Limiting to One hero per team.

[Boricha]

Eh, stacking heroes just feels like a gimmick to me. I've seen six bastions on defense and stuff, but it doesn't usually work if you have a team that knows how to combat it and is willing to character swap. Me and a bunch of friends did have a lot of fun winning games in under a minute with 6 Tracers, just running right past the enemy team.

[Deleted]

Maybe they should limit to one hero only when you Premade! Because this won't happen in PuGs.

Premade always ruins everything.

Idk mate. I've managed to convince full pugs to do: Full Roadhog, full D.Va, full Lúcio, full Winston and full Pharah. No two of those were the same pug.

You just gotta work on your convincing skills.

[Zoidberg747]

What people don't realize is they tried this in a tournament and it absolutely killed any character variety. If you limit heroes then the teams will 99% of the time consist of Reinhardt, Lucio, Mercy, Winston, McCree, and maybe one flex. When there isnt a hero limit you see much more interesting comps. A 2 hero limit would be lame too because seeing 4-6 of the same hero at a high level is extremely rare but when it does happen it is hilarious(with the exception of 6 tracers to keep the payload stopped but thats more of a problem with the mode than the comp itself. Maybe make a mode that can do this but I really hate that people want to kill that one thing in competitive Overwatch that makes it unique.

Yep there should be a rule like this. I have seen 4 Bastions, 4 soldier 76, 5 Winstons, 6 Dvas. Its really annoying and sometimes they do work. 6 Dvas attacking control map Japan, they just fly in and pop their defensives and after you kill mech gotta kill littles Dvas by the time you finish killing all, they got 50% objective done. On their 2nd attack they win. Pure mindless zerg.

All those comps have hella easy counters. All the Bastions can be taken out by ONE good Pharah or Widow, Or if you want to cheese yourself go 4 genjis.

Soldier 76's can be taken out with a couple of Winstons.

Winstons can be taken out by one or two Bastions.

D. Vas can be taken out easily by any DPS hero(McCree, Bastion) and then you can have a Winston to mop up the non-meched ones. If you have a good widow you can mop that whole comp because a good one can headshot the D. Va as she exits the bot.

There is no excuse for losing to 4-6 hero comps other than you weren't playing as a team and didn't know the proper counters.

[Deleted]

Definitely a good thing to limit 1 char per team. Facing like 3 tracers is just complete cancer and anti-fun

[Raugnaut]

When you see in TF2 - 2 demoman, 2 rocket soldiers and 2 snipers, no one bitches. You see 2 junkrats, 2 pharahs and 2 widowmakers in OW and people lose their damn minds. Why? Because in tf they are presented as generic guys, in OW they are unique characters.... in your brain anyways. Some people just can't seem to grasp the ideal of a unique character being in the same game with a duplicate in OW.

Team Fortress also has SIGNIFICANTLY less playable characters (9), whereas Overwatch has 21, and is very likely to continually add more throughout the game's life.

THATS why its a problem. You can find a counter to pretty much ANY combination of heroes in Overwatch, and theres combinations that just aren't effective. However, in a game whose main feature is the diversity in "unique" heroes, causing ppl to go multiple copies of one hero is boring, and detracts from the game.

[CaptainV]

I personally have fun stacking heroes now and then, but also hate it when we get a team of people blasting us with duplicate ultimates.

Example: D.Va Defense.




I know it's not that hard to deal with, but still it makes the game fun for us and terrible to them.


I think limiting heroes to one per team would fix the issue.

Getting rid of the core reason that Overwatch seperates itself from other MOBA's by allowing you to spam one hero combo's, simple solution is to just make a one hero counter team, or mix them out a bit to counter a single hero.

No, locking it out is a bad idea, in ranked id almost accept it "in" ranked, but thats only because people will actually 'try' to get the best stats, but outside, hell no.

[Vurdah]

No, cheese is a legitimate thing. It just refers to a strategy that is overpowering UNLESS you do something to directly counter it (it's called cheese because its a "cheesy tactic"). Having 3 Winstons, a Reinhardt and a Bastion on a payload escort is cheesy because a random team isn't likely to coordinate to counter you. This isn't really a thing in professional play though, you're right there. If pros all working together can't figure out how to switch to counter certain things, that's a learn to play issue. Though to be fair I don't think a lot of people realize that the heroes aren't necessarily overpowered, but that certain maps and situations play really well to their strengths.

All you need to counter the comp you listed is a good mie and for the team to kill the enemy while immobile.

