I formally nominate this week for “Strangest week in OWL thus far.”

This isn’t really because of the Shock though. The Shock did what they had been doing for most of Stage Two, although it looked so much better this week, thanks in no small part to the OWL debut of Moth. Moth came in as somewhat of an unknown name, but many people who had been watching him play for a while had good things to say about. The phrase “best ladder/T2 shotcaller” was one that was thrown around by multiple people. This is something that the Shock needed, as coordination has been a problem since day one. We’ve been over the Shock’s split dive strategy a lot at this point, and you could make an argument that Dhak was a big reason why it wasn’t working very well. With Moth in the equation, things looked a whole lot better

I mean, I say that, but the London game was at times pretty ugly. Getting full-held on Volskaya wasn’t a good way to start. The Shock have actually been pretty good on Assault this Stage, so this is somewhat surprising. Nepal wasn’t close either. Neither of these maps were particularly notable, aside from Profit and Hooreg running a double sniper variation of the Wounded Moose Anti-Dive composition on Nepal Sanctum (This is clearly a thing that is working in scrims, as the Shock would proceed to run this composition against the Outlaws on the same map).

Hollywood was probably the most notable map of this series. In what can only be described as a “clusterfuck” the Shock full held London before taking the 60% of the point that they needed. London began with one of the weirdest compositions I’ve ever seen in OWL, coming out with the age old Quick Play “No main tank with Hanzo” composition. To absolutely no one’s surprise this didn’t work at all, and the Spitfire wasted about 1:45 on this Frankenstein’s Monster of a team comp before swapping to a more traditional Triple Tank. Interestingly, they stuck with a Lucio/Zen healer duo instead of opting for a Moira. This had a little more success, and they might have actually taken the point if they had been on this the whole time. The Shock then ran a normal Triple Tank and took the point. Route 66 went back to kinda boring, with the exception of Profit who ran rampant for the entire map.

Aside from the aforementioned weird team comps, this wasn’t a super notable game going either way. Moth made his debut and did fine, but it was clear that there were some growing pains. Nevix also had one of his worst series of the season. Danteh looked great as usual, and Nomy had a decent series, but overall things didn’t look all that great.

If you take this series at face value and do not look at any of the other games that were happening, you might think that the Shock had no chance against the Outlaws.

However, there was more to this than meets the eye. While this series didn’t surprise anyone, the rest of the league was being plagued with unexpected results and upset upon upset. The Mayhem (Who were previously considered to be lower-mid tier at best) have suddenly turned it on over the past two weeks, even beating the Valiant and very nearly beating a resurgent Gladiators squad. On the other hand, both the Valiant and the Outlaws have been in a nosedive, getting smacked around by teams that neither should have any business losing to.

After having a very good Stage One, the Outlaws have gone ice cold in Stage Two. Some of this can be attributed to a shifting meta that has placed less emphasis on heroes that the Outlaws were good at using (See: Junkrat), but quite a bit of it also has to do with teams figuring out how to exploit Houston’s weaknesses, the most crippling of which is the lack of a top-tier Tracer player. Literally every other team in the league has a top tier Tracer. Houston doesn’t, and it’s beginning to hurt them.

This was just a case of the Shock taking care of business. Houston didn’t look good. Their Tracer play wasn’t good, their coordination was off, and players like Linkzr didn’t look like their Stage One selves. Meanwhile, the Shock all looked very good. Moth in particular was a standout performer, with excellent positioning for the entire game. Danteh looked great, Nevix recovered, and Nomy finally had what I would call a “very good match”; one of his first of the season. There improvements were obvious on Gibraltar in particular. Previously, the Shock had had some issues on Gibraltar. Dhak on Mercy was one of the main problems. Moth’s Mercy is light years ahead of Dhak’s, and it showed. This honestly wasn’t the best map for the Shock overall (Both Babybay and Nomy looked mediocre at best) but Moth was there to pick up the slack where Dhak wouldn’t have been able to.

This was the hardest week to rank yet. We had extensive discussions on who to rank where on the Power Rankings Discord, and after about an hour of non-stop arguing no one agreed on anything. The especially difficult bit to rank was 6–10, with the Shock, Mayhem, Uprising, Outlaws, and Valiant all vying for the top spot in mid-tier. I ended up with this:

6. Shock

7. Mayhem

8. Uprising

9. Valiant

10. Outlaws

With the huge caveat that the gap between 5th and 6th was massive. If I had a choice this week, I would leave 6th and 7th blank, put Shock eighth, Mayhem ninth, etc. and then add 13th and 14th to the end to make room for everyone.

The only thing all the power ranking people did agree on was that none of these teams really deserved sixth place. It wasn’t a matter of who was better out of this group; it was a matter of “Who is the least worse”.

I put the Shock sixth here because I just couldn’t rank any other of these teams sixth. Mayhem have had some good showings as of late, but they are still 2–6, and putting them even this high up is a tough pill to swallow. Boston has a better record, but Mayhem have looked better against better teams. Boston’s Stage Two has so far consisted of beating up on shitty teams for their lunch money and then spectacularly collapsing any time they face a halfway decent team. Meanwhile the Outlaws and the Valiant are both in Top Gun Flat Spin mode, and they haven’t shown any sign of slowing down. Realistically though, you could randomly rescramble these teams and still make a case for whatever order comes up. This week was crazy.

Speaking of mid-tier, the Shock play the Mayhem and the Uprising next week. The Mayhem are on a hot streak and should definitely not be underestimated. The Uprising haven’t looked as good as they did in Stage One, but they haven’t looked all that bad either. I would personally give the Shock a slight advantage in both of these games (especially now that SINATRAA IS COMING ABOARD!!!!) but I wouldn’t at all be surprised if they lose either. Next week is full of intriguing games and should be a must watch for even the causal OWL observer. Hopefully the Shock can pull these games out and finish the Stage with a .500 record in the books.