Thought dump is a regular series where I post my unedited thoughts and musings about Overwatch that don’t merit a real article.

Well here we are, hero pools are coming. If you want my thoughts on hero pools check my previous Thought Dump. But for this piece my goal is to establish my philosophies on different styles of compositions in a concrete form so that in the coming year when I make statements about a team’s read on the mini-metas that will come from hero pools I can refer people here instead of explaining myself over and over.

The reason why I think composition matchups will matter far more this year is that simply put, teams will be worse this year. Due to the available heroes changing weekly the nuances of any specific composition will not be as clearly defined as years past. Because of this, among other reasons like role lock, it won’t be like OWL S2 where goats was dominant despite other comps being more than playable. Simply for the reason that no team will have the literally months of practice ironing out the errors in their execution so that any theoretical weaknesses can be covered by near perfect play.

So before OWL S3 starts I want to outline the four main composition styles that exist, and how I see them interacting with one another. So that when you see a matchup that isn’t a straight mirror you can have a better understanding of each team’s win conditions. Part of the reason I want to very clearly lay out win conditions of different comp matchups is so that when I criticize casters/fans lack of understanding in Overwatch I can at least say I did something to try and help :). So let’s get started.

As I see it it now, and over the course of Overwatch’s history, there have been four primary styles of compositions. Rush (I may refer to them as goats style comps), dive, poke, and anti-dive.

Rush:

Rush comps is a more recent term I’ve heard to describe this style of comp. Personally I’m not a fan of the term, but it is generally speaking an apt name. Goats was a rush style comp, Quad tank was as well. Additionally the super old school Rein/Dva/Hog/Tracer/Ana/Lucio comps we saw in APEX would fall into this category.

Generally speaking the goal of the composition is the have the W key pressed down. Get to the objective, kill anyone on it, and move forward to hold choke points with it’s oppressive health pools/sustain.

The main strength of these style of comps is their consistency. With lots of healing and plenty of tank resources it’s generally tricky to find early kills against this style of composition. These comps use that safety to reach objectives or choke points safely with low mobility heroes which forces the enemies to come and fight them. And in a straight up brawl the heroes in this comp usually excel.

The heroes generally found in this style of comp (per role) are:

MT: Rein, Orisa

OT: Zarya, Dva, Sigma

Hitscan: Reaper, Sombra, Symmetra

Flex: Mei, Doomfist

Flex support: Ana, Bap, Moira

Main support: Lucio

As you can see the main support pool is particularly small for this style of comp at just Lucio. So with hero pools if Lucio is ever removed it’s a safe assumption this style of comp will not be played. And if it is played, you must consider what the team is trying to do with it as the comp is severely hamstringed without speed boost. Are they playing it for a specific choke point on the map? Are they trying to closehold a payload map for extra fights to delay time?

The hero on this list which might surprise people is Symm. Symm can be used vs dive compositions to bypass areas where the dive comp normally wants to set up a soft dive, fixing a large part of the rush comps weakness in the matchup. Because of the mobility Symm affords a team she could theoretically be used in place of Lucio on weeks when he’s banned.

In the mirror rush comps are purely about micro. While many fans thought goats was a smash heads comp, rush style comps are entirely about cooldown usage. Zarya bubbles, Mei walls/ice block, Reaper wraith, Moira fade, Bap lamps, Orisa foritfy/shield, Dva matrix, and so on are all critical to sustaining your team for the maximum amount of time. And it’s crucial that the defensive ones are not overlapped. If your Zarya bubbles Mei right as she iceblocks, the bubble wont block much. And that mistake means your Rein suddenly has no extra defensive tools, and is that much easier to kill. So in the mirror look for the smallest details, and expect the color caster to do the same.