I really don't get why people have such a hard time countering some of these comps. Like double bastion. A widowmaker and reaper can counter them, hell a good reaper can counter both of them.

If a comp is playing mostly tanks then they have a lot less damage on the field and tanks like winston and reinhardt can be countered by reaper and pharah.

I think a lot of people haven't been able to play enough of the game to understand the counters to classes and class stacking.

[themaelstorm]

The mindset of everyone is still revolving around MOBAs.

This is a different game. In MOBAs it makes sense because you pick before the game and stick with whatever you have. In OW however, you can swap characters. Sorry, I'm gonna correct that, you SHOULD swap characters.
Character swapping is not some side feature that you may use one day. It is integral. You are expected to utilize it, just as you are expected to utilize wards in a 3laner mobas or map objectives in HotS.

With this in mind, multi characters should never be an issue. Every character has weaknesses. If someone stacks characters, stack their counters.

If you can't deal with 2-3 heroes of the same kind, you are being out played strategically (they are making use of the game situation and comp better than you) or tactically (they are playing better in combat) or performance-wise (they have better aim, reflexes etc).

And the more than 2 of the same hero the enemy has, the more they setting themselves up for being countered.


That being said, I see 2 potential issues:
There may be some situations where a certain stacking strategy is seriously OP.
Unless the amount of these are getting high, the solution would be to address that issue on its own.

E-sports-wise, it may kill the enjoyment of observers.
This actually has no other solution I guess.

In both cases, I would say that if there will be a limit, it should definitely be at least 2.


My honest opinion, after playing the game a lot for months, is that this is yet another fad/bandwagon that eeeeveryone jumps on without having backed-up opinions. These happen everywhere and the more people try to justify it, the more reasons others find to jump on it and the counter arguments lose power just because there aren't enough people backing them up.

But I trust Blizzard will follow the data and make the right choice, regardless of who yells more.

[Deleted]

Overwatch's main mechanic is hero switching. If you refuse to use it then that's your problem.

[Deleted]

The mindset of everyone is still revolving around MOBAs.

This is a different game. In MOBAs it makes sense because you pick before the game and stick with whatever you have. In OW however, you can swap characters. Sorry, I'm gonna correct that, you SHOULD swap characters.
Character swapping is not some side feature that you may use one day. It is integral. You are expected to utilize it, just as you are expected to utilize wards in a 3laner mobas or map objectives in HotS.

With this in mind, multi characters should never be an issue. Every character has weaknesses. If someone stacks characters, stack their counters.

If you can't deal with 2-3 heroes of the same kind, you are being out played strategically (they are making use of the game situation and comp better than you) or tactically (they are playing better in combat) or performance-wise (they have better aim, reflexes etc).

And the more than 2 of the same hero the enemy has, the more they setting themselves up for being countered.


That being said, I see 2 potential issues:
There may be some situations where a certain stacking strategy is seriously OP.
Unless the amount of these are getting high, the solution would be to address that issue on its own.

E-sports-wise, it may kill the enjoyment of observers.
This actually has no other solution I guess.

In both cases, I would say that if there will be a limit, it should definitely be at least 2.


My honest opinion, after playing the game a lot for months, is that this is yet another fad/bandwagon that eeeeveryone jumps on without having backed-up opinions. These happen everywhere and the more people try to justify it, the more reasons others find to jump on it and the counter arguments lose power just because there aren't enough people backing them up.

But I trust Blizzard will follow the data and make the right choice, regardless of who yells more.

A limit of 2 changes nothing, the comps that were problematic were always duplicates of two. Also we are talking competitive gaming here, you said you played a lot of months, did you play in a 6 man? scrimming or participating in tournaments? cause i can tell you good teams running cheese comps is something completely different than queuing with 2-3 friends and playing competitive mode and meeting other 3-4 people stacks with a couple of randoms. Since this was beta this wasn't so prevalent because of the limited player base, but it will get more obvious once launch hits and a lot of good players start playing and watching tournaments to utilize their strategies i think. We'll see what happens then, so far blizz nerfed every character that got stacked in one way or another, but i think either in tournament rules or in competitive mode a character limit of 1 will be seen sooner or later

[Deleted]

What people don't realize is they tried this in a tournament and it absolutely killed any character variety. If you limit heroes then the teams will 99% of the time consist of Reinhardt, Lucio, Mercy, Winston, McCree, and maybe one flex. When there isnt a hero limit you see much more interesting comps. A 2 hero limit would be lame too because seeing 4-6 of the same hero at a high level is extremely rare but when it does happen it is hilarious(with the exception of 6 tracers to keep the payload stopped but thats more of a problem with the mode than the comp itself. Maybe make a mode that can do this but I really hate that people want to kill that one thing in competitive Overwatch that makes it unique.



