CaptainPlanet over at Overbuff (formerly at Planet Overwatch) writes an Overwatch Meta report on the state of Eleague play that is a great read if you're really into the game. If you’ve ever dabbled in online gaming before, you’ve probably familiar with the concept of “metagaming.” If not, it’s quite simple: metagaming refers to a game’s generally accepted strategy that has been developed by the community outside of the game itself. In the case of class-based games such as MOBAs and shooters, it includes what characters and team compositions become generally accepted by the “pro” community over time. While the vast majority of gamers don’t play at the ELeague skill level, the Meta developed by these players does eventually trickle down to the rest of the player base.

There are pros and cons to players reading into the Meta of a game. On some level, the knowledge developed by pro gamers does help to instruct those of lower skill levels on how to get better at a game. Unfortunately, it also has a lot of side-effects. From “experts” suddenly growing upset if players don’t pick “Meta characters” to players trying to adopt strategies they don’t understand, many learn the wrong lessons from the Meta.. The following is a very quick guide into clearing up some popular misconceptions about Overwatch’s Meta. These are of course my own suggestions. I am not a pro gamer. I am not on a competitive team. Many of you are probably better players than I am.

2 DPS/2 Tank/2 Supports

This is the most commonly accepted piece of the Meta that has trickled into every level of play. The general suggestion has been to ignore Blizzard’s categorizations of Attack/Defense/Tank/Support and instead pick based on the roles of DPS, tank, and support. While most get the basic concept, many still don’t get the underlying philosophy of this team comp related to character synergies. You’ll get into a game, your team will pick Genji, Tracer, Roadhog, D.VA, Mercy, and then be yelling at you to take a support while you’re trying to explain to them that this combination probably isn’t going to work, and it will generally get ugly.

To start with, I’m going to reclassify the cast based on role:

• DPS - Soldier 76, McCree, Tracer, Reaper, Pharah, Genji, Bastion, Junkrat, Widowmaker, Roadhog
• Tank - Reinhardt, Zarya, D.VA, Winston, Mei
• Support - Lucio, Mercy, Zenyatta, Ana

Completely out of the Meta: Symmetra and Torbjorn

If you’re a Roadhog player and you’re about to yell at me that you’re a tank, you are not a tank. Roadhog is a DPS “off-tank” at best. If Roadhog attempts to fill the role of a tank and stand in front of your team and soak up damage, he will still die under focus fire no matter how much you heal him while having the side-effect of serving as an Ultimate farmer for your opponents. Simultaneously, Mei is not DPS. If you play Mei as a DPS character, your team will struggle. Mei is a pseudo-tank that creates walls rather than acting as one.

You can additionally break each of these roles down further. Tracer, Genji, and Reaper are flankers, while McCree, Soldier 76, and Widowmaker are long-range hitscan characters. Tanks fall into “tank” and “off-tank.” Finally, supports fall into roles of “primary healer” and “DPS/healer hybrid.”

As you’ll notice, there are a lot of DPS options here. This is one of the reasons many on this list are ranked low or have fallen out of the Meta. Your team composition is typically built around your DPS picks. It is difficult for instance to pair a Mercy with a flanker like Genji or Tracer. In addition, if you pick 2 DPS flankers, your back lines are vulnerable to the other team’s flankers. Outside of Control maps, you typically want one flanker and one hitscan or projectile DPS.

You need a primary tank, which unfortunately is a role limited to Reinhardt and Zarya right now (Blizzard desperately needs a third tank to break up the staleness of this role right now). There are different options for the “off-tank” role. D.VA and Winston are divers/flankers, though D.VA can fill multiple roles. Mei can offer your Reinhardt a reprieve to recharge his shield, help divide teams with carefully placed ice walls, delay point captures with her healing, and has an ultimate ability that can completely shut down capturing a point. Finally, Roadhog fits in the role of pure power. He probably needs to be paired with a Reinhardt in higher level competitive play and is more meant for Defense and Control.

And then there’s support. Here’s the short version: you need a primary healer (Mercy or Lucio) and a hybrid support (Zenyatta or Ana). If you pair Mercy with Lucio, your team likely lacks enough damage potential. If you pick Zenyatta and Ana, that might work a little bit better, but you’ll still struggle to provide consistent healing.

