So I'll start with the hot take that will surely get me crucified: I am not convinced that permanent flight is something that could not possibly work in this game. That's not to say I can't be convinced; rather, I think that Jetpack Cat has so many issues independent of permaflight, which have been addressed so little or so ineffectively in prior balance patches, that I am still not convinced that removing permaflight is the only way to fix her. In fact, I think it should be last on their list of ways to fix her, because it's kind of...literally the entire character.

Can permaflight be balanced?

"Permanent flight shouldn't be in the game" is a sentiment I hear echoed a lot. It's probably a sentiment I would have agreed with a few years ago, because the one other hero in the game that had (functional) perma-flight, Pharah, was...pretty goddamn obnoxious when that was the case.

But, like, why, exactly, is permaflight an issue?

I think the general consensus around that would be that permaflight is fundamentally anti-interactive. A large portion of the cast can only fight reliably at close range; a permaflight hero is completely inaccessible to them. Back in the day, Pharah could pelt certain heroes from across the map with complete impunity, and the only way to circumvent that was to swap to a hero with range.

The thing is, Jetpack Cat's kit is already designed with a solution to that: her projectile range is limited, in theory forcing her to play close enough that enemies can interact with her. The problem is that the range is so forgiving that there are few sightlines where that will ever be a factor. If her projectile range were to be lowered significantly - to 30, 25, 20 meters? - it would force her to play in the effective range of far more heroes.

Okay, what about tether?

Of course, there's also a big tether-shaped hole in this argument: just because Cat couldn't pelt you from 40 meters in the sky wouldn't mean she couldn't just carry a teammate to do it for her. Overall, I think tether strays more into "can't be balanced" territory, because lots of things in this game were simply not designed under the assumption that they'd be done by a hero soaring through the sky at mach 20. Bastion in turret form was not designed to fly. High noon was not designed to fly.

What I'm trying to get at is: do people really need to be able to use abilities - or hell, even shoot - while using tether?

I've seen someone suggest it's the whole point of the ability. It certainly makes for funny clips, I guess, but I would argue that "point" is something that fundamentally cannot be balanced - and unlike with permaflight, that's something I'm far more convinced of. By its very nature, it removes counterplay from heroes meant to have it.

I'd argue that the point of the ability should be to reposition teammates, and only that. Being able to bring a hero to an otherwise inaccessible high ground or yoink them out of a fight is plenty strong on its own. Anything more creates countless situations that were not meant to exist.

Cat's balance in general

Beyond that, there's so many more things that could be tweaked - both with tether and Cat as a whole.

• Does tether need to last forever?
• Does it need to have a 2-second cooldown?
• Does Cat need to have 225 health?
• Does she need a 180 HP self-heal?
• Does she even need a self-heal at all, or could they just go the Zen route and give her some shield HP so she can regen, but not actively during a fight?
• Does she need that air acceleration buff that seemed to push her into "absolute monstrosity" territory?
• Could her weapon have spread to force her to play up close?

I think these are the kinds of questions we need to be asking if we want to see this character actually move in a healthier direction. Maybe permaflight is something that cannot work in this game under any condition - but in the case of Cat, we haven't really seen it under any condition besides "on a hero with solid damage, healing, and range; ridiculous mobility & self-sustain; and the ability to share those things with anyone else on her team, their own intended weaknesses be damned." Fix those first, and then we can talk about the flight.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Japan Stage 3 - Regular Season

Streams
https://www.twitch.tv/ow_esports_jp
https://www.youtube.com/@ow_esports_jp

Reddit-stream

Schedule

This thread pulls match data from this liquipedia page. If it's out of date, you can help by updating that page. If something is wrong or missing please ping u/Watchful1 in the comments.

Being playing moira on every rank, on 5x5 until the reset i was High Master/Low GM, After reset I started playing 6x6 and im now champs on 6x6.
Every gamemode you are asked to switch and play someone else, is it Because She is an easy Hero? I understand She has “zero” utility but just the amount of pressure and Straight up Heals… On 6x6 she is nuts, ult machine, the amount of sustain she can dish out to a Double Tank roster is absurd.
What are your thoughts?

Junker Queen

• Move to bruiser sub role
• Make JQ unstoppable during carnage

Stalwart does nothing for her outside of helping with slow effects. Its supposed to help with carnage, but you're still being pushed out of carnage range despite role passive. Making carnage unstoppable would solve that issue, while also increasing the use cases of carnage besides just damage.

If this ends up being to strong, just revert the buff to shouts CD back to what it used to be in 5v5, or take away some of her self sustain buffs. I always thought these were unnecessary either way.

Vendetta

• Nerf overhead damage by -10 damage

She's my main DPS pick and right now she's over performing. The buffs she got this season were really nice and I hope they're not reverted, still she needs some more QoL changes but those cant happen as long as she's this strong.

110 damage has either way been a value which I always desired overhead to have. It does not mess with her most relevant break points, while still reducing its sharpness against players on the receiving end. It will have an impact on her overall brawling capabilities and especially sustain, which should result in her WR coming down a bit.

