[Gaming] Overwatch (#boycottblizz)

I played Pharah this morning in a QP on the PTR. D.Va can definitely wreck my shit a little harder with the BOOST TO THE FACE ROCKETS PEW PEW. On the other hand, it's easier to kill her overall with less uptime on DM. Orisa's shield is pretty boss now. Its large enough to actually protect people. Oh, and I kind of like the Mercy changes. I havent played her yet, but as someone on the receiving end, these single rezzes that come more often keep the flow of the battle moving, plus its great for the doofus that gets picked off 15 seconds into the fight so pushes don't rely on holding rez forever until the most opportune time.
 
Curious about the Mercy changes. I ended up joining a match already in progress last night, chose Mercy, and then proceeded to wipe their Doomfist and McCree off the point about three or four times each. Sometimes people forget that Mercy can do more than heal.

--Patrick
 
But seriously, new Mercy is amazing as fuck and will probably get nerfed before live. She's actually a healer now instead of a 1 trick pony.[DOUBLEPOST=1503697177,1503696862][/DOUBLEPOST]
 
15 gig update?

Fucking 15 gigs?

Blizzard, I don't have infinite space. I got a lot, but not infinite. You can't be giving me updates that are the size of full games. That is not why we bought the physical version. Especially when that update is for a game mode that everyone is saying sucks. I can't judge for myself yet, because it's fucking 15 fucking gigs, so maybe I'll get to play tonight.
 
Question. For someone who hasn't touched the game since before they added the skill-ranking system and is thinking of getting back in, what are some of the major things I should be aware of?

(I'm aware that the game community has become meta-obsessed, not only in the competitive ladder, but the quick battles as well. Am I just going to be sad if at least for the quick battles I kind of don't care?)
 
Question. For someone who hasn't touched the game since before they added the skill-ranking system and is thinking of getting back in, what are some of the major things I should be aware of? (I'm aware that the game community has become meta-obsessed, not only in the competitive ladder, but the quick battles as well. Am I just going to be sad if at least for the quick battles I kind of don't care?)
-Characters have had some changes, so you'll have to relearn a lot of playstyle.
-Characters have been added (Orisa, Doomfist) and you will need to learn what they offer a group.
-QP hasn't changed that much (aside from the above). It's still mostly 6 solo players who don't communicate trying to play together.
-Comp has become obsessed with meta, but if you're below 1750-2000 then it's mostly about being able to play through with at least one whiner on your team.
-The custom game browser can hook you up with all number of wild, silly games assuming that "Total Mayhem" and "Random Heroes" aren't wild enough for you.

--Patrick
 
Kept trying but just could NOT manage to record my highlights. Thought I had the settings too high, but even after putting them as low as possible, it didn't matter whether I did software or hardware encoded, the process would stall and then sit there at 30% CPU activity for about half an hour, then give up.
Found a thread that suggested this happens when you don't have access because you're not playing on an admin account (which I am), but I noticed the folders in the patch weren't named right (or so I thought), being all lowercase instead of Capitalized. So went to go change the folder names, but when trying to fix this, discovered Windows didn't want to allow me to change the folder name. Turns out the folder itself where Overwatch wants to store its videos had somehow gotten tagged as read-only. How did that happen? Nobody knows.
Welp, it all works just fine now, too bad the clips I wanted to archive have all aged out by now.

--Patrick
 
Soooooo you might not want to try rendering 4k video playback with max settings and HW encoding enabled if your GPU has less than 4GB VRAM.
Just sayin'.
(I don't know the actual minimum, I just know 3GB wasn't enough).
CPU rendering seemed to work fine, though it said the process was using 7GB RAM (so maybe your GPU would need 8GB?).

--Patrick
 
Soooooo you might not want to try rendering 4k video playback with max settings and HW encoding enabled if your GPU has less than 4GB VRAM.
Just sayin'.
(I don't know the actual minimum, I just know 3GB wasn't enough).
CPU rendering seemed to work fine, though it said the process was using 7GB RAM (so maybe your GPU would need 8GB?).

--Patrick
For a second I thought you were telling me I did something wrong and I'm like "my vids in 1080p" then I red all of your message.
 
TIL Widowmaker's charged scope shots use 3 ammo REGARDLESS of whether you let them charge to full power or not. I don't know how I never noticed this before. I guess I just assumed it only consumed one ammo for each level of "charge" you accumulated, maxing at three.

--Patrick
 
Ya nope it's always been three per scope shot. Scoped shots, even low charge, still do a ton of damage per bullet compared to her automatic rifle mode, so the extra ammo per scoped shot is the limiter to make sure you better think about when and how to fire your shots.

If it was based on charge, you would see more widows just spamming snipe shots since it would be more efficient to just spam 1 bullet shots to murder people rather then waste three ammo on a possible miss. Could you imagine a widow rapid firing 30 scoped shots?
 