McCree vs. Soldier 76

This is the most commonly misunderstood piece of the Meta right now. Players look at the Meta report, see McCree near the top every week, and are then convinced they need to play him. The reality is McCree’s effectiveness is only realized in the hands of a player with high accuracy. Think of it this way: if Soldier 76 is the game’s Call of Duty character, McCree is from Counter-Strike. For every good Counter-Strike player, there are ten good Call of Duty players.

The simple reality is most players would be better off picking Soldier 76. He’s more forgiving, has a better overall kit, and his Ultimate is generally better. McCree’s kit is actually considered one of the weaker in the game right now with his Flashbang being the one standout . His value comes when you start hitting half your shots and can consistently pull off headshots. Only then does his DPS actually become worth the tradeoff of Soldier’s versatility.

Why some characters aren’t in the Meta, or “Please stop picking Junkrat on attack; you’re making your teammates want to kill themselves”

Going back to what was mentioned earlier, the DPS bucket currently has nine or ten options depending where you want to put Roadhog. There are two slots on a team for DPS picks in the most commonly accepted team comp. Simple math demands that certain characters in this group are not going to receive much play at any given point in time.

To start with, Blizzard’s initial attempt to create a “Defense” class has been ineffective. Snipers in general have not been in the Meta for a while as they can’t easily contest points and offer more inconsistent DPS production. Or the game’s two snipers, Hanzo is currently more viable as Widowmaker’s scope takes too long to come up to be effective in peek battles. However, the consistent DPS production of a hitscan character like McCree is generally going to win you more games than the occasional Hanzo hot streaks.

Bastion has always been the newbie bane of Overwatch, but is a sitting duck against a more experienced team. Unless protected by a Reinhardt shield, he’ll get decimated by long-range characters or a Genji or Reaper flanking him. Then there’s poor Pharah. Changes to McCree and the rise of Zenyatta’s Discord Orb pushed her out of the Meta until the most recent patch.

Finally, there’s Junkrat. If bad Hanzos were the bane of season 1, Junkrat is the villain of season 2. Despite Junkrat never enjoying success in the Meta, he is as of this writing the tenth most-selected character in competitive play. Unfortunately, many players consistently get the Gold Medal for damage and assume they’re playing well. In reality, Junkrat is the king of trash damage. His damage often isn’t actually leading to frags, and while it might charge his Ultimate faster, it is simultaneously charging the Ultimates of the other team’s supports who have better Ultimates. More importantly, trying to work Junkrat into a team comp is extremely difficult. He’s basically a DPS character, but he’s slow, struggles to target many characters, and needs to be babysat as he’s possibly even more vulnerable to flankers than some supports.

This all being said, at the Gold and Platinum level, these characters have value if properly utilized. Pharah is a perfectly fine pick so long as the other team hasn’t picked multiple of McCree/Soldier 76/Hanzo/Ana/Widowmaker. “Desperation Bastion” can actually buy time if deployed at the right moment. Even Junkrat has his uses. However, before picking these characters, you need to learn when to use them and when to switch off of them. You might pick Junkrat at the start of a competitive match thinking, hey, I’m not that good, but at least I can lob grenades and quickly drop Reinhardt’s shield. But your pick is a bit selfish, as now your team has to work around you by either giving you one of the valuable DPS slots or having to give up a healer or tank to make things work.

As a final note on this subject, Torbjorn and Symmetra are essentially “builders,” which is a role that hasn’t found success to date in Overwatch. Symmetra does have some small value on point A defense on some maps, but you have got to talk it out with your team before you pick her and be ready to switch off of her as soon as you lose the first point. Please don’t pick Torbjorn in competitive play. Your teammates will thank you.

