Hi again everyone! Here with another post about the past week of Overwatch League in these troubled times. Let’s get started!
Talent and Production
Not much to speak about in this week on the production end. Everything appears to have been running as smoothly as possible.
There was this funny bit from the Korean broadcast however:
Another awkward thing is whenever casters try to do a sponsor ‘read’ in a hamfisted way. Looking at you, Teamspeak and Xfinity mentions.
The Meta
So week 11’s hero bans were:
- Brigitte
- Reinhardt
- Widowmaker
- McCree
With two powerful hitscan heroes gone from the game we saw the return of the Mei/Reaper deathball compositions. A couple of the Chinese teams decided to opt into the Pharah duels instead (Shanghai and Chengdu) which was interesting to see.
The LA Valiant opted to throw a wrench in the works and did the following: Ashe/Tracer/Orisa/D.Va/Ana/Lucio. It was good to see Ashe being played again and to see Bob actually do something.
The Games
There are two games to talk about. If you have picked up the pattern from my previous posts the games I usually pick are 3-2 games and this week is no exception.
Los Angeles Gladiators vs Los Angeles Valiant
Going into this I was expecting a good match as the battle for LA games always bring a certain energy to them. Ho boy did it not disappoint. As I mentioned earlier the Valiant decided to opt into a decidedly non-meta composition with the Ashe/Tracer while the Gladiators played the Reaper/Mei deathball meta.
The first half looked like the Gladiators were gonna walk away with the 3-0 victory but the Valiant were able to bring it back in the second half. Ultimately the tiebreaker match resulted in a victory for the Gladiators and the Valiant were unable to complete the reverse sweep but I would like to thank them for a very fun match to watch.
Dallas Fuel vs San Francisco Shock
This one I was not expecting a close series. I thought this was going to a 3-0 clean sweep for the shock but Dallas came out strong with the win on the first map. It was a very back and forth series. I really wanted Dallas to win this particular series in the tiebreaker but it was not to be. Ultimately the Shock were able to pull together a win but they had to fight for this one.
The Doha/Decay DPS line up is looking scary and Note on the Sigma had an excellent performance as well. Looking forward to seeing what Dallas can do next.
Miscellaneous tidbits
The Toronto Defiant get another win against a weak Boston Uprising. The Uprising are down to a six man squad with no backups as Swimmer retired from competitive Overwatch and quit the team. We take these wins I guess but I don’t feel too great about it.
The Shanghai Dragons brought out the DPS monster that is DDing on the Pharah this week against the Chengdu Hunters and it was a delight to see the DDing and Jinmu Pharah duels. I really want to see the Chinese teams play against the other teams in the league, specifically the Dragons to see where they stack up.
Concluding thoughts and next week’s hero bans
This week of OWL felt like it went by real quick. The Western teams playing on Thursday and Friday meant that my weekends felt emptier than usual. I only had the VODs for the Chinese games to watch and those games weren’t all that interesting other than the bit of chaos that Chengdu brings into the proceedings. I don’t mind this kind of schedule however, it frees up most of my weekends for me to do other things.
Next week’s hero bans were announced after the Flash Ops Echo Community Showdown event that happened on Sunday. Announced by Pixie and AVRL this week.
So next week’s hero bans:
- Echo
- Tracer
- Orisa
- Moira
Echo being banned right after she is available is hilarious to me. We will have to wait till the week after next to potentially see Echo being played in OWL. I suspect we will still keep seeing the Mei/Reaper based compositions but I hope that we some more hitscan play now that Widowmaker and McCree are back on the table.
See y’all next week!