All those comps have hella easy counters. All the Bastions can be taken out by ONE good Pharah or Widow, Or if you want to cheese yourself go 4 genjis.

Soldier 76's can be taken out with a couple of Winstons.

Winstons can be taken out by one or two Bastions.

D. Vas can be taken out easily by any DPS hero(McCree, Bastion) and then you can have a Winston to mop up the non-meched ones. If you have a good widow you can mop that whole comp because a good one can headshot the D. Va as she exits the bot.

There is no excuse for losing to 4-6 hero comps other than you weren't playing as a team and didn't know the proper counters.

If they can be countered so easily then why do you want to play multi of the same hero? And no in my opinion they cant always be countered so easily think about end of payload maps 2-3 Bastions guarded by Reinhardts is very difficult to get through, before you say "well you should just play the counter heroes". Even to change heroes you have to die first and end of payload map attackers have to walk a long way to the fight then defenders. Of course there are counter to everything but time also matters, if it takes you more than 1 min to kill the Bastions guarded by Reinhardt then you will lose the game. Snipers cant get through Reinhardt's shield so you have to go with offensive heroes.

About the Dva team it was a control map, when we chose heroes we didn't know enemy team is getting 6 DVA. We killed them all but the amount of time they stayed in objective gave them 50% completion. These comps are easy to counter when you know which heroes they are playing and in long fights these "cheese comps" don't really work but in short fights like control maps or end of payload map they do work.

I think it would be a decent rule to change one hero per group. A lot of heroes are similar so it shouldn't be a problem, if you want to hold a choke point instead of getting 2 Bastion you will get 1 Bastion and 1 Turret. Instead of 2 Reinhardts get 1 Reinhardt and 1 Zarya.

[The_Butcher]

I think limiting heroes to one per team would fix the issue.

When they add more Variety for the heroes, absolutely.

For Now: defense only picks the dwarf or bastion it seems.

[themaelstorm]

A limit of 2 changes nothing, the comps that were problematic were always duplicates of two. Also we are talking competitive gaming here, you said you played a lot of months, did you play in a 6 man? scrimming or participating in tournaments? cause i can tell you good teams running cheese comps is something completely different than queuing with 2-3 friends and playing competitive mode and meeting other 3-4 people stacks with a couple of randoms. Since this was beta this wasn't so prevalent because of the limited player base, but it will get more obvious once launch hits and a lot of good players start playing and watching tournaments to utilize their strategies i think. We'll see what happens then, so far blizz nerfed every character that got stacked in one way or another, but i think either in tournament rules or in competitive mode a character limit of 1 will be seen sooner or later

I've played 6 man, I've done stackings, I've played against stacking.
Against teams or pugs, with teams or pugs.

That will be even less relative after launch since the match maker will try to match teams vs teams, i.e. you'll be able to match their level of organization.

I'll be very disappointed if limit of 1 enters. Plus, how will it work when people want to switch to an existing character? then that guy has to sacrifice himself or the other one needs to wait. See how un-intuitive it is to gameplay.

The thing for me is that this will boil down to who plays better unless there are REALLY broken comps and I haven't seen any.

If a comp is POWERFUL, that doesn't mean it needs a nerf, it means people found a good use of game mechanics. What if someone finds out a way to make a 6-hero combo, with each different heroes that is immensely powerful? Are you gonna nerf that or leave it because it's 1 per team?

RH Bastion is a good example. It can be VERY powerful and VERY Hard to counter when these two (even worse with a 3rd person added) coordinate well. Don't get me wrong, I'm on the "no its not OP" side of arguments, but it's obvious that the comp is rather simple set-up and the gains are really high. Should it be nerfed? For me it's not a problem, but I'd understand it.

My point is, if it's about power of comp, then it should be about power of comp. If it's game-breaking, you should change it.

The question is, is it Stacking itself that breaks the game or certain comps? If it's the former or a majority of stacking, then it should be addressed. If it's the latter, those comps should be addressed.

Can someone count 5 super powerful, very hard to counter stack comps?

[Deleted]

I've played 6 man, I've done stackings, I've played against stacking.
Against teams or pugs, with teams or pugs.

That will be even less relative after launch since the match maker will try to match teams vs teams, i.e. you'll be able to match their level of organization.

