Hey guys, season 3 has been in full swing for a few weeks now hopefully giving you chance to finish your placement matches.

So how is everybody doing? Are you still playing? Have you stopped and moved onto other games? Let's here your placement horror story's for this season.

Myself I placed more or less where I finished off season 2 even after losing most placements but quickly moved up and even finally got into Master rank which I'm super excited about. Even if I drop back down I'll still get those sweet end of season rewards for another...... golden weapon?? Gahhhh I wish there were better things to spend them on. But yeah, somehow this season has seemed a lot easier so far for me, how about you?

I think my play time on hero's this season is going to be much more condensed, focusing on a couple hero's rather than a bit of everything. Mostly playing Zen with Winston, Hog, Rein and Mercy sprinkled in. Only about 13 hours played so far but really not seeing any Sombras putting in the work. Maybe people haven't had the time to learn her yet? Same happened with Ana, I guess. Solider seems much more frequent aswell.

I'm currently super frustrated because I was lazy and didn't do my placement matches early enough. I'm doing them right now and they're torturous. I have 2 left and I know I'll be having to make the climb back up to where I was at last season.

@bobafeet: if it's any consolation I lost the majority of my placements and wasn't too far off my season 2 rank.

The new seasonal event is live and you guessed it, it's Christmas themed! Loads of new skins and sprays etc to be had..........

I got Nutcracker Zenyatta in my first box!!!

I got 2 legendaries today. One in the free box they gave and then one from arcade playing. First one was currency. Second one was the D.Va "Game On" emote. I was not a happy camper.

@frodobaggins: Me too. I could hardly believe it, since he's my most played.

I have really increased how well I play Overwatch recently, if only because I realised that my sensitivity was WAY too high, especially with my crappy mouse. I was playing at 60 in-game mouse sensitivity, now at 17.5, and been playing a lot of McCree in quickplay to get better at aiming and consistency.

@bobafeet: Don't worry too much about your placements. The system basically puts you somewhere within about 200 SR of where you placed last season no matter how you do.

As a D.Va player, I'm enjoying my time to finally shine this season.

I bought 50 loot boxes this morning and got Mei's, Zen's, Zarya's, and Hog's skins along with Sym's and Widow's intros and McCree's emote. I really need that new Winston skin though. :(

@cav829: I'm 100% buying the Winston skin if I don't manage to get it otherwise. I love Winston so much, he's my favorite hero.

My placements were so-so and put me in mid-silver territory, haven't moved much up or down so I guess the placement was pretty accurate.

Hoping to up my game and end up at least gold at some point and then who knows.

@craigieboy: it can take some time before you actually settle in to where you belong, placements and a handful of games arnt the be all end all - keep plugging away at it.

As expected I've fallen back into diamond, 3400 or so. I had an awful game yesterday on Lijang Tower. Lost all 3 points easily. Had tracer batching over voice chat all game and Solider spamming thanks constantly. Meanwhile I'm gold damage with Winston..... i mean what more can I do lol.

@frodobaggins: Please tell me it was a Tracer who died over and over fighting a Roadhog instead of the healers.

I am currently trying to learn Pharah as she's super strong right now when teams default to Soldier instead of McCree as the hitscan DPS. The six stack I run with sadly doesn't have a Pharah player at the moment, so I'm trying to actually git gud as a DPS.

Put me back in plat, wanted to switch my main to dps from healer, but everyone online seems to throw a hissy fit if they have to heal so I guess I'm still gonna main healer this season. Lost my duo partner (a tank) so I guess I'll see if I'll get into diamond this season or if I'll focus on League where my friends are

@cav829: I don't know what she was doing to be honest but evidently by getting out damaged by my Winston my guess is not a whole lot lol.

I've seen some great Phara players lately.

The game is impossible for me to play right now. 300+ ping in every game mode. No other game I own is having this issue. Its ridiculous.

This week, and especially yesterday, they were getting hit by DDOS attacks that were affecting latency. Me and my friend both experienced in game yesterday where our ping was going up to 2000+. According to their twitter account, the issue is currently resolved: https://twitter.com/BlizzardCS

I'm a Pharah main, because I like not being on the ground, but I've been mixing it up more this season, now that I'm getting back into the game (played S1, hated it because it had the competitive-mode problems of most other games--felt like a MOBA with the same loudmouth dirtbags). Lots of Zenyatta, lots of Junkrat. I placed, like, 20 points off of platinum, and I expect that'll be where I top out because it was going off of S1 rankings.

Back in the beta I mained Mercy, but I can't play her in this. It doesn't work. Getting hung out to dry all the time is the worst. Zenyatta is barely tolerable, but I don't feel like I'm able to actually have an offensive impact or protect myself at all when my teammates go rando.

I managed to climb from 2500 into Diamond, which I'm pretty happy with, playing Zenyatta 90% of the time. Fixing my internet so I didn't rubberband every 10 seconds sure helped.

As such I am into the part of comp where people play meta (well, they play it but also know how to play it and know why it works) and the triple/quad tanks in every game sure are something. Fortunately most teams seem happy to have the usual Lucio pick replaced by me as a Zenyatta, because it's Ana that really is key to this set up. Her biotic grenade + healing spam easily rivals the healing provided by Zen's ult, but is instead on a 12 second cooldown. I fully expect Ana to get hit with a nerf, and with Mercy (and possibly Zenyatta) receiving some changes.

I got the Winston skin and it's great!!! That's Winston and Zen this event, happy days!

Hi guys, I'm around 2200 mark and need to form a full group. I've met people that are good but often on at different times so can never make a full team. Looking for bombers to play competitive with! Add me up user - Rekt#21902 from the UK :)

How do you all feel about the new map (s)? Really like it personally. Seems like soldier, Genji and diva will enjoy it. Trying to decide whether Torb can actually be useful, lots of nice angles and sight lines for the turret.