The reasons you’re losing probably aren’t Character-specific

The final thing I want to say about understanding the Meta is that there is more to it than just character selection. In most situations, teams struggle because of poor fundamentals. The most common reasons I see teams lose are:

• Team composition is poor and characters don’t synergize well
• A player takes a high-skill character they’re ill-equipped to play
• The team fails to protect supports
• The team utilizes poor positioning throughout the match
• Teammates fail to take advantage of focus fire opportunities
• Players constantly trickle in rather than engaging as a group
• Teams make poor use of their Ultimates

Only a few items on this list involve character selection. For every team that loses because of poor team composition, I will show you two or more that lose because they let their supports get relentlessly divebombed the entire game. By all means, understand what characters the Meta suggests and incorporate it into your game, but don’t just assume your team needs a Genji because that’s what the pro team would use in a particular spot. Don’t force someone to play a Zarya you don’t know how to play. There are still strategies that work on the Gold/Platinum level that don’t work beyond that. Don’t justify your terrible Hanzo this way of course, but if you are legitimately good as him, and be honest with yourself if you are or not (i.e. Gold Damage because you fired into Reinhardt’s shield all game means nothing), pick him. Just maybe warn your team ahead so they don’t hate you.

I hope this was of use. Please feel free to drop me any questions or leave any comments below. If you’ve found this of value, let me know! I may yet write what amounts to an intermediate guide to support play in Overwatch If others find this of use.

Well said, I agree with a lot of what you wrote. I do think the 2/2/2 is a good starting point for any team, but as you say it totally depends on your individual hero picks to ultimately decided whether or not you go with it.

...and this is why I have started to give up on Overwatch. The last thing that I want to do in a video game is study. At first this game felt pick-up-and-play, but now it seems to be filled with enough people who have picked apart the "meta,"and every time I jump into quick-play my team just gets destroyed. Frankly, out of all the characters I have found that the only one I have fun playing with is D.Va, and it almost always ends up with the team thinking that I can carry out the tank role and this leads to us being out "meta'd," and crushed seemingly with no chance of survival. Or I get in and everyone starts reaming me out about my choice in character, saying shit about how she is "tier nothing," or some bullshit I don't care about. It is getting to the point where the knowledge necessary to be sucessful and the skill of other playes increasing is making the game no longer fun to play anymore.

I guess I am heading back to COD sooner than later.

Really enjoyed this write up. I picked up Overwatch because a lot of my friends did. I'm not the type of person to go and learn every little thing about a game's meta, but a bunch of my friends are. Now my friends have moved on to other games/we have different schedules and I'm left playing alone 95% of the time. I'm basically let to quick match or study for competitive. This would be fine if I cared to know more about the game but I don't feel like putting in the work outside of playing the game. So I would love that support write up.

I guess my lack of enthusiasm to do this outside works speaks to how much I like this game. I think it's a good game, but hero based multiplayer just doesn't do it for me like twitch shooters, that I can lone wolf and build my own kit, do.

Currently rank ~2300 and I mostly agree.

I strongly disagree about Junkrat however... At least so much in that he's hard to work into team comp. I've never once heard somebody complain about a junkrat pick. That's not to say he's always a good pick mind you. I'd consider myself a Junkrat main, but I only play him 40-60% of the time based off other team picks. When not Junkrat, I usually play defense Mercy or Offense Zenyatta and do well enough.

A BAD junkrat player does in fact amount to nothing more "trash damage" that provide no real benefit to anybody except the opposing team as they help their mercy/lucio build ult meter. A good junkrat uses their mine and trap just as much, if not more, than their grenade launcher. I've had more than one occasion where I waited for others to make their pick so I could pick whatever's leftover/needed, only to deeply regret letting somebody else play Junkrat. I would hesitate to call them the reason for the loss though.

A medal in damage is absolutely meaningless without any eliminations or more importantly, objective related medals, to back it up, but I'd consider this a universal truth for all characters, and junkrat far from being a the primary offender.

But perhaps I'm just bias from playing so much and considering myself good at it compared to most randoms. If I don't have gold in objective eliminations as Junkrat, than I've fucked up. Being able to pop grenades and traps around and/or under the payload while using it for cover is stupidly good on both offense and defense. Majority of people are still also completely blind to Junkrat's traps and mines in my experience, most the time that they get destroyed instead of triggered, is because somebody's aoe attack incidentally destroyed it.