Could you imagine a widow rapid firing 30 scoped shots?
No, because I thought at the lowest charge level, it only used 1 ammo and hit the same as a single round fired SMG-style.
I had always thought the rapid-fire snipe kills were due to that extra Widowmaker bonus to headshots. I guess what this REALLY shows is that I don't play Widow very often. :)
To be fair, my palm-on-the-mat mousing style really handicaps my Widow play.

--Patrick
 
No, because I thought at the lowest charge level, it only used 1 ammo and hit the same as a single round fired SMG-style.
I had always thought the rapid-fire snipe kills were due to that extra Widowmaker bonus to headshots. I guess what this REALLY shows is that I don't play Widow very often. :)
To be fair, my palm-on-the-mat mousing style really handicaps my Widow play.
I am an utterly terrible widow. Hanzo too.

There was one time during a match I just played Hanzo because "fuck it" and got POTG and I honestly felt like I didn't deserve it, because I just noticed Zarya use her graviton and I had my ult up and did a near team kill. The rest of the time up to that I wiffed like 80% of my shots, lol.
 
D.Va feels slightly less useful (though I don't miss an opposing D.Va's matrix eating everything ALL THE TIME)
Mercy feels about the same.

Also, this:
reticle.jpg

Hey since this is how some raptor's eyes actually work, it's not that crazy of an idea.
I wonder if some add-on could be installed that would fish-eye the reticle slightly, and whether Blizzard would consider doing so "cheating."

--Patrick
 
I wonder if some add-on could be installed that would fish-eye the reticle slightly, and whether Blizzard would consider doing so "cheating."
People have been asking Blizzard to increase the range on the Field of View slider for ages, but they said they don't want to since the people that "Fish Eye" the screen would gain such a large visual information advantage. Not likely they would add something like that for even just part of the screen.

As for the changes, the Dva changes are fine, they make her more of a hunter then a tank, flying in unloading on things like Symmetra shield generators or Bastions that don't get defended, before using matrix and flying out. Mercy I am sort of mixed about, I feel the removal of the max res was a good idea, but even just having that solo resurrect feels so strong compared to other healers. I felt like most games I played over the last few days the team that didn't have a Mercy was much more likely to lose. I think I just need to wait for people to get used to how to counter her new playstyle a bit and that might change.

Honestly the only change that I am not happy with at all already happened awhile ago, Junkrat. I feel like now more then ever I will almost always see a Junkrat in a game, tossing mines into our faces like a machine gun and flying all over the place. The one night I got to play consistently, maybe around 10 games, all of them had at least one Junkrat player, and 8 of those games the POTG was a Junkrat. I think they overdid it a bit on his last tuning trying to make him more viable for COMP and instead making him super cheesy in QP.
 
Yeah D.Va's strat has completely changed. Now she can either do guns and rockets simultaneously for burst or she can do turret kill since her missiles can be fired even when she has matrix up. The matrix duration has been reduced but the charge time has also been reduced so it can still be be used frequently but has to be used strategically rather than just smothering everything that moves.

Mercy also has to be a little more strategic rather than just hiding until rez, but she can still kinda double up rezzing once she pops her ult since the cool down goes to 10sec. I tell you what, since I tend to be more of a battle Mercy, I am really enjoying the changes. I don't know what the deal is, but I guess a lot of QP folks got trained that "Mercy always runs and hides" and I would take full advantage of the fact that people just seemed to forget that she also packs a pistol--one that's more effective than D.Va's, to boot.

I fully expect that Junkrat's consussion mine is going to get nerfed. I know the double charge was done to increase his mobility, but using it as a grenade does feel too strong.

Oh, and my gripe about visibility is more due to the fact that I play on a 15in 4:3 monitor, which the game helpfully letterboxes so I get the full widescreen, but that means I'm essentially playing the game on a 13in widescreen monitor, which I consider a slight handicap. This is why hanging a magnifier in front of the display is intriguing.

--Patrick
 
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I didn't notice this before:

Mystery Heroes
  • Players will no longer see the Assemble Your Team screen at the beginning of a game
  • Players who purposefully kill themselves will no longer respawn as a new hero. However, their Ultimate ability will reset and anything that’s been placed (i.e. Torbjörn’s turret) will despawn
Good.
 
I didn't notice this before:

Mystery Heroes
  • Players will no longer see the Assemble Your Team screen at the beginning of a game
  • Players who purposefully kill themselves will no longer respawn as a new hero. However, their Ultimate ability will reset and anything that’s been placed (i.e. Torbjörn’s turret) will despawn
Good.
Yeah, I respawned as Genji 3 times in a row on "random" the day before the patch went live. Not a complete fan of the second one, though, since even an accidental death counts as "you must've been trying to kill yourself."

--Patrick
 
Yeah, I respawned as Genji 3 times in a row on "random" the day before the patch went live. Not a complete fan of the second one, though, since even an accidental death counts as "you must've been trying to kill yourself."

--Patrick
True, but in a way you get to amend your mistake.
 
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