Against dive the rush comp is looking to reach the objective while giving up the least amount of ult charge to the dive team, while also not dying. So this is still about cycling cooldowns (sensing a pattern here yet?), to take the least amount of damage as possible. Speed helps you be exposed for less time, so does Symm TP. Rein shield is key here, Dva matrix is powerful for this as well. Even Mei walls as a makeshift shield is a powerful tool as well. Other, less thought of tools, such as Lucio boop to push Monkey away, are also useful for preventing damage done. The reason for this is that in a 0 ult fight between rush and dive comps taking place on the objective should almost always be in favor of the rush comp with their additional healing/survival cooldowns. But ultimates like Primal Rage to break the rush comp formation, EMP to turn those cooldowns off, and Nano Boost which turns your divers into super tough beats can allow a dive comp to beat a Rush comp in a straight fight on an objective. So for the rush comp they are trying to get to point alive before the dive comp builds ults. On KOTH this means a dive comp has the time before the point unlocks to find a kill or build a fast ult, as they can’t match the rush comp’s sustain on point. When defending with a rush comp vs a dive comp you’re trying to hold close to a chokepoint and push onto their supports and kill them quickly to further exacerbate the gap in sustain. Or, simply deny them from taking space by standing in it and fighting for control of your flanks.

Against poke comps it’s largely the same, where you’re looking to deny them from building ults like Barrage, Dragon, or Rip Tire which can kill multiple players quickly. But with an extra emphasis on cycling cooldowns (getting the theme here?) to prevent the early deaths while crossing to point, as there is more upfront damage which can kill you. And while defending vs a poke comp you’re also looking to play choke points and rush onto whoever you can catch.

Against anti-dive compositions Rush is a straight up hard counter. Anti-dive also generally looks to play defensively while moving itself to an objective, but plays heroes meant for dueling dive and generally does not have the tools to sustain a prolonged engage that rush excels in.

In summary, rush comps are very heavily execution focused. With your cooldown usage being a key factor to your success. They naturally excel at extending fights on objectives, and are a very strong defensive composition when they can pick the time and place where a fight happens. They have win conditions vs every style of composition, and that combined with their consistency mean that theoretically there is no clearly defined weakness. You should expect to see rush comps played this year as the best teams can focus in on this style, nail down their execution, and despite heroes changing can understand their goals week to week.

Dive:

Dive is a personal favorite of mine. Because it combines many of the cooldown usage traits of rush comps with more skill expressive heroes like Tracer and Winston. It’s explosive when done right, and a blast to watch.

Historically dive comps were named after their DPS, Genji/Tracer, Sombra/Tracer as the tanks were always the same Winston/Dva as the only tanks with any sort of real mobility. But now with Wrecking Ball in the mix we have a variety for once.

The main strength of dive comps are their ability to always act first. Because of the gap closing ability the dive comp can on a whim press the go button and take a fight. Although normally more setup is required before the go button is pressed. This comp generally looks to win the fight before moving to the objective, as they do not have the sustain/damage to match rush or poke style comps in a long term fight.

The heroes generally found in this style of comp (per role) are:

MT: Winston, Ball

OT: Dva, Ball

Hitscan: Tracer, Sombra

Flex: Genji, Sombra, Doomfist

Flex support: Ana, Moira, Zen, Bap

Main support: Lucio, Ana, Mercy, Bap

You’ll notice that this style of comp is far from limited by the supports available. And historically this comp has been run with a wide array of support duos. Ana/Zen on defense provides tons of offensive tools which shine on defense when you can pick the place and time of a fight. Moira/Lucio is a highly mobile pairing which on KOTH in particular can follow your divers right into the thick of things. Mercy and Bap are both picks that in a dive mirror do synergize less than the other picks, but have tools to stay safe and not die to the enemy dive.