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At the end of the day, regardless of hero balance and meta. I think the most important lesson anybody should learn about competitive and casual play both, is to react to the enemy comp and be willing to change your hero up if need be in order to counter. To many games get lost because a player refuses to change off their current favorite hero to what is actually needed in the moment. Bastion fucking your team up so you can't advance? Well shut up and switch to Gengi, some flanker, or whatever else might counter him, rather than throwing your useless, ult feeding corpse at him.

You aren't admitting failure by switching heroes when things go bad. You're adapting, which is good.

I don't really want to play competitive Overwatch myself, but this was a really interesting and well written write up, so thanks for that!

@monetarydread:If people are heavily complaining about you picking a D.VA in Quick Play of all things, ignore them. Or kindly suggest to them to head on over to competitive if they want to start lecturing others on the Meta. Keep in mind you can leave games of Overwatch during the character selection process without penalty. If you hit a rough patch with the matchmaker though, it's probably not because of Meta issues. The Quick Play matchmaker really wants everyone to have about a 50% win rate, and thus you'll hit patches where ie thinks it is correcting for itself. Bruno's guest column on the front page actually touched on this subject pretty well. It's a totally different issue. If you're not going to ever touch competitive, Quick Play always will remain a good pick up and play option though.

@exiledvip3r: So first off, I just want to reiterate, I'm not hating on Junkrat as a character or saying everyone who picks him is a scrub and the cause of their team losing. Also, I am not even close to an expert at this game. I'm currently 2794 on PC and haven't placed on PS4 yet (I was 57 in season 1).

What I will say though is the majority of the time I see Junkrat picked in competitive play, he's been picked for the wrong reasons and results in his team having composition problems. I'm friends with a group that are all around the 2200-2400 area in competitive play. One of their members insists on playing Junkrat almost all the time and defends it each time by saying either he's always got the gold medal for damage or he isn't good at other characters or so on. The result has been another member of the group who is a better Pharah player than he is a Junkrat player had to switch to playing support to compensate.

Junkrat's low movement speed and need for specific positioning to find good angles to lob grenades limits him on Attack and the majority of Control points. He's an awkward fit on many team comps because he struggles to target specific characters (You're right: the difference between the good JR players and the bad is the ones who are really good at targeting individuals). He's another backline character who needs to be babysat against divers. You need a flanker to help finish off the characters he whittles down with damage, but you also need a power DPS like McCree to stop the Genji or Pharah from mauling him.

Also, as you get into higher tier play (and btw I'm not really at that level, I hate to sound snobby here as I'm not. I'll be the first to tell you I will never be sniffing Master), you're going to start seeing more issues with Junkrat. What you want to do as Junkrat is pick a direction the other team is coming from and lob grenades into it. What's going to happen more and more is they're going to dive you with Genjis and D.VAs that you can't counter. They're going to bring out Zarya who is going to use all that spam to quickly boost to 75-80% energy. Any time you're out in the open, you're going to get discorded and killed by a McCree who actually has good aim. You're going to have to deal with group formations behind a Lucio speed boost that are on top of your team rather than the other team slowly walking toward the capture point behind a Reinhardt shield.

The key is, be honest with yourself both if Junkrat makes sense as a pick at a given moment, if he makes sense in your team comp, and will this play hold up in higher levels. I'll throw out an example from a QP game I had the other night. We're on Volskaya and I'm playing Reinhardt. We get to the entrance to point A. I see most of the other team set up to the right of the truck, so I angle my shield toward them and attempt to walk my team into the left side room. The other team's Junkrat is in there and now divided from his team. At this point, he should be a dead man walking. What happened though is the teammates following me stopped to fire at the other team because that's how you play other FPSs. The result is I'm depleted in health, now I have to turn to face the Junkrat, and I die while he escapes with one unit of health left. The other team possessing a Zarya at low energy, a Symmetra whose turrets were just avoided and no teleporter, and a Mercy with no rez should be down a Junkrat in this situation and in a really bad spot and point A should shortly fall. Instead, we fall into the trap of fighting endless pitched battles at the choke and never really threaten because they have characters that get immensely better as the fight goes on and own the positioning battle. But if you're newer to the game, you instead might think well it was the Junkrat and Bastion combo that we used that won the game. BTW: this isn't me being bitter because I've lost a lot worse games the past three days as I try to practice some lesser-used characters. :)

I'm a big fan of the point this video made about Junkrat if you've got a few minutes to check it out.