This was already done fairly well in the beta, that's what my actual point was, since i played 90% of the time with a 6 man stack I played nearly exclusively against other 6 man stacks. In those cases both teams were pretty well organized and you felt a huge difference wheter they ran something they came up with on their own or something that was known to be OP in tournaments. Even with the same team switching it up between games (we usually encountered the same teams quite often due to few 6stacks being up in the high mmr range).

I'll be very disappointed if limit of 1 enters. Plus, how will it work when people want to switch to an existing character? then that guy has to sacrifice himself or the other one needs to wait. See how un-intuitive it is to gameplay.

That is my only real concern with the limit 1 thing, hero changing has to still be intuitive, maybe two of the same hero can exist for a period of time, but as soon as one of them dies he has to switch off or something of the sorts (yes i do see the inherent problem with that, but it was just a quick food for thought thing.)

The thing for me is that this will boil down to who plays better unless there are REALLY broken comps and I haven't seen any.

Come on. winston stacks pre shield nerf and the double genji zen comps pre zenyatta change were completely broken and this is not just according to me but to pretty much all the competitive players that i have seen comment on this. I mean the nerfs there happened for a reason and in case of winston it was after a day iirc. The problem here also being that if you HAVE to run mirror comps (and that was the case during the double genji double ze phase) to beat the enemies it gets pretty shit to play and pretty stale to watch. The other downside is that nerfing those heroes changed their gameplay completely, which would probably have not been necessary if duplicates weren't possible. I've seen teams run tripple zen, double tracer (instead of genji), symmetra during that time because they had two extremely good tracers, the others pretty much just chilled behind while two players did everything due to the synergies, if you can only have 1 zen and 1 tracer that would have gone a completely different way.

If a comp is POWERFUL, that doesn't mean it needs a nerf, it means people found a good use of game mechanics. What if someone finds out a way to make a 6-hero combo, with each different heroes that is immensely powerful? Are you gonna nerf that or leave it because it's 1 per team?

This is exactly what happened though, every cheese comp that the competitive scene found so far got nerfed hard in the coming days/weeks, winston barrier, zen orb, genji healthpool (this was reverted after they saw that without the orb he doesn't need another nerf) as examples.

IF that would be possible people would have done it already, there just are certain synergies and hero abilities that makes stacking them better (double mcree, double widow as of the current meta come to mind). Having to have one of every hero only would get people to play heroes that are a lot less used because they would have to come up with new strategies and people would play heroes they are more comfortable with over heroes that have some kind of synergy they need to abuse.

RH Bastion is a good example. It can be VERY powerful and VERY Hard to counter when these two (even worse with a 3rd person added) coordinate well. Don't get me wrong, I'm on the "no its not OP" side of arguments, but it's obvious that the comp is rather simple set-up and the gains are really high. Should it be nerfed? For me it's not a problem, but I'd understand it.

I have watched the bastion plays during the last gosu finals (due to a discussion in another thread) and they got countered extremely easily on every occassion but one, even when running double reinhardt to protect him so this will definitely not get nerfed, bastions main use is against uncoordinated opponents, which is why it doesn't merrit a notion if talking about competitive (since most of that will be 6stack vs 6stack in the higher ratings).

My point is, if it's about power of comp, then it should be about power of comp. If it's game-breaking, you should change it.

The question is, is it Stacking itself that breaks the game or certain comps? If it's the former or a majority of stacking, then it should be addressed. If it's the latter, those comps should be addressed.

This is what blizzard is doing atm, they nerf whatever stacking is OP atm, but that leads to it's own inherent problem of those heroes not getting picked up nearly as much or at all after the nerf because their use diminishes from being OP to being sub par, if you can't pick up two of it anymore and there is another option then you sure as hell won't run one of them. As an example mercy ulti nerf lead to mercy not being picked up for around 1 month or so and everyone running double zenyatta, the zen nerf now lead to a lot of teams running double lucio or lucio/mercy. zen is getting picked up more again because of the unique toolkit but still the question is would this have been at all necessary if they couldn't stack them in the first place. (mercy nerf was needed for other reasons though and was not a stacking issue).

Can someone count 5 super powerful, very hard to counter stack comps?[/QUOTE]

You mean as in 5 examples? I know of two off the top of my head, but those dominated everything completely until the responding heroes got nerfed, if i look a bit into the gosu replays i'm pretty sure i can come up with some more. In my opinion it's not really how many were there but how they got handled. Balancing around 1 of each hero per team is a lot easier than around stacking and nerfing every hero that stacks well often leads to that hero not being picked up a lot afterwards.