In the dive mirror generally speaking, the team which acts first wins. If you can get your tanks and dps on top of their supports first (or you ult whoever), it means their backline dies first. And then you can fairly easily out sustain. Occasionally this rule is broken when a team “counterdives”. Simply put, instead of using your mobility forward, you use your mobility to follow the enemy onto your own backline instead of moving forward in an attempt to trade. The reason this works is generally the counterdiving team is holding space forward of their backline, meaning that the diving team must extend into space the counterdiving team controls. So that when counterdove, the fight is usually a mismatched 4v6. And you can win from there. Something to note, but counterdive is very hard without Dva as Ball has no defensive tools for his backline besides booping people away and Monkey’s bubble can easily be pushed into/push people out of it as it’s stationary. Counterdiving is strong when you have ults like Beat/Valk/Trance to keep you alive or EMP to catch them overextended with their abilities turned off. Diving is strong with you have ults like Primal Rage to dive super hard since they can’t kill you, Nano to dive super hard since they can’t duel you, EMP to dive super hard since they can’t press buttons. Notice that EMP is on both lists as it’s just a broken ult, and building it/winning with it is key to a dive team’s success. The dive mirror is exciting because playmaking can net you advantages more than in the rush mirror where it’s about making less mistakes with your cooldowns. But in dive a Tracer one-clip or Ana sleep can completely turn around a fight, and these things can happen multiple times a fight. So this is where the play by play casters need to get hype for the small plays, and tell a story of the back and forth of a fight.

Against rush comps, the onus is on the dive team to win the matchup. As previously discussed their ultimate goal is to build an ultimate or force a kill before the rush team ever reaches the objective. So setting up “soft dives” in which cooldowns are used, but you do not commit to the kill outright are important. These soft dives are most focused around protecting the members who need to build ultimates. If that’s monkey he may get Dva matrix to protect him and Ana will focus heal him to prevent him from dying while he zaps as many players crossing choke points as possible. This is often done from highgrounds where the rush team can not easily get to with their lack of mobility. Meanwhile the DPS, especially Sombra, are trying to farm from off angles where they can look around the shields the rush team is pointing at the rest of their team to farm their own ults. Outside of when using ults, the only times a dive team commits to a kill is when the rush team makes a mistake and splits someone off alone, or wastes lots of cooldowns all at once, or when the dive team’s Ana hits a nade. Turning off the healing for the rush team. At which point all players become killable, and the rush team is instantly on the hard defensive. Ana’s nades make rush comps killable, as well as her Nano allows Monkey/Tracer to play fearlessly in the face of rush. She’s so crucial the the success of dive vs rush that in weeks she’s banned you should not expect to see dive blind picked on defense. As they will lose to rush comps the majority of the time. If attacking into the rush team, the dive team looks to take space around them and force a guerrilla warfare style fight, where they can attack the rush team from multiple angles. Again, mostly from highgrounds the rush team cannot easily contest. From there it plays out similarly, where you attempt to find a free kill, an Ana nade, or build an ultimate.

Against poke comps dive comps are heavily favored. Their explosiveness means they can quickly close distance with the enemy team and force a close range fight where they have superior heroes. If a poke comp goes up against a dive comp, it will largely be determined by the positioning of the poke comp, and how effectively they can protect themselves. But generally speaking the playstyle for dive is simple in these instances, it’s look for members in range of your jumps, kill them, hide while your cooldowns reset, and rinse/repeat. So again, it’s mostly on how the poke team positions/punishes during the windows the dive team has no mobility cooldowns. However now with Dva/Tracer/Ball all having incredibly high uptime on their mobility it is very hard to do, hence why dive comps are favored. Defending against a poke comp with dive is absurdly easy, as you begin with all the space controlled. Meaning dive setups should be a piece of cake.

Against anti-dive is where dive comps struggle the most, obviously. They generally strive to have the least number of killable targets possible, which heavily limits your viable dive targets. Generally speaking the centerpiece of anti-dive has historically been McCree. He can poke dive tanks/dps out very easily and prevent extending scouting. Plus the obvious utility of flashbang. So in the matchup the onus is once again on the dive team to make it work. The execution has to be very clean, where all your divers land on the chosen target together and instantly oneshot them. And from that point on you hope you can win the 5v6, but even that is not guaranteed. So quickly changing targets and chaining together kills is crucial.

To summarize, dive comps have fallen out of favor in the last couple of years because the execution threshold was very high. It is very high in rush comps as well, but the difference is that dive does not have the inherent strengths that rush does of being able to contest objectives easily and hold the games dozens upon dozens of broken ass chokepoints very well. In addition the onus to win is always in the hands of the dive team, always requiring them to make the correct move. Where the other styles of comps have the option of playing slow, which makes them a more versatile comp. While extremely powerful, the theoretical downsides to dive are significant. As such do not expect dive to be blind picked very often in OWL. But in the right matchup, or on weeks where heroes such as Rein/Lucio/McCree/Mei are banned, you will likely see dive make a comeback as in the hands of a team as confident/coordinated as an OWL team it can blow teams out of the water.