Fantastic write up. I especially like

Think of it this way: if Soldier 76 is the game’s Call of Duty character, McCree is from Counter-Strike. For every good Counter-Strike player, there are ten good Call of Duty players.

Very apt.

@cav829: I recorded the statistics of a 100 matches starting a month ago and at the end I was sitting at around 30% win rate and almost fifty of my losses were what I would consider a blowout (Edit: Defined by KOTH matches where we get less than 10% control time, or an attack that we can't get past the 2nd control point, or a defend that takes less than 4 minutes to lose). It could very well be a result of my performance when it tries to correct things, I usually get 4 golds when I play in a lower MMR tier so it corrects again and puts me in groups of tryhards. The problem I face is that even in quickplay people have started to treat it like it is competitive mode and they get so toxic that I now refuse to join voice chat and about half the time I have to hide the chat window....

The simple reality is most players would be better off picking Soldier 76. He’s more forgiving, has a better overall kit, and his Ultimate is generally better. McCree’s kit is actually considered one of the weaker in the game right now with his Flashbang being the one standout .

But but I wanna use muh 'Uhmerica' Olympics Skin!

great writeup @cav829 ! definitely helpful to me as I'm just diving back in now season 2 is underway.

This game's meta has gotten so fucking boring by this point that all of my interest in it has been sapped out of me. Quick play is more infuriating than it is fun, competitive has one working framework for team composition (and is still more infuriating than it is fun). Cool writeup, but it's such a shame that this is the state of the game and has been for so long.

Yep, my thoughts on the game also. After less than fifty hours of play, I already feel done with it; just isn't fun anymore, in quick or competitive

Good writeup. Altough i could argue a bit about what characters you find usefull and not your bottomline is the key to understanding Overwatch.

Forcing some metacomposition you have read about in a forum on your team is NOT the way to win.

Everytime i enter a game and someone instantly bashes another player to swap out their pick i know we have at least one clueless idiot in the team.

@monetarydread: Thats really not the impression i have gotten. Quickplay seems to suffer because the ones playing for real are all in competive. The ones left in Quickplay are either very low level players or high level players that takes a casual pause from competive by having fun with 6x Torbjörn games.

Our group usually just wings it. Just take a quick look at the picks and look for what we are missing. Looking in terms of meta picks or classes seems like such a narrowminded way to go about it. You really just need to think in terms of kill potential and survivability/sustain. If our metapick dps aren't doing their job well enough, we need a third. If our tanks aren't useful, we need to pick dps that can outplay/carry more effectively, if our supports are awful we need to pick soldiers and pray.

The meta is based on player skill being at a certain level, a level which most of the playerbase is not at. Strictly following it is absolutely ridiculous when obvious problems crop up during a game. If we aren't killing anything, then clearly we aren't doing enough damage, and we will never get anywhere no matter how good I hold my shield up. Therefore I should pick something that covers up that weakness. If that means ditching Reinhardt, so be it. I really dislike the kind of flowchart mentality metagaming creates when it's generally much more effective to troubleshoot your team as you play. Over time any common issues will get instantly recognizable when you've seen them a couple of times. At least in this game you can switch on the fly, following a chart for dota is a bit more understandable since you lock yourself into an hour of pain with bad picks.

Overwatch is for getting drunk and playing over chat with your friend who's going through a difficult break-up, laughing at stupid shit and trying repeatedly to do that one cool thing you did before with McCree.

I love reading about the "meta's" of popular multiplayer games. But like many others in this thread are saying, you're playing it wrong.

@slag: It's pretttttty good. But you know what's really good? Dat new Reinhardt skin...

