Ryuuga Wagatekiwo Kurau - The Overwatch Thread

i really like the uprising gamemode! though in 2 out of my 3 games last night, our reinhardt's game froze while we were guarding the payload as it charged up & the reinhardt left (was playing with different people each time.) not sure if that's a widespread bug or what.

on normal difficulty we were still able to win without a great deal of difficulty even without reinhardt. not so on hard, haha. with all four players, though, hard is def doable.

 

Protip: if you play Pharah in that gamemode, every single enemy will agro onto you in flight, even if your Rein is right the fuck there. It's not sooo terrible till the last bit, but that last fucking bit with the Bastions and OR14s is hell. Mercy is the uncontested best healer for that mode, and Torn and Bastion rule at it, and Rein is pretty essential. Tracer. Tracer is difficult to work with.

 

Out of the games I've played so far only one Mercy has stuck with the team, the rest have quit partway through. Makes it that bit more difficult when you're relying on Torb's armour for boosts. I dunno what I'll do if I get landed with Tracer one time, I am so fucking bad with her it's not even funny.

 

I'm trying to determine who the absolute worst hero is for the new brawl. I think a lot of Sombra's kit ends up pretty useless, but apparently hacked enemies just freeze in place, which would be very useful at certain points. A solid EMP at the end there could help clear things out immensely. Winston's lack of damage output would be pretty bad. Widow is a slow killer, which doesn't do well for endless streams of enemies, and her ult is basically useless... the thing to do mught just be to try them all out in normal or something, but I think people might get kinda cross with me if I do that.

 

Nah, I'd say go for it. Widow is definitely pretty useless though-- she just can't put out the damage on the big swarms, and her headshots aren't useful enough on the big mechs. But fucking around in the normal mode seems pretty much what it's there for?

(Incidentally, I'm having a blast, and a Symm with her turrets in the right places is a goddess of MURDER.)

 

Played with a Widow in normal mode last night! Figured she was skeet shooting, just sorta practicing her aim. Had a Reaper, too, and he kinda rules for this mode, so that made up for that. It's all close quarters brawling, and he's never without souls to munch on, so he's pretty much a perpetual murder machine.

 

Today my game froze during the "payload charging" segment (as Torb), which makes this the third time someone's game has crashed during the "payload charging" section of Uprising, out of the six times I've played. Hrm.

 

Zenyatta is real good for normal mode, though I suspect when the enemies do real damage his lower healing rate'll tank that. His ult is fucking useless. Honestly, the only support ult that matters is Mercy's, and maybe Ana's. You're never dealing with burst damage, you just have to sustain, and quick revives are fucking important. Winston is not as useless as I'd imagined, but still pretty not great. He takes agro away from squishies pretty good, but he cannot kill for shit. Also, I think he does like mega damage against those bomb things, which was fun, and his ultie is good for keeping them off the cart, so he's pretty solid for that section. Orisa is pretty baller. Ana feels really not good to play as. Slow fire rate, too many bodies, hard to get heals where they're needed. D.va is a popular choice, it seems, and she clears a room real fast. Haven't played her yet, but she invariably gets 250+ kills, so good on her.

 

I'm into Overwatch for, a lot of lore reasons (which is probably a dumb reason to be into a Blizzard game). Does this recent event feel super inconsistent to anyone else? (also like. I'm Unsure About Talking About the Game in a Story Perspective Here... if it's not polite, lmk)

 

Talking about story and other fluff is absolutely on topic here!

I think one thing we have to accept is that Blizzard don't care super hard about there being a consistent chronology that makes sense, and a whole bunch of other things ... canon is going to contradict itself frequently.

 

I don't really mind it. Partly for what Morven said and partly because I find plot consistency one of the less important things for me just in general. Tonally I feel like it fits and that to me is what matters. Chronologically though I'll admit that I don't entirely know how consistent it is due to not having that be a priority for me.

 

Imo, overwatch lore is undergoing some revisions right now. In the past... Uh, however long it's been since Heart of the Swarm released... Blizzard has made a point of monitoring and responding to social media more (perhaps too much but ymmv on that), and they've made several updates to WoW and Starcraft lore in that time period based on fan reception. So I'd say that there was probably some story elements they'd planned that didn't gel with current fan reception of lore, thus the cancellation of the previously planned past-of-overwatch comic a few months ago. They haven't bothered to retcon stuff yet, but given their history, I bet it's coming.