As a last point its a lot more interesting to watch 6 different heroes play (even if they do mirrorplay) than 2x2x2 (which often also ends in mirrorplay anyway).

[Zoidberg747]

If they can be countered so easily then why do you want to play multi of the same hero? And no in my opinion they cant always be countered so easily think about end of payload maps 2-3 Bastions guarded by Reinhardts is very difficult to get through, before you say "well you should just play the counter heroes". Even to change heroes you have to die first and end of payload map attackers have to walk a long way to the fight then defenders. Of course there are counter to everything but time also matters, if it takes you more than 1 min to kill the Bastions guarded by Reinhardt then you will lose the game. Snipers cant get through Reinhardt's shield so you have to go with offensive heroes.

About the Dva team it was a control map, when we chose heroes we didn't know enemy team is getting 6 DVA. We killed them all but the amount of time they stayed in objective gave them 50% completion. These comps are easy to counter when you know which heroes they are playing and in long fights these "cheese comps" don't really work but in short fights like control maps or end of payload map they do work.

I think it would be a decent rule to change one hero per group. A lot of heroes are similar so it shouldn't be a problem, if you want to hold a choke point instead of getting 2 Bastion you will get 1 Bastion and 1 Turret. Instead of 2 Reinhardts get 1 Reinhardt and 1 Zarya.

Thats how the game was meant to be played. They picked the right comp for the situation and your team didn't have enough time left to counter, so you lost. Thats all it really comes down to.

The second example is your team getting blindsided by a weird comp, it happens. But if you adjusted properly you could take the point and then they would have to respond, its all part of the game.

Blizzard has been very clear that these types of rules should be left to custom games and that this was how the game was intended to be played. Whether the eSports scene listens to them remains to be seen but I tend to agree with their stance that the game is more interesting with multi hero comps.

Those characters are similar but have different utility. For example, maybe you need 2 Winstons to deal with a really good Widow(She headshots one whenever he tries to jump to her without using the "butt jump"). A D.va couldnt provide the same utility because although she could get in, she doesn't have the mobility or the damage to take out the Widow once the Winston is dead.

[Deleted]

Thats how the game was meant to be played. They picked the right comp for the situation and your team didn't have enough time left to counter, so you lost. Thats all it really comes down to.

The second example is your team getting blindsided by a weird comp, it happens. But if you adjusted properly you could take the point and then they would have to respond, its all part of the game.

Blizzard has been very clear that these types of rules should be left to custom games and that this was how the game was intended to be played. Whether the eSports scene listens to them remains to be seen but I tend to agree with their stance that the game is more interesting with multi hero comps.

Those characters are similar but have different utility. For example, maybe you need 2 Winstons to deal with a really good Widow(She headshots one whenever he tries to jump to her without using the "butt jump"). A D.va couldnt provide the same utility because although she could get in, she doesn't have the mobility or the damage to take out the Widow once the Winston is dead.

Yeah you make valid points. we will understand more when the game comes out on 24th. As more people starts playing and we will see what are the rules for ranked play. Also as people learn more about each hero and maps countering cheesy comps will become easier, we will know what comp to expect in which map.

[Chingylol]

But it sucks to never get to play your favorite character because there's always someone else that wants to play it. I think that will cause a lot of joining and leaving of players in your game.

Pretty much. Anytime you join a game there's ALWAYS a Soldier 76 and usually a Lucio/Rein. Which means you would never be able to play those characters unless it was a fresh game and you're quicker then the other person to select the character.

[Mormolyce]

Pretty much. Anytime you join a game there's ALWAYS a Soldier 76 and usually a Lucio/Rein. Which means you would never be able to play those characters unless it was a fresh game and you're quicker then the other person to select the character.

I did not have that experience. Didn't see that many S76s and Reinhardt may have been common but tanks were regularly picked last anyway. Was always surprised how many people went Mercy, especially after it went to open beta. Pssst... Lucio is the best support :P

[Lochton]

I personally have fun stacking heroes now and then, but also hate it when we get a team of people blasting us with duplicate ultimates.

Example: D.Va Defense.




I know it's not that hard to deal with, but still it makes the game fun for us and terrible to them.


I think limiting heroes to one per team would fix the issue.

Nah, I would say the limit should be 2 of one kind at maximum.

[Mormolyce]

The game does not need limits on hero duplicates, that's part of how the game works, if 3+ of a hero is beating you then you need to get better at countering that hero because that actually creates a significant weakness in their team.