@yummytreesap: Honestly, the Meta is in the best state it has been in for some time. You're down to pretty much the two builder characters and Widowmaker in terms of characters who will struggle to win in competitive play beyond the more basic levels (amusingly enough the two builders own the two highest win rates, probably because players forget you can still win at Gold and below or in specific situations with Symmetra with them). The only really stale portion of the game IMO is Reinhardt, and it's not his fault. The alternative primary tank to him is beyond the abilities of a lot of people (Zarya is the 16th most played character in Quick Play and the 5th in Competitive. That's enough to tell me there are a lot of players who haven't spent the time learning her when I'd argue she's the second most challenging character in the game to learn and use next to Ana). That's one of the reasons I keep hoping the next character after Sombra is another primary tank option. They need an intermediate skilled "wall" character.

@rethla:Thanks! And yes, if you're treating Quick Play seriously then you're probably having a miserable time. With the advent of Comp play, QP is basically for screwing around, cooling off, and to practice characters you're not as familiar with.

@tobbrobb:Totally. I mean "things not dying" using a "Meta comp" 9/10 times comes down to 1) at least one player not knowing how or not being good enough to use the character they've picked or 2) lack of focus fire. If you think mid-match you can get that correction, you go for it. But typically there are easier "fixes" that will work, especially below Diamond and up competitive play. One support (so long as it's a Mercy) can work. 3 DPS can work. You're absolutely right that you don't need to skip simple solutions and go right to the pro-suggested strategies.

The thing is, things die in this game very quickly under focus fire. a Mercy and a Lucio healing a target can barely offset the DPS potential of the other team's Mercy if she's hitting her shots. If you were playing an RTS, you would tell your units to focus on one unit at a time. But when you have six different players, getting them to pick a target at a time is a challenge. And so if your comp starts with Reinhardt, Zarya, and Lucio, that's not much damage potential (at least to start the fight) you're getting from half your team and the other three players need to be very coordinated.

Honestly, outside of Junkrat picks in the wrong situation, the two biggest issues I've run into in season 2 games are 1) McCree players who aren't accurate enough to play him and 2) Zarya picks in the off-tank role. In the case of the former, if you're playing McCree and the other team has a Pharah dominating our team, you need to switch to something else because if you can't even win that matchup, you need more practice before you bring that in to competitive play. In the latter, Zarya needs to survive the first 30-45 seconds of a fight to find DPS value. The off-tank position is typically more of a DPS pick. Some pro comps use Zarya in the off-tank position because they play very conservatively and operate in a Death Ball. But if your DPS players are off flanking and Zarya is in the off-tank role in an invitation to the other team's Genji, Tracer, or Winston to spend the rest of the game in your back lines without anything you can do about it.

@dudeglove: Totally agree they need more modes. In particular, I think some kind of just Deathmatch mode that people could play just to muck around as random characters would be good. Also, they need a Quick Play option with the one hero limit in place so people who want to practice something closer to competitive can do so. It's pretty fast to level to 25 btw if you get into groups due to the XP bonus.

It seems since the beginning of season 2 that the 2/2/2 is no longer the go to meta. 3x3 is rising as it seems to have no counter. What is 3x3? Three tanks and three supports. What are you guys thoughts on it. Have you seen it in action?

This is a really nice post on the state of the Overwatch meta. I know some folks don't really like the current state of the meta, but I actually find it pretty fun. I definitely agree that the game desperately needs another main tank character, and this is from a Reinhardt main. I haven't really played much competitive in season two due to WoW Legion coming out, but speaking to my friends tells me that not much has changed from season one except an influx of Mei as well as Genji's dominance being toned down a bit. I hovered around ranks 63-65 in season one and at that level of play most games came down to which team had a better Genji. It's really nice that Blizz shortened his ultimate duration. I hope that in the long run Blizzard discovers a way to make Symmetra and Toblerone more viable at higher levels of play, if only to cut down on the monotony of characters you see picked.

@toysoldier83: I've seen it in ELeague play. Basically, the 2 DPS slots are given to Roadhog and Ana and they use Ana's ability to quickly charge Ult to Nano Boost either the Reinhardt or Roadhog before the other team can defend against it. It seems to be limited in effectiveness to certain maps right now, but yes, pro teams are having some difficulty coming up with counters for it. Nano boosted targets plow right through Zenyatta's Transcendence in a lot of cases, so on a map with tight corridors, a boosted Roadhog with Whole Hog just mauls your team.