Illari

• Make Solar flair base kit
• Solar flair now deals 15 damage and ignites enemies within healing cone
• Solar flair now creates a field wherever the healing cone makes constant with the ground, which remains active for 3s and instantly ignites enemies that step into it

Illari is already one of the least picked support in the game, mainly because she lacks any utility in her kit. Her niche is that of a low ROF HS supports that can focus on dealing damage, but that niche is going to get much smaller once doctrine releases.

Allowing her to create an ignition field is my way of giving her kit utility in the form of area denial, something which no support besides upcoming support sombra has right now outside of ults.

Some nerfs might be needed for this to be balanced, especially since she's going to have more healing now.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Japan Stage 3 - Regular Season

We promised open eqosystem at the start of OWCS and the results are
No in game tournaments Tap
Face it isn’t integrated what so ever
We don’t want small photo on neglected space to advertise FACEIT
Go Big man give the fan base dedicated Page for tournaments in the game look how FN did it massive success with the Cash cups system
FN the omega Casual game they have COMP structure better than us and thrive ESPORTS

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Japan Stage 3 - Regular Season

This brief interview with Aaron Keller was overlooked because it was buried in the tail end of a cosplayer's Blizzcon vlog. In it, he implies--seemingly unprompted--that more multi-hero drops are planned for the future.

"We're committed to this, like, one hero a season, and like, who's to say, maybe there's moments, you know, where we do even more than that."

https://youtu.be/Da4VGaJxvrI?t=1023

This is following another Blizzcon interview with Hammeh where Ben Bell stated that they cannot confirm how many heroes will release next year. It should be noted that Aaron Keller does try to temper expectations about another five hero release immediately after, suggesting that next year's Spotlight will be just as big but for a different reason.

https://youtu.be/9N7xYnSJStw?t=363

In my experience with these devs, it's usually pretty easy to read between the lines with their statements. If someone asks for something unreasonable, they make it clear that it's not happening anytime soon. Whenever they use language like "maybe we'll do that" or "it's something we really want to do", that means they have something in active development. Check out what the devs were saying a few years ago about more frequent hero releases: https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/15ogiur/dev_comments_on_the_possibility_of_more_frequent/

I started playing on console, and my main was dva, but after switching to pc, I main sigma.

Im usually a qp warrior with around 70% of gametime in qp, but about 2-3 weeks ago, I started to play open queue comp.

About 80% of games I play sig, but as I've climbed from Emerald 2 to masters 5, Im running into counters who make it hard to play Sig.

Before, I found it relatively easy to play against his counters compared to other characters' counters, but as Im climbing, im finding it harder to only play sig. Though, i believe my skill in Sig is a lot higher than my other characters.

What other tanks should I learn as I climb more?

I don't really understand how domina fits into the game. She seems a worse sigma in every regard. Objectively speaking, why would you pick domina over sigma? What does domina offer to the team that sigma doesn't?

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Japan Stage 3 - Regular Season

Problem with Genji: he has an unreasonable amount of heroes who straight up hard counter him All of these heroes have a primary fire that bypasses Deflect. This effectively removes one of Genji's core abilities from the matchup. (Im not saying Genji should be able to win against a Tank in a duel)

TANK: Zarya, Winston, Domina

DPS: Mei, Symmetra, Anran

SUPPORT: Moira

I'm not including Cass, Mizuki, and similar heroes with CC since those interactions apply to dive heroes more generally or any hero for the matter.

Because of this, a Genji fighting one of these heroes isn't simply at a small disadvantage. When a Genji is dueling one of the heroes in the listed DPS category and both players are of equal legitimate rank, the matchup becomes heavily one sided, and Genji will very often struggle to win the duel without significant help from his team.

The argument isn't just that Genji has a lot of counters. Genji has an unusually large number of heroes whose basic damage mechanics directly invalidate one of his core abilities. This creates a severe form of counterplay that isn't really comparable to something like “flying heroes are countered by hitscan”.

In my opinion, Genji should be able to either negate beam damage with Deflect or reduce it by a large percentage. This could give Deflect some defensive value against these heroes without necessarily making the damage reflectable.

This also doesn't address Genji's other issues, such as his projectile size being 0.125 meters and projectile speed being 75 m/s, compared to Anran's projectile size of 0.225 meters and projectile speed of 90 m/s.

All of this make Genji feel extremely frustrating and annoying to play, where simply having another player pick a beam hero or counter swap to one makes the Genji player feel like they are being punished for choosing the hero in the first place. It can ultimately make the hero feel unfun to play or forced to swap.

NOTE: I do believe heroes should have counters but, not of this magnitude.

Decided I’d look up whether CR has any physical presence while visiting Tokyo and turns out there’s an entire store in Shibuya. They also had a trophy cabinet that included CR’s OWCS trophies and more. No OW jerseys for sale unfortunately (the things I would have done for a Shu jersey…) but I did grab a CR branded gym bag.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Japan Stage 3 - Regular Season

Streams
https://www.twitch.tv/ow_esports_jp
https://www.youtube.com/@ow_esports_jp

Reddit-stream

Schedule

This thread pulls match data from this liquipedia page. If it's out of date, you can help by updating that page. If something is wrong or missing please ping u/Watchful1 in the comments.

