In a recent interview with Gamespot, Blizzard Principal Designer Scott Mercer revealed that an Overwatch hero limit will soon be coming to competitive games. As Mercer states, “players will not be able to stack more than one of the same hero within a Competitive match.”
This is joyous news for players like myself who hate to face off against six Tracers, even worse, six Torbjörns. These silly strategies shouldn’t work, but players can find success with this “cheese” as a sort of coordination check. It’s easy to counter a squad of, say, Winstons, but if your teammates aren’t willing to switch characters to counter them, the match becomes terribly lopsided. The hero cap made the top of our ways to improve Overwatch, so there’s a lot to love about this decision — even if we have no idea when the limit will come.
While this is exciting news to some, this is a huge change for the burgeoning Overwatch esports scene. Up to now, it’s been quite common to see pairs of heroes as a legitimate competitive strategy, especially to counter an opposing team’s composition. Double Winstons, double Widowmakers and double McCrees are common sights in professional matches. The impending Overwatch hero limit will force pro players to rethink how they approach shutting down opposing heroes. You can expect to see more diverse, but important, character swaps when it comes to countering enemy players.
This also means the Overwatch hero limit will force players to have a deeper pool of familiar heroes to play in a game. Expect some growing pains on the competitive scene when this patch drops. In the long run though, Overwatch esports will be more entertaining to watch.
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