ETA: I actually feel positively towards the possibility of future retcons - I think several of the retcons in lore in other Blizzard games improved the backstory - but I don't think anyone at Blizzard puts a lot of time into figuring out if timelines for any of their games are sensible. I'm also probably pretty blase about inconsistencies and revisions because I've made my way through the trenches of superhero comics before, so. Again, a ymmv thing.

 

Superhero comics are so fucking great for learning to just not give a single fuck. The Star Wars EU is too.

 

I guess I meant more with the omnics right now... I've been focused on that part of the storyline, and I don't think anything makes any sense. Like how the omnics feel like an oppressed group, but at the same time they only seem to focus on the group when it does anything wrong? Or like how London is super shitty to omnics but the story implies the extremist group is the reason there isn't any peace bc they came in at a time when things 'would be fixed'? Or how Los Muertos is shown as a group that is anti-omnic originally, but when we see them in Sombra's backstory they have an omnic member? Torb's position is really confusing to me too - he has a line in-game all the time where he talks about omnics and how he thinks omnic rights are a silly idea, and his backstory implies he always hated them even before the war, but then we have him go 'well i think theyre just not handling it the right way' when it comes to Null Sector. Also Reaper seems to hate omnics (idk it could just be that Gabe is kind of a jerk about everything) but he's like 'well i kinda understand why' or w.e

I don't know... I always keep my eye on AI stuff in narratives generally, but I don't know what Overwatch is doing? They have omnics around, but seemingly only bring them up when they need something to shoot and I don't get their role in the narrative or if they're even going to do anything worthwhile with them? Like I feel they talk up the omnic role, but then do the same thing every video game does where they kind of just use them for bullet practice.

If anyone had any theories where Overwatch is actually going with this subplot, or what they have in mind, or which of those things are retcons, I'd be curious. I just do not understand or enjoy what they're doing with it right now.

(and, to be fair, that might be part of why i don't read a ton of superhero comics. not to their detriment, i just find that confusing)

 

I think the easiest way to figure out what the fuck Blizz is doing with omnics is to think of them as a metaphor for racism second and a metaphor for war first. Because robots aren't ever going to be a pure 1:1 metaphor for anything, but framing omnic rights and oppression as centered around wartime modes of thought manages to make a hell of a lit more sense than anything else.

Part of the problem is that is you need endless waves of mooks, omnics are always going to be the best bet. So there's a gameplay/narrative split there that's going to need justification. Part of the other problem is that not all omnics are created equal (Bastion's level of self-awareness is a surprise, rather than a feature) and the issue of the God AIs is going to mean that you've also got a population vulnerable to literal brain rewrites without warning, in canon, which is absolutely terrifying to think about.

And, I mean, ultimately the omnics have always been sort of a prop for the human narrative? Timeline-wise, it's hard to tell where the fuck this fits, but it feels pretty consistent with how Blizz has been handling their endless mook nature from the beginning.

(Wrt characterization, part of the inconsistency might be that they're trying to tone back some of the anti-omnic sentiment given how upset parts of the fandom have gotten. I've seen "[x] is irredeemable trash because they hate omnics" often enough that it's likely the writers have too, and given that the heroes are supposed to be sympathetic, toning down the overt sentiments there might be Blizz's way of trying to emphasize that.)

 

Unrelated to this but I've been reading the blizzard forums for overwatch and it's a trip. Like reading the WoW boards, especially the PvP one. Gods this is magical. I read a 24 page epic of an Ana main rambling almost entirely to themselves and copying most of what they said verbatim regarding how they hate the recent damage nerf. It was preceded by another such thread and we have been promised a sequel in this tale. There is some sort of forum culture drama regarding the "mercy circlejerk", and Mercy mains seem to be incredibly hated. D.Va mains too. The current cancers of Overwatch thus far are...Pharmercy, Ana (or just the biotic grenade), Roadhog simply existing, and 76. Everyone is mourning McCree. Everyone should be mourning him. Also TIRES DON EXITS.

 

It's the Mercy Mafia, get it right. We have secret Discords where we plot.

 

are you the reason that ana has single handedly ruined overwatch forever

 

Yes