Overwatch - Competitive Season 2 Confessional

Confession: I blew my placement matches so badly that I ended in silver, despite having played at a "platinum" level in season 1.

Since my horrible placements, I have managed to claw myself up into the gold ranks and I must say that even when just crossing the threshold from silver to gold, there is an immediate jump in the quality of communication and teamwork. Silver felt like banging my head repeatedly on a wall and having to rely on myself more often than not to get the job done and progress. In gold, at
least so far, my teammates take a lot of that pressure off of me and as a result I have had way better individual performances and team performances all while feeling far more relaxed. I felt this way in Season 1 as well when comparing low-40 rankings to upper-40 and mid-50 rankings.

Second confession: I play with no sound so I rely a lot on my teammates "group up", "need healing" and "ultimate status" messages. I know I should play with sound, but for a variety of annoying personal reasons I can't. Wish I could.

Playing with no sound isn't as hard as it sounds. Hearthstone has so many visual cues that it is still possible to play fairly well without hearing "It's High Noon!", "Die Die Die!" or "Justice Rains from Above."

I used to play a lot of competitive CS 1.6 in my younger days and I miss having team voice communication because it really does add a lot to your ability to coordinate and prepare for enemy maneuvers and tactics. I know that playing with no sound is likely to limit me from ever achieving the highest skill rating categories in Overwatch, but I am still improving, so we'll see where my skill caps out.

Third confession: I play Reaper more than I should. Reaper gets a bad rap as an "easy" hero to play because of "ult to win", but I feel like that is misleading for a couple of reasons. First, the player base is getting better at optimal teamwork and more rarely lays down and lets a Reaper get a 4+ ult kill. Second, more players are figuring out how to save their own ults or other counters to deal with Reaper sneak attacks. Whether it be Zenyatta or Lució's ult, D.Va or Reinhardt's shield, or Ana's sleep dart, there are more ways to handle Reaper effectively than ever before. It's also extremely frustrating to actually pull off a great ult and then have Mercy just resurrect her fallen allies (always kill the Mercy!).

There is also a fairly large skill cap to playing Reaper effectively. People may think it is just point and shoot, but there is actually a fair amount of positioning, timing and mobility involved with flanking well. There's nothing worse than being caught alone behind enemy lines with your pants down and yet Reaper is often at his best when taking down the healers and other squishies in the back line. Since Reaper is so often behind enemy lines, it is super important to get in, get the job done and get out without dying. That last part is the hard part even with Reaper's Wraith Form ability. If you don't judge everything just right, you will get focused down as soon as the invulnerability shroud ends because unlike Genji or Tracer who have built-in escape plans, Reaper moves quite slowly in Wraith Form and his Shadowstep ability takes too long to pull off before dying. Typically, you want to Shadowstep behind their lines, kill as many as you can safely and then Wraith Form out of there or find some place to hide, heal and reload, but it doesn't always work.

Final Confession: I am terrible at playing every single one of the tank heroes with the exception of D.Va, with whom I am mediocre. If I am forced to take a tank other than D.Va, I will likely be helping my team lose. If you're ever on my team and this happens, I am sorry in advance.

If you'd like to watch me play Overwatch (or Hearthstone), you can occasionally catch me on Twitch at: https://www.twitch.tv/fangstruth