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The D.Va is in my lineup mostly to distract and disrupt while Roadhog gets up close with Ana's healing, as well as extra defence if we have to play on the back foot. Mei is good, but is very short range. Both Hog and D.Va have ways around that, while Ana is enough healing to keep them up. I'm usually playing either the Ana or the Hog in this.

Whoooaaaaaa playing on the PlayStation is so hard. I can't aim at all.

Capture the flag is a lot of fun. Though it does draw a lot. I think I went 9 win, 1 loss, and 5 draws in the 15 matches I had in this new brawl last night

Rien, Winston, and Dva are great flag carriers since they can shield themselves from damage and dash with the flag. Take two of them and a healer and you got a good attack party to handle sentries and get the flag

Symetra, Torb, and Bastion are great at defense. Since you got to split resources to attack and defend, characters that usually take focus fire to bring down are less focused on and thus stronger.

Zen, Symetra, Torb, Junkrat, 2 of (Dva, Rien, Winston) is what I found works best in CTF. Junkrat and Symetra defend with traps and turrets. Torb leaves his turret behind and goes to support who needs it. Zen supports where needed from varying ranges. Tanks get flags and neutralize enemy turrets. If winston or zen ult correctly, its a guaranteed capture

I've been running Rein, Symmetra, Dva, Winston, mobile(Genji, Trafer, 76), Torb/Junk

The mobile is escorted to the flag with three layers of shields, captures and runs for it. Symm can rotate back to defend with torb/junk, and rein/dva can ult raiding parties if the mobile isnt in position to try to capture

Symetra feels more like a defense character now than she did before the re-work. She locks down an area with turrets and strengthens hold on it with shields or tele pending map and teammate positioning. Torb is more of a support character since he can actively gather and give out armor where its needed. They have almost swapped roles now

Symmetra hunts down people out of position and assassinates them while providing remote support with turrets and shields.

I'm still in the camp of Symmetra actually being a defense character. You don't want to give up a healing slot for Sym, it's better to give up a DPS slot.

Overwatch Wiki wrote:Defense heroes are good at guarding locations, creating choke points, and preventing objectives from being taken. They are skilled at area denial and generally form the back line of their team.

So the turrets plus her are great at area denial, she can cut off alternate routes thereby , and her new ultimate only works in a (relatively large) area, lending itself to . Teleporter is also (outside of very niche cases in which you charge an entire team through at once for an odd angle attack) a defensive tool for getting back to a point.

Symm is a defense character by OW's own standards.

Over/Under on the first full "expansion" to the game, and what it will contain?

I'm guessing it gets announced late this year with a 2018 release date. In order to charge ~$40 for it (which I'm assuming is what it'll be based on Blizzard's expansion model in other games), it would need to have a sizable amount of content.

My guess is that would need about 8 new heroes... maybe 3 maps? I dunno, it would have to be sizable, but Blizz is gonna have to do SOMETHING to fund future development.

I played against Spree and Eiss from Luminosity at Pax South. It was a 3v3 and they were playing against people at one of the booths.

I didn't kill anyone but we did win one round because of a roadhog lol. I swear that Spree never misses with Ana.

In post 807, xRECKONERx wrote:Over/Under on the first full "expansion" to the game, and what it will contain?

I'm guessing it gets announced late this year with a 2018 release date. In order to charge ~$40 for it (which I'm assuming is what it'll be based on Blizzard's expansion model in other games), it would need to have a sizable amount of content.

My guess is that would need about 8 new heroes... maybe 3 maps? I dunno, it would have to be sizable, but Blizz is gonna have to do SOMETHING to fund future development.

i don't know how other blizzard games are run, so how would this work?
would people without the expansion be unable to play against people with the expansion? or would people without the expansion be unable to play in games with those maps/characters?
man, i just don't want to pay 40 more dollars to get all the game-relevant content, you know?

With Starcraft, basically there were different ladders for each expansion. So people with just the base would queue on one ladder, people with the expansion would queue on another. At least, I think that's how it was done... it might've been that competitive was restricted to expansion only, while free play/arcade had different queues.

hook 2.0 is busted, being able to one shot mei, ana and reaper makes roadhog so strong

dividing competitive queue seems really risky

As far as I know, there's no expansions or anything like that planned. Have you seen anything saying otherwise?

