terabient

THERE'S SO MUCH OVERWATCH HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND!!!

First: there's a new hero, Ashe (and her ult, Bob) and a new cinematic with McCree

Also, Lucio-oh's will be a real thing come December! (but only in USA orz) I'm kinda upset that the box art isn't an exact replica of the in-game spray, though. >:[

The Overwatch World Cup is also finishing up this weekend. I've really gotten into watching pro Overwatch this year (it helps that I live near Boston, one of the few cities that has an Overwatch League team, and the local fanbase has been very active in organizing viewing events) and I'm really excited to see what kind of compositions and strategies will be pulled out over the weekend. The community is rather split on the state of the game and what the strongest compositions are, and that split is reflected in the top 8 teams: some teams have gone all-in with refining triple tank/triple support comps with others being rather open with their belief that 3tank/3support as it's been played for the last few months is pretty weak. The first day of play was today and just finished up as I started writing this entry, so the pool has already been cut from 8 teams to 4.

US vs UK (UK wins, 3-1)
LOL i'm not even mad that US got served the gentleman's sweep, I didn't have a lot of fondness for most of the players picked for this year's team. (Space, their primary off-tank, is an exception.) I didn't see the whole match but I tuned in for Volskaya and Route 66, and UK was outright better playing just about every composition and role. Kruise, UK's main support player, was unbelievable on Volskaya--there was a moment where he successfully revived his support and then immediately killed the DPS threatening him, and later on killed an ulting Genji as Lucio and then cleaned up the point afterwards lol.

Canada vs France (Canada wins, 3-0)
i didn't get to watch this at all because i had an evening class lol, but in terms of the pros/cons of 3tank/3support...the French team was the most adamant that 3/3 was unstoppable and winning the World Cup would come down to which team to execute it best, and Canada was the most outspoken that it sucks (I think their coach actually has a bet going where he'll donate to something if 3/3 comps win over 50% of fights it's used in?) so France getting steamrolled is already being memed all over twitter and reddit, so. I'll try to watch the replay before tomorrow's game start.

China vs Finland (China wins, 3-0)
Watched all of this match and it was AMAZING even though it was a sweep. China played like no other team in the finals, they used a lot of different compositions, switched often, and had really amazing rotations and positioning that allowed them to combine ults and abilities in effective and creative ways. Their main tank player, Guxue, got the most attention from casters and observers but I think their Ana player, Sky, was the real carry in a lot of moments--like straight up, I don't think China could have rotated and pushed as aggressively as they did if Sky hadn't been plowing heal darts into them at the rate and accuracy he had. His bionades were also pretty clutch, like he was the only Ana using it to do stuff like pump up Transcendence healing and save his team from opposing pushes.

Of the losing teams, Finland looked the most composed. They didn't have a lot of composition variety though, and tended to get bullied into bad/unwinnable situations--different from the US, which often looked lost and made a lot of bad decisions that the UK capitalized on.

i clipped some stuff from this match (links instead of embeds, sorry):
China gets a 4K on Hanamura (fun fact: when Doomfist was first released, casters called the Graviton/Meteor strike combo "Space Jam" or "From Russia with Glove")

China uses Winston to pin Finland in place for a D.va bomb

Australia vs South Korea (SK wins, 3-0)
I watched all of this but it was pretty bad for Australia, except for a few moments on Blizzard World. This match also had the most Torbjorn usage. that's about it.