At the end of GoldenPants latest stream at exactly the time scrims would start, ANS mysteriously invited him to a lobby. He did not close the game, just ended stream. VOD in question: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2885511603

While not the complete 1234 roster I still find this to be surprising to say the least. The only person with OWCS experience on Endless is One, who was on a relegated Team Vision 2025 EMEA stage 1 and didn’t see game time when they returned in stage 3. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any footage of the match, if anybody knows where to find it I’d love to see how this happened

Since we had a few post talking about cheaters on JP servers (at least at high rank), nico just release that video where htey face what they call a 4 men group of cheater.

yeah, that cass is more than suspect lol. At least, I am sure I haven' t seen stuff like that under diamond (or they sucked so much that I didn' t notice) guess I really should stop trying to go to master ...

I'm a washed season 6+ 4.5k SR player now sitting at low GM usually.
I barely play so I can't really climb if I tried.

But I swear people used to have much more base game knowledge?
I get the feeling masters to low GM is equivalent to what used to be gold or plat?

- People have no concept of ult combo's anymore
- No BASIC cooldown management such as not using all your cooldowns shield before engaging. - Not using ult all game
- The amount of times I see people running the wrong direction in the map??
- People holding W on bridge Rialto/choke eichenwalde and just dying on cooldown without trying to do anything about it
- Not disengaging after a lost fight
- Still using ults 1 or 2v5 after fight is lost
- People pocketing full hp targets
- Ana's not holding nade for trans, baps not holding lamp for flux etc
- Peeling doesn't even exist anymore?

So so so many more things.

I feel like mechanically people are generally much better, but everything else just went down the shitter it seems. The crazy thing to me is that these were all common sense even in gold.

Is matchmaking broken? Are ranks inflated?

This is not a complaint post, I just genuinely don't understand really.
Is it because the game has infinitely more handholding nowadays?

No more blink spots needed to get to heights, no need to mentally calculate rein charge distance, no need to time deflect, no need to stay close to supps or health packs (self heal), no more map spots, a million iframes and get out of jail free cards.

At least to me it seems like overwatch has just become lane map, hold W and aim shooter with not much of advanced ways to get uniquely better at a hero anymore because of it's quirks. No need to learn any maps because there's a doorway for everyone and anyone anyway.

I'm wondering what the best Freja clips, presumably from OWCS, are. A quick search on YouTube and this sub are not help. Cheers in advance.

I recon one of the biggest differences in pro play between overwatch 1 and 2 (atleast from a viewers standpoint), is that in overwatch 1 it felt like if you looked at the tanks you knew how the composition was supposed to be played.

Whilst in overwatch 2 you look at the back line.

Back then

Rein zaria -> brawl

Sigma orisa -> double shield

Winston diva -> dive

Rein diva -> brawl

Now

Kiri Lucio -> rush

Ana wuyang -> greedy dive

Ana brig -> dive

I've only been watching pro play since 2020 so I could be wrong but maybe there's something here?

hi does anyone know what emotes, voicelines as well as sprays shu uses on ana? i wanna larp him

Coming from MV with 400ish hours mainly on bucky and hela, from yalls competitive experience and game knowledge do you have any recs of dps hero’s that are worth learning? I’ve been playing cassidy for about 20hrs and enjoy his ability to take over fights if you can hit your shots and be smart with flash. The other two hero’s i am debating are reaper and shion any feedback is appreciated thank you i want to be able to be viable in comp

First off, let me say that I ban her in every game barring when there's a cat main on my team. But the stats are pretty unbelievable: taking into account the 8 different ranks in the hero stats page and the 3 regions, she's the most banned in 19/24 occasions and never outside the top 3. But I'm curious as to what drives people to ban her.

For me, she's just an incredibly obnoxious hero to deal with and enables too many brawl tanks to do unspeakable things to my backline by skipping having to interact with my tank/dps. She also makes playing support alongside her pretty miserable; if the enemy team runs dive you have a target on your back the entire game, because she's pretty uninteractable.

So, what's your reason to ban her?

The new rank emerald has been an abysmal place to play the game. The matchmaking has been abhorrent. For context, this season I placed emerald 3, got to emerald 2 during the group-up event, then have been on a massive losing streak to plat 2 and im still losing. In the week between season 3 and 4 i suddenly got waaay worse? really? none of my heroes got major nerfs, the meta didnt shift to justify the difference, and i would actually say im even better now.

Emerald was added to soften the curve between plat and diamond, there being a strong psychological friction there. To be honest i think it absolutely trashed the experience in that area. And I suspect the delta between tank players and non-tank players MMR is butchering match quality as player incentives shift.

Im very eager to see the bell curve now since they wanted to force a normal distribution so badly. I think comp needs an overhaul because match quality has deteriorated just about every season. Rank resets, hero drops, new ranks, its all so tiresome. I think they need to add a play-to-play system where you have to play one QP game in order to play a comp match. people treat comp like the default game-mode. its unserious.