@frodobaggins: The new map has been great for D.Va. But yes, it certainly favors a handful of characters. I've still had a fun time with it so far.

I just want to express how glad I am for the impending death of Triple Tank with these PTR changes.

@cav829: what's the changes Cav?

@frodobaggins:

• Ana - Biotic Grenade healing boost dropped from 100% to 50%.
• Roadhog - A bunch of changes to how Roadhog's hook functions. Most importantly, if Hog does not maintain line of sight to the target the entire length of the hook duration, it breaks. So no more b.s. hooks around scenery.
• D.Va changes from 400 armor/200 health to 200 armor/400 health. Her bullets drop from 3 damage per pellet to 2 and the spread increases from 8 pellets to 11.
• Sombra hack takes .8 seconds instead of 1 second.

The top 2 are the really important ones, as minus a lot of Hog's abusive hooks and with Ana's insane healing potential cut in half, it's going to make triple tank much more niche.

@cav829: wow yeah that healing grenade is something.

@cav829: It seems like the hog changes may make Hog nearly unplayable at this point due to momentum of those being hooked. I haven't spent too much time playing with it, so I'll wait and see. Hopefully they can land on something that feels good to play as well as play against.

@slax: I think he'll be fine. Hog's hook has gone through several revisions at this point, and the last one was definitely the most broken. The main thing this changes (I'm stealing this from LINKzr's breakdown) is that Hog won't be able to abuse his hook to catch characters that take high ground on a team. This was one thing that really limited the ability to counter tank heavy teams with a Widow say on Volskaya's roof because Hog would throw his hook through the roof. Another good example location is the roof of streets phase on Dorado.

@cav829: Yeah, the high-ground stuff was garbage, mostly because the vertical hurtbox on that hook seemed to be infinite. I totally agree, the most recent hook makes for some ridiculous and broken hooks and it needed to change, I'm mostly just worried that from what I've seen, they have made a change so the hook is no longer fun/viable to use, which I feel is the worst outcome when nerfing a hero.

I think Zarya's recent changes are maybe the best example of Blizzard making a change that made the character just slightly weaker, but making her feel better to play. I'm hoping they continue making balance changes this way.

Not crazy about the D.Va changes

@dudeglove

From the Overwatch Wiki

Armor will block 5 HP damage from every individual hit that deals 10 HP damage or more. Hits that deal less than 10 HP damage will be halved. This means that armor is especially effective against rapid fire weapons and shotguns, both of which deal damage by firing many low-damage projectiles (shotguns fire multiple pellets per shot).

I honestly can't wait. It's the most boring strat in the world that I think was cooked up by some bum-ass Roadhog player to enable him to pick his main every game.

@ssully: Specifically it was developed by Ninjas in Pyjamas, who have probably the best Roadhog player in the world and wanted to come up with a comp to better enable him. It led to the triple support/triple tank lineup at first, which eventually morphed into 3/2/1 over time. For whatever that is worth. XD

Oh, and thanks to @nodeath for covering the armor question. The main character that will benefit from that change to D.Va is Reaper, who was the character who prevented teams from going triple tank in the past up until the recent buffs to D.Va that kind of neutered him. I'm not sure about the D.Va changes yet either, but I have yet to try her out on the PTR.

@cav829: I had no idea and it all makes complete sense now, thank you. Esports need to be burned to the ground.

I'll need to drink the tears of the anti tank meta peeps while I still can. :/

Man I'm having a real rubbish run lately in competative. Dropped like 300 SR. Wish people would stop going crazy when I/others pick Bastion on first point of certain maps (kings row, echinwald, anywhere that generally employs the Reinhardt shield comp.).... on another note, is there anyway to set control schemes on a character to character basis on ps4???

It's still fun to push players off the map with Lucio's secondary. So everything is pretty OK for me.

@frodobaggins: I'm fairly certain I remember there being the same character by character control settings on console. You just have to select the individual character from the dropdown where it defaults to "all."

@cav829: ahhhh yes, I'd been totally glossing over that tab that said all hero's. Now that I've tried switching a few things round (Lucios wall run to L2 etc) I think I'll keep things as default. My brain is too set in muscle memory after 230+ hours to actually change at this point lol!

Sigh, I feel that the community in this game has become so toxic. Its almost at the point of Dota to me.

The amount of times I see someone "throwing" a game, that is perfectly winnable, is starting to be ridiculous. Simply someone asking someone to change hero can trigger this, or someone gets really upset that you are playing something that isn't in the "pro meta". Its draining my desire to play the game frankly.

So I've been on a bit of a win streak recently, climbed a few hundred points and almost back in masters. I attribute it to something I read. Don't try and play 6-8 characters, filling in any role your team needs. Instead focus on 1 or 2 you excel at and play them exclusively. For me I've been playing Ana or Zen if Ana is taken and yeah, it seems to be working.

I made the mistake I always do when I have a team competitive game, I played with my friends. They aren't bad, the differences in ranks means we have crazy low teams to compensate for my rank. I had just got diamond in like 6 hours in comp this season, now at 20 hours I'm stuck in a rut ~2750. Same mistake I make every season in LoL

Also I follow @frodobaggins said with focusing on a really small pool, but make sure to be able to at least function on 1 of each DPS/Tank/Healer. Bonus points if they are semi required heroes in this meta like rein/ana/76/Dva etc. That way if you don't get your main you aren't completely lost or a liability.

For those in night concern, Overwatch has its newest seasonal event up and running. It's for the Chinese new year I believe. Lots new skins etc and a new arcade mode, capture the flag.