Dragons match didn’t really showcase this (because, you know, Dragons) the Valiant match really showed where the Shock need to improve. For this reason, I’m mostly going to be talking about this game.

I wasn’t really expecting a win here. The Valiant had had an impressive showing in Week One, and the addition of Custa seemed to have worked wonders for a squad that had looked pretty discombobulated in Stage Two. In addition, the Valiant had also added Bunny, who made his Valiant debut against the Shock. On the other hand, the Shock now had Architect, giving them the projectile specialist that they desperately needed. And, of course, they had Danteh, one of, if not the best, Sombra in the league, as well as an improving Sinatraa. I was confident that having the best Sombra in the league would help us greatly on map one, Volskaya Industries.

What I did not expect was the Shock rolling out and putting the shiny, new, and less proven projectile specialist on Sombra.

It’s pretty clear that the Shock think incredibly highly of this new Sombra. The Shock use her 50% of the time. This is a lot considering that the league average pick rate for Sombra is around 18% In the Valiant match, they ran the Mexican Hacker almost 80% of the time, a mark that blew every other teams Sombra usage out of the water.

So why would you choose to run a projectile specialist on one of the best Sombra maps in the game instead of your proven Sombra player.

I can’t really figure it out either. It did work very well on point A, where the Shock flattened the Valiant defense and moved on to point B. Here, their progress completely stalled.

There were several problems with this attack, although a lot of it can be drawn down to Architect sticking with Sombra for as long as he did. While it made sense to run Sombra for the first couple attacks due to the EMP charge that had been built up on Point A, it didn’t make much sense after that because the addition of an inexperienced Sombra player was throwing a wrench into the Shock’s dives.

Instead of switching off the Sombra, the Shock started playing one of the strangest dive variations I’ve ever seen. The Shock split into three groups. Super and Sinatraa would go into the backline and try to take down Kariv and Custa, who often took the standard Volskaya Point B support defense position on the high ground behind the point. Architect and Nevix, meanwhile, would try to hack one of the tanks (Usually Space) and bring them down, while Moth provided some healing to group “Take down the tank” and Sleepy laid down cover fire.

To say that the backline was “exposed” during these attacks would be an understatement. The issue was that Moth was often left behind when Architect and Nevix did their dive. Nevix and Architect usually ended up on the Point itself, but by the time they got their both Shock supports were already under siege from Bunny’s Tracer. To compound the problem, Bunny was having an amazing match, even by his high standards. Nevix would then attempt to go back and peel, but then Architect would have to follow his partner, and then the rest of the Valiant would swarm Sinatraa and Super. Not to mention the fact that many times these peel attempts were late, as the supports were already dead, and then Nevix would die too. It got so bad that Soon swapped to Sombra halfway through the defense (this was the only time the Valiant played Sombra during this match) and joined Bunny in a game of “Tag-team the completely unprotected supports”. The Shock then had a defense that was so weirdly out of sync that I actually had to go back and rewatch it a few times to even decipher what the original plan was. I’m still not 100% sure, so I’ll just leave the phrase “It was bad” there and leave it at that.

Things were a bit better on Blizzard World, although I’m pretty sure had more to do with putting Danteh on Sombra than anything. This match was much the same as the Volskaya match, with strange dives and leaving supports out to dry being the main Shock strategies. This round wasn’t particularly notable for the first two rounds of attacks, as both teams completed the map, although Valiant had a minute left while the Shock did it in OT. The only interesting thing this round showed us was how broken the Point B defenders spawn is, as the Shock had to effectively win three fights in a row in order to get past, and they did only because Nevix channeled his inner Poko and had two clutch D.Va bombs.

The second round of attacks was interesting because the Shock tried something wildly different. No, not getting off Sombra. That would be silly. The Shock don’t “get off” Sombra. They instead ran Moira/Lucio instead of Zenyatta/Mercy with their dive comp. Moira/Lucio dive plays completely differently from Zen/Mercy dive, as instead of taking the high ground you have to lawnmower your way to the point and brawl it out there. Teams have been rolling out with comps like this more often, although I haven’t really seen it work all that well yet. And it didn’t work very well here, as the Shock couldn’t do enough damage on the point (unsurprisingly considering their team comp, and the fact that Soon’s McCree is a dive’s worst enemy).

The Shock ran with this Moira/Lucio/Sombra dive weirdness for the majority of Ilios, and it didn’t work here either. This map had most of the same issues that Blizzard World and Volskaya did, although Sinatraa’s emergency Doomfist to save the point was one of the cooler things I’ve seen in the OWL thus far. The Shock FINALLY axed the Sombra on Route 66 attack, although the attack still was punctuated by crappy dives, and a lack of game sense. It was just bad.

This was a forgettable game for…well, everybody, but specifically Architect and the Shock coaches. Architect’s Sombra wasn’t up to par, although the coaches should have been running Danteh if they knew they were gonna run this much Sombra. It just doesn’t make any sense.

The Shock lost a map to the Dragons. And…that’s kinda all I have to say about that. How did that even happen. Argh.

The good news is that next week the Shock play a Fuel squad in turmoil. The ejection of Kyky and Rascal is just icing on the cake for a team that has become used to Texas sized drama, and their performance on stage has suffered. Maybe Kyky getting the boot will help things, but the players have indicated that he wasn’t the issue. Who knows with that team at this point. What I do know is that a win against the powerful Fusion seems unlikely, so another 1–1 week seems likely for the Shock as of right now.