Blizzard's Overwatch Catch-All

Over the past few months Matilda Smedius (Brigitte's voice actress) has been catching a lot of flak and getting a lot of sh*tty messages on how she's "destroyed" Overwatch because of the GOATS meta. Despite the internet generally being a horrible place a lot of fans have rallied around her and sent her messages of support and she responded yesterday with an unexpected thank you video to the community.

A while back Blizz also did a really well mini-documentary on her which i've always liked. Kinda wished Blizz put out more content like this focusing on the VA's and dev team members.

WTF are people mad at the voice actor who voiced a game character for? Am I so old that I don't get it? Just ridiculous. She got the gig of her life so far (hopefully with many more and better to come). I so want to believe that people are good but man, so hard to hold to that. Thanks for sharing, Axel and wish you didn't have to.

bhchrist wrote:

WTF are people mad at the voice actor who voiced a game character for? Am I so old that I don't get it? Just ridiculous. She got the gig of her life so far (hopefully with many more and better to come). I so want to believe that people are good but man, so hard to hold to that. Thanks for sharing, Axel and wish you didn't have to.

You are quite old. But no, you're just not a dbag unlike a large part of the internet population.

bh this was the POTG I said you stole - but I was only cleaning up what everyone else was allowed to live through with your ult

Carolina Ravassa (Sombra's voice actress) recently cosplayed as Sombra during an anime convention. It's funny that quite a few Overwatch VA's with the help of fans could probably pull off decent cosplays of their characters (thinking of Matt Mercer/McCree, Charlet Chung/D.Va, Johnny Cruz/Lucio, and Anjali Bhimani/Symmetra).

This weekend I also had a chance to see Gaku Space (Genji's voice actor) at Vancouver Fan expo during his Q&A session.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/UGOFUOf.jpg)

It unfortunately it went downhill pretty fast with someone asking him a hentai related question, another person asking about how he felt about the fukushima nuclear disaster affecting the anime industry (I swear to god a person actually asked this), and another person rambling incoherently into the mic for like 5 minutes about their father.

Eventually a sane person asked a question about how Gaku came to America and got into voice acting. Gaku explained in Japan he originally wasn't an actor and his story of coming to America sounded remarkably similar to this:

Is this game still played enough on here for me to hop in late and be taught how to play it? It's $20 but I'm afraid I'll hop in alone and get yelled at for not knowing how to do all the meta stuff.

KozmoOchez wrote:

Is this game still played enough on here for me to hop in late and be taught how to play it? It's $20 but I'm afraid I'll hop in alone and get yelled at for not knowing how to do all the meta stuff.

If you're playing on PC, my battlenet tag is marshlights#1521, you can add me as a friend. I can't speak for the console side of things, but I feel like if you get on the GWJ dischord most evenings (what like 8pm EST or so? I'm a westcoaster, most gwjers are asleep when I'm ready to play games), you can find a few folks to group with on PC. If you're upfront about being new people usually chip in with advice or tips.

With 29 (soon to be 30) characters it might seem like a lot to learn how everybody's unique abilities work, but it's pretty straitforward. Everyone has a right click, left click, [Q], [E], and shift, and you can hold down F1 with a character to see what all the abilities are. I am a fan of the dive-into-the-deep-end-of-the-pool method of learning to swim, so Mystery Heroes in the Arcade section is a quick way to see what you like/don't like since your character is chosen randomly for you. Find out what works! Everyone else is equally clueless and holding down leftmouse! It's fine!

I left out some important information:

I do have it on PS4, I have not played in a very long time. Even when I did play, I didn't "learn how to play". I just did stuff and people yelled because I didn't switch to healer or bla bla bla. So, I would like to play on PC because I feel like that's where most people are playing it now. I looked at some gameplay and it looks like so many characters' abilities have changed so it would almost be like learning from scratch again.

I never spent the time to learn who is good/bad against who. That's the stuff where if I hop on with others, you would have to be patient with me and help out. I'm also really bad with mouse/keyboard right now but I do TRY to play Rainbow Six Siege and Insurgency with mouse and keyboard so I do know to move and shoot, but those games are like 100x slower.

I will add you, and anyone else. It's only $20 so if I hate it I won't be too upset. battletag: KozmoOchez#1790

There's a chat feature in the blizzard game launcher, with a GWJ group and an overwatch channel. I've never seen anyone use it, but that could just be because I play Asia timezones. Anyway it may at least show you who's on.

Re: gameplay, just stay out of Competitive (i.e. ranked) mode and things should be fine. People very rarely get salty in unranked game modes, and if they do there's no penalty to just exiting the game and re-queueing. It's also very easy to mute people, and "avoid" them so as not to be teamed with them again. Both of those are done on the screen that pops up when you hit "P".

The non-ranked modes are Quick Play, which is just casual standard 6v6, and "Arcade", which is a revolving set of tweaked modes (low gravity, etc.). Note that the arcade menu sometimes has some ranked alt modes, like ranked CTF, which you might want to avoid for now.

