Hero Limits in Overwatch

The question of whether Overwatch should have hero limits for tournament or ranked play has been a recurring one within the scene. The overwhelming majority of professional players think that the game should be played with a hero limit of one per team and had lobbied most tournaments to run this ruleset. Despite this, the view has yet to gain wider traction with public players and often gets labelled as “anti-Blizzard”, which seems true when one looks at the recent comments from the Blizzard team and major tournaments they were involved in such as the ESL Atlantic Showdown. Should Blizzard be sticking stubbornly to their guns on Hero Limit 0, even in the face of reduced player and viewer enjoyment?

For the love of balance

The most basic reason that professional players want Overwatch to be played in a hero limit 1 format is for balance. Tournament play pushes the balance to its limits. It’s the job of highly competitive players to abuse over-powered mechanics, build the best team possible, and abuse any balance issues to win. The prevalent school of thought among the professional players is that Overwatch is impossible to balance without limiting the heroes to one per team, but there are many who disagree.

This is not intended as a slight on Blizzard and their attempts at game design. The balance argument for HL1 centres around the difficulty in balancing a hero when you may see anywhere between zero and six of them in a composition. We’ve seen with previous patches that Blizzard were able to balance individual heroes but they became overpowered when used together: D’va, Winston, Tracer, McCree and Lucio were all nerfed not because they were individually too powerful, but because they were unbalanced when used in pairs or when spammed at the payload as a delay strategy.

Let’s take a closer look at Winston as an example and try to see why it’s so difficult to balance a hero to be strong individually but not overpowered in multiples. Winston has been used extensively in pairs, with double Winston forming the tanky core of almost every doubles strategy due to his ability to initiate, deal damage, shield, and harass. There’s nothing novel or clever about running two Winstons, it requires no adaptation, and they don’t occupy different roles within the team. Double Winston is so good because they do the exact same tasks but with twice the efficacy. It’s like having one super-Winston who has half the cooldown on his bubble and his jump, while doing twice the damage and having twice the health.

Blizzard’s answer to the extremely powerful double Winston compositions was to reduce the shield’s health by 40% and begin the cooldown on its disappearance rather than deployment. This did affect Winston, but he’s still far better in pairs despite being a significant nerf. Proponents of the HL1 balance argument say that in order to push the nerf far enough to make multiple Winstons not overpowered, Blizzard would totally ruin any possibility of running single Winston. They believe it’s not possible to balance certain heroes effectively so that a single instance of them is impactful, but they cannot be stacked to great effect. So far the evidence is with them.

Blizzard are capable

Opponents of HL1 see no issue with balancing for no hero limits. Blizzard’s patches have certainly thrown the prevalent metas around, and each change has mostly had the intended effect. The 2-2-2 strategies have been mostly countered, and by leaving the options open it allows players to come up with novel counter-strategies to any stacks by stacking their own or running a key counter hero. The evolution of the HL0 meta at the moment almost sees no double heroes other than in specific holds or to spam the payload and abuse a horrific overtime mechanic.

As long as Blizzard actively keep trying to balance the game without hero limits, is there really enough data to say it’s a hopeless task? There is also the option of nerfing stacks specifically rather than the hero in general, for example with Mei’s freeze or Zenyatta’s orbs, neither of which stack, dissuading doubling up those heroes. If this principle was applied to Winston for example, Blizzard could stop Winston’s Tesla Cannon stacking damage or even try a team-wide cooldown on his abilities. Before these options have been explored, opponents say, there is no reason to demand hero limits as a requirement for balancing.

Let’s move on from the balance argument for a moment to discuss some other issues which often crop up in the wider context of hero limits in Overwatch: diversity of strategy and Blizzard’s logistical implementation.

Strategic diversity

The large swing in hero limit rules recently, from tournaments running predominantly HL1 to exclusively running HL0 is due to the announcement of the ESL Atlantic Showdown. As a huge tournament with a six-figure prizepool, its rules define what teams want to practise and play. The official ESL announcement when the rules were released gave this reason for HL0:

It’s important to note that teams will have the freedom to craft team compositions as they like with no hero restrictions or limits. Blizzard and ESL see the option to stack heroes as a core game concept and central to the strategy of Overwatch, as it gives teams the most room to be flexible and adaptable.

Blizzard believe that by locking tournaments to HL1 they would reduce the diversity of strategies and heroes played. Mathematically they are obviously correct: Hero Limit 0 gives you 230,230 possible team compositions, with Hero Limit 1 limiting that to 54,264. This is a completely useless statistic however as it ignores the limitations of creating a “viable” composition, and though the amount of theoretical variation is larger with HL0 in its tournament application we have seen less variety, not more. The silver lining for HL0 is that it does provide the strategic ability to counter more easily, as seen with double Winston countering the pre-buff Widowmaker and double Reaper/McCree in reply. Sometimes a single overpowered hero requires two of its counter in order to be shut down.

Is this really enough justification to sing the praises of a flexible and dynamic meta under HL0? History sends us leaning in the other direction, as memories of double Genji/Zenyatta, double Winston/Reaper, and triple McCree fly in the face of this claim. As yet nobody has found a single dominant composition under HL1, and it is likely that one does not exist - even if it did and HL1’s meta development slowed to a crawl, Blizzard could solve that with a patch and avoid all of the pain inflicted by HL0.

@CShadowstaff Hero stacking is a core concept and strategy of Overwatch. Teamwork is key! — Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) 6 July 2016

Deal with it

Unfortunately they don’t seem open to this line of thought, much to the annoyance and frustration of the competitive community. Every Blizzard statement so far has broadcast similar sentiments to the one above: we created the game with hero stacking as a core concept and we believe it’s a good thing.

Given that we all know Blizzard hold this opinion, and they are the only ones with the power to change the rules, is it a waste of time to be arguing in the first place? One anonymous pro certainly thinks so:

Trying to enforce 1hl was a huge mistake by everyone in the competitive community. We were forced to practice a ruleset that will never be used again, [it was] a literal waste of time, especially for [teams that] have to catch up. 0hl is fine if blizzard could design their game with even a little bit of competitive insight - like how overtime works is a joke. The fault isn't in the ruleset but the game mechanics itself.

This quote from Jeff Kaplan, Game Director & Vice President of Overwatch, shows how much the community is shouting into the wind and why this causes so much frustration:

...Overall, Overwatch is a game about switching heroes. We feel like the dynamic gameplay and the core systems of the game are all tuned around this fact of team play, and counter play. Switching heroes is a part of this game. We see your threads when you say on the internet "I think you should lock into heroes" and our answer to that is, That is not what Overwatch is about

The professional players pushed HL1 in order to prove it was a superior format. Everything so far seems to suggest that Blizzard either disagree with the evidence or were never going to change. Thus far it seems like wasted effort, but the lack of impact will only serve to further frustrate the competitive players in favour of HL1. It seems a real war is brewing in Overwatch, one behind the scenes between the developer and its professional userbase.