Poke:

Easily my least favorite style of comps because they’re generally so passive. They are however the comp that highlights the most traditional FPS mechanics, most notably angle control. Poke comps have come in many styles in Overwatch. From double sniper, to Pharah/Hanzo, most recently Mei/Hanzo, Junkrat has found himself in this style of comp, and I categorize the OG Clockwork comp as a poke comp. It’s a style of comp which changes the most depending on the heroes in it in terms of what goals it’s trying to accomplish. Which is one of the reasons it is so versatile.

The main strength of poke comps is their ability to find kills at range, without ever committing to a real fight. This can be accomplished through raw damage output like Junkrat, or precise angle control like with a Widowmaker. But either way, the comps are weak in straight fights on the objective. And seek to gain advantages through forcing their enemies to use all their defensive cooldowns, or be at low hp before they truly commit to the fight. But if a fight does break out before an advantage is won these styles of comps win by flanking heavily and using their pick potential to clutch.

The heroes generally found in this style of comp (per role) are:

MT: Winston, Orisa

OT: Dva, Sigma, Hog (even though he’s shit now)

Hitscan: Hanzo, Widow, Mei, Ashe

Flex: Hanzo, Junkrat, Pharah, Torb

Flex support: Bap, Zen, Ana

Main support: Bap, Zen, Mercy

In the poke comp mirror, it was originally about taking control of the areas of the map your snipers wanted to play in. This was mostly done with Winston/Dva in the old double sniper meta, where you had Mercy as insurance for sniper duels, and Zen for tank pressure to hold the areas you already had. But in more recent times it has become about cycling cooldowns such as Sigma matrix, Bap lamp, and Orisa shields to live for as long as you can, and trying to trade out favorably. Again as stated before, if you cannot find wins through these means, then hard flanks were the name of the game. Mei/Sigma pushing flank angles as an unstoppable duo was a large part of the EU seeding tournament metagame. But back in the day your Widow could clutch by grappling to an aggressive angle and winning an aim duel. The mirror gets very position focused, as map control to prevent flanks is so important. So if there is a mirror, I expect the color casters to be focused on which positions of the map are being contested vs not contested and how teams rotate around each other with that information.

Against anti-dive comps poke comps win straight up. Anti-dive does not have the sustain of rush comps, or the explosiveness of dive, which are the two areas which poke comps can struggle against. And anti-dive cannot match the angle control/damage output of poke comps, so generally just lose in every way.

Against rush, the poke team wants to be playing heroes like Pharah/Hanzo/Junkrat in one DPS role, and Mei in the other. Basically speaking you want one high damage throughput hero and then Mei. So Torb could fit in there if you’re worried about dive as well etc etc. But Mei is critical, because her ult and more importantly her walls are both amazing at contesting rush comps. Splitting them off in chokes means that you can separate the players from supporting eachother with healing/defensive cooldowns making finding kills easier. And Mei’s ult forces players off the point, which covers one of a poke comp’s biggest weakness. From there it’s up to the rest of her team to use their damage or other abilities like Ana nade/Orisa pull to slow down the rush team, and eventually crush them with overwhelming damage. Notably crushing Rein shield means that the rush team is instantly under crazy pressure as all other defensive tools need to be used quickly. So in this matchup the rush team may look to use Symm to bypass dangerous areas of the map where they may normally get spammed, in which case the poke team will need to quickly break the teleporter. Overall when defending vs a rush comp the poke comp should feel good, as long as the poke team has space to concede on the objective. But if it’s 99% on KOTH, one tick to go on 2cp, or 1 meter left on payload, the poke team needs to find kills quickly before their tanks which have very little support are overwhelmed on the objective. The poke into rush matchup is about buying time for your DPS to do their thing, without losing your tanks or having your backline run on. For a historical note, the reason goats was able to be so dominant is that the strongest theoretical counter in poke didn’t work because there was nearly infinite tank/healing resources with 3 tanks and 3 supports (also 2k hp rein shield LUL). But as this is no longer the case in role lock, poke into rush is very viable once again although harder with the Orisa/Bap/Hanzo damage nerfs. But again, in weeks with Lucio banned expect to see poke as rush is not a viable comp.