Oh, when you first play, before anything else choose "Training > Practice" from the menu. That puts you in a practice map with static bots, so it's the ideal place to check what the buttons do, get your mouse sensitivity set up, change keybinds, and all that jazz.

Discord. There's multiple channels there. Take a peak and see if anyone is there then jump in to say hi. If there's room you can join up or keep an eye to see if the group drops below 6 or gets close to 12.

Yep, generally it starts filling up somewhere between 8:30 - 9:00 or so Eastern time most nights. Wednesdays and Sundays tend to be a little lighter, but come out and join us. It is definitely more fun in a group

Despite Blizz re-writing the code for Rein's charge from the ground up, I still think it's broken, Skraut should have pinned one of the 3 ppl in front of him.

Axel wrote:

Despite Blizz re-writing the code for Rein's charge from the ground up, I still think it's broken, Skraut should have pinned one of the 3 ppl in front of him.

Oh, I definitely feel that it's still broken.

Definitely still broken, but as often as it does strange things, it is still my favorite mechanic in the game, particularly being in the game of chicken on the other side of things. Would have been dead here if not for the Zen Discord orb

The only thing worse than reins charge is losing mei's ult...
And reaper in general...
And junkrats's ult...
And doomfist...

I haven't noticed charge being broken particularly. In the clip he only gets near the Brig, but it could just be lag compensation making her look closer to the charge on your client than she was on the server.

With that said I noticed something odd watching OWL the other day, check out the rein charge here:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/2yC0MCA.gif)

Regarding which I'll just say: game physics is hard

Looks like the game thought the Brig booped the Rein. I dunno the inner workings of the client/server relationship but I'd be curious to see her POV, wonder if she saw something different.

Axel wrote:

Looks like the game thought the Brig booped the Rein. I dunno the inner workings of the client/server relationship but I'd be curious to see her POV, wonder if she saw something different.

Almost certain it was the Lucio with the boop. He is wall riding above and the angle lines up.

I think it was the Widow on the grassy knoll...

Medmey wrote:

I think it was the Widow on the grassy knoll...

Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D1kIC5VWsAAi644.jpg)

If anybody is in the Austin area this weekend, the Houston Outlaws are giving away this AWESOME home-jersey repainted Mercy statue at SXSW Gaming.

After my failed attempt to repaint OW Lego, I'm thinking of picking up the Pharah/Mercy double pack hasbro action figures and repainting one Vancouver Titans and the other Toronto Defiant skins.

IMAGE(https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--Fg76s1CX--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/zubhvsc5bjtzd21qrkfw.png)

Axel wrote:

After my failed attempt to repaint OW Lego, I'm thinking of picking up the Pharah/Mercy double pack hasbro action figures and repainting one Vancouver Titans and the other Toronto Defiant skins.

Please share pictures, I can't wait to see how it turns out.

The Outlaw Mercy is fantastic.

PSA: if anyone hasn't been following the PTR patch notes, there are a lot of balance tweaks coming, including several small nerfs to GOATS.

  • Armor now cuts beam weapon damage by a flat 20%, instead of depending on the tick rate of each weapon
  • Armor no longer affects DoT effects
  • Knockback physics changed, apparently to make the results of knockback less dependent on how fast the target was moving beforehand, and make flying targets more susceptible
  • Nanoboost heal 300 ➡ 250
  • Doomfist cooldowns reduced for shoryuken and slam
  • Hanzo sonic effect radius 7m ➡ 9m
  • McCree right click damage 55 ➡ 50
  • McCree ult will lock faster on high-health targets (over 275 hp)
  • Mei left click damage increased ~20%
  • Ice walls health 500 ➡ 400
  • Moira left click - the HoT effect that persists after you use it lasts 3s ➡ 4s
  • Orisa speed penalty while firing 50% ➡ 30%
  • Soldier left click damage 19 ➡ 20, takes less time to exit sprint mode
  • Sombra hack cooldown reduced by half when used on health packs
  • Widow ult reveals enemy health, but now cancels if she dies
  • Hammond E ability no longer cancels ball mode
  • Junkrat left click damage 120 ➡ 130 (only on direct hits)
  • Lucio speed boost nerfed by ~1/3rd (personal boost from wall riding buffed to compensate)
  • Reaper self heal %50 ➡ %40 (told you he was OP :P)
  • Zarya right click splash damage no longer gets bigger at high charge
  • Zen discord orb damage boost 30% ➡ 25%
  • Zen left click damage 46 ➡ 48
  • Symmetra left click ramps up 20% faster

Think that's everything. Lots coming!

The Zarya & Lucio bums me out a little, but I like the rest of them.

Interesting changes.
I don't think I understand how the knockback is exactly changes. If I understand it, it means less weird rag doll like flying off the map??

Hurray for Mei buff.

lunchbox12682 wrote