From the days of Beta:

Kaplan made it clear that any additional maps and heroes added after Overwatch launches next Spring would not be sold as DLC. He said "we don’t have an exact timeline of when new heroes will be added to the game, how soon after launch, or how many... We just know that when we patch a new hero into the game, we want it to be free and not as DLC."

The announcement represents another debunked assumption about Overwatch's business model, following the announcement at BlizzCon last month that the game would not be free to play, and would instead be sold at $40 for the base game. An optional $60 Origins Edition that unlocks five hero skins and digital goodies for Blizzard's other games will also be available.

The decision not to put new heroes and maps behind paywalls is obviously a welcome one, given that splitting the community between free and paid content in a competitive game would likely have damaged its long-term health.

how will they make money in the long term?
with skins?

Lootboxes. People are putting money into that every event. For people that do buy those, I usually hear somewhere in the realms of 20-100 dollars or so. Some go all the way up to 200+.

sheesh

I'm now Gold.

I suspect Roadhog will get an increase in his hook cool down time

Since Blizzard has always wanted hero switching to be a thing and not charge for individual characters, I doubt there will be expansions. Loot boxes and events get them enough

I don't think Loot Boxes are going to fund a team the size of Overwatch forever. We'll see. I predict about the time the gravy train starts running out we'll get an expansion. Maybe it'll be a new mode, like story mode or something.

I'd be cool with some story mode. I just would not be cool with pay for hero or the competitive environment getting segregated to those with expansion and those without

Adding new features is ok. Ruining old ones like everyone getting all heros and comp access is wrong

Scenario mode might be more fun. You're given a bunch of scenarios with unique challenges(eg. reinhardt on eichwenwald with 5 medium bots against a team of 8 medium bots, and his goal is to hold the first point for 2 minutes).

Your particular scenario might not happen due to team limits being 6 but the idea of a scenario mode does sound good to me.

It could be very useful for new players

In post 807, xRECKONERx wrote:Over/Under on the first full "expansion" to the game, and what it will contain?

I'm guessing it gets announced late this year with a 2018 release date. In order to charge ~$40 for it (which I'm assuming is what it'll be based on Blizzard's expansion model in other games), it would need to have a sizable amount of content.

My guess is that would need about 8 new heroes... maybe 3 maps? I dunno, it would have to be sizable, but Blizz is gonna have to do SOMETHING to fund future development.

There won't be an expansion. Doing so with maps would risk dividing their playerbase, which isn't viable given that their server maintenance costs etc. are covered by loot boxes...and the more divided the player base gets, the longer queues take, and the less likely people are to play, and thus less boxes will be sold.

The other alternative, of ONLY having heroes behind a pay wall brings up complaints that 1) they're making the game pay to win, and/or 2) the new heroes aren't worth purchasing. It basically takes all the hype and income they can get from simply putting out new heroes with all sorts of cosmetics that people will want and will thus buy loot boxes for, and transfers it into them making an up front payment and bitching about it as necessary balance changes are rolled out.

Regarding the idea that sales of cosmetic items in a gambling system won't be sufficient to fund further development: First, at a certain critical mass of players the addictive nature of such gambling systems will reach enough potential pockets to keep things funded. I don't know what that critical mass is or if they're reached it, but both completionists and those who simply desire the rush of acquiring that rare drop will definitely spend a LOT of money on boxes. Second, the OWL is a clear move to get ahead of any such issues, by creating a professional marketing arm of Blizzard positioned to maximize return on game development and maintenance by allowing them to tap into further revenue streams from advertisers/sponsors. For Starcraft and Starcraft 2, for example, there were/are organizations that aren't Blizzard and which turn a profit through creating tournaments. Blizzard seeks to ensure that the majority of such income will end up in their hands.

Oh, and the fact that event cosmetics can't be purchased after the event has ended is going to go a long way to keep casual players who just want all the skins for their favorite hero to keep playing and getting boxes rather than just getting burnt out/collecting everything.