Against dive poke plays very similarly to how it plays vs rush. Where your goal is to pressure tanks and keep your backline away at a safe distance. However the tricky part becomes positioning because of the mobility of a dive comp. So your frontline needs to hold space far forward to force the dive to be at max range/deny the most flank angles, while you put as much damage into the dive tanks as possible. It’s very much winnable for the poke team, especially if they have Pharah which means Pharah/Mercy are two not diveable targets. But if the poke team has things like Zen/Widow, then the positioning becomes very hard as they are much more easily diveable targets. So in the dive vs poke matchup it really comes down to what heroes the poke comp has to determine who the matchup is easier for.

To summarize, poke comps are very versatile. Especially with Orisa in the frontline the comp can swap DPS and supports to react to the enemy comp quite easily while still maintaining the goal of holding space and buying time for it’s DPS to find the kills, either through popping off on snipers, or through grinding down tanks with damage. And when the cards are dealt, the poke comp has lots of room to clutch fights by flanking and picking people off to even up a 5v6. Expect to see poke comps get played in OWL on not KOTH map types, as they can very easily have heroes swapped to match up favorably against many comps. Except for weeks where Orisa is removed, as the old school Winston style of poke comps is not quite as versatile.

Anti-dive:

Realistically anti-dive is the most niche comp in the game. Blind picking anti-dive requires you to have very good scouting on your enemy team, as you lose every matchup that isn’t vs dive. The ultimate goal of anti-dive is literally just to survive the dive, and win the extended fight with superior defensive/healing cooldowns. The real strength of anti-dive is that swapping to anti-dive from both rush and poke is fairly easy, as it’s just a couple of heroes. Which should be noted, is another theoretical downside for dive.

The heroes generally found in this style of comp (per role) are:

MT: Orisa, Rein

OT: Dva, Sigma, Hog (even though he’s shit now)

Hitscan: McCree, Mei, Sombra

Flex: Mei, Torb, Sombra

Flex support: Bap, Ana, Moira

Main support: Lucio, Mercy, Brig

If you’re playing an anti-dive mirror, swap to poke. You win with more damage.

If you’re playing anti-dive vs rush, swap to poke. You can’t contest point vs rush, and don’t have the damage to grind them out. So go poke.

If you’re playing anti-dive vs poke, swap to poke. (sensing a theme here?) You have less damage than them, and not enough resources to sit on point. So go poke.

You managed to pick anti-dive into dive! Congrats! Your goal is to move to the objective or hold space as 6, and tank the dive together. Use your defensive cooldowns like matrix to eat the dive team’s Ana nades. Use your CC from Orisa pull/Sigma rock/Flashbang/Hack/Mei freeze/Brig stun to lock down a tank and blow them up before they can escape, or punish DPS who get greedy. You lose if you split up, or if you waste cooldowns. Ultimately it’s on the dive team to win this matchup, and the way that dive wins it is by forcing a chaotic fight. Using Primal Rage to split up the formation, having Tracer come from off angle to split the anti-dive team’s attention etc. So a disciplined team on anti-dive should be able to beat out a dive team more often than not.

To summarize overall:

I want to highlight that this is all independent of hero balance. For example if Tracer did 50 damage a bullet you would always play dive. That’s a silly example, but I think you get the point. That sometimes a comp can win a bad matchup, or win a skill matchup in a 75/25 type ratio because the heroes it uses are too strong. So don’t use this information as something you blindly follow as law, but as a framework to understand what teams are trying to do by picking different styles of comps now that we have hero pools and it’s not always the same comp mirrors.

As the season goes on, this is the framework in which I will be evaluating which comps are strong week to week. And how I will judge which teams in OWL are making the “smart” calls week to week with each different hero pool.