But I think it's more an extension of some of the newer snowballing strategies with Ana we're seeing more of. I've been thinking for some time Ana's Ult probably needs a slight cost increase, but I think they've been reluctant to do it given she's still the least played character in the game. If that comp starts to dominate, expect that to be the adjustment. Do I think we'll see much of it below tiers where the pros hang out? Probably not. How many good Ana players do you know to begin with? It also requires a pretty damn good Roadhog (or Winston I believe is one variation) and a good Zarya. It's too specific to see outside of six stacks.

If you want to watch it in action, it's 33 minutes into this video if the timecode doesn't work.

Boy I do not get these kinds of attitudes.

It's always weird how salty players can get because the community develop "metas" and it somehow ruins the game for the casual players or something, Guys, just ignore the meta. Ignore the hardcore folk. Mute players. Don't chat. It's just a game. You can still enjoy it. There's still quick play there for everyone to casually enjoy.

There's no reason to feel like meta ruins the game or whatever. I play Overwatch both casually and competitively depending on what mood I'm in. I really don't get the "everyone is taking the game too seriously" excuse for backing out of a game. YOU don't have to take it as seriously as they do. That's a freedom every player has, and a game mode to go along with it. If they get upset about it in quick play of all things, so what? They're loss. Fuck people, just have fun with the video game.

@frostyryan: You're absolutely right. The two styles of play aren't mutually exclusive. When I play alone I usually play competitive and take it seriously. When I'm with my friends, however, we play quick match or brawl and just have fun with it. People in quick play don't give a damn if you're following the meta or not, and if they do, why the hell are they playing quick play? All competitive games develop a meta, like you, I don't understand the negative mindset some people have around it.

Could you elaborate on Torbjorn's ineffectiveness? He's one of my favorite characters on point B defense or on the payload's last checkpoint. In my experience as long as the turret is placed out of sight of the main choke it is quite useful. It alerts me of flankers and helps me take them down. More importantly, it can turn the tide of a brawl on the point by shooting the back of the enemy team, especially if it is Molten Cored.

@socialone:The basic issue is as you get into higher level play, the game is played more in group fights rather than the Quick Play style of players trickling in. And typically, most teams will be behind a Reinhardt shield. The turret only does 56 DPS (to put into perspective, that's less than Lucio) and is stationary, hence easy to target. So a group behind a Reinhardt shield will take it out in two seconds while not taking any damage back. After that, you're basically a less effective DPS/Support (with armor).

While you can stash the turret, it does simultaneously mean it can't fire at anything out of its line of sight. Also, most characters can fire at it around a corner without being in its line of sight due to its hitbox versus the LoS it needs to fire at. I might have some footage somewhere to demonstrate this, but you've probably seen that in action.

The better strategy for "higher level" Torbjorn play is to actually put the turret down somewhere and not babysit it, but rather contribute to the fight with your teammates. Also, move your turret after every fight as once the other team knows where it is, they're going to easily take it out.

Molten Core does remain an incredibly effective Ultimate if used at the right time, but it tends to be more of a delay Ultimate against a team behind a Rein shield that can back off while it's up. Also, like everything, Torbjorn can still be fine at lower levels of play.

@socialone: In my experience, his effectiveness comes from his turret. A well or even decently coordinated team can use various shields and range to take the turret down, greatly cutting in on how effective Torb is at holding a point, similar to Bastions downfall. Furthermore, in the middle of a team fight, it is much harder for Torb to get his turret out, meaning he is not great at retaking the point/cart/map control. So, when it comes to the meta, I believe the thought is that there are plenty of DPS characters who can do what Torb does, holding a point, better than he does. Now I love Torbs gun, I think it can be super effective, but knowing that half of your kit can be countered relatively easily (and therefore the effectiveness of even your ult) it puts Torb in a weird spot.

With that said, every character can be viable depending on the match-up. Are you fighting a team who is rushing in one-by-one with their DPS, while your team holds a point? Torb works great. And if you like playing him, go for it! Just know that there may be more viable alternatives that could assist your team even Edfurther.

Edit: AKA what @cav829 said. Remember the meta discussed in this thread is based on pro play and in that Torb is just not played because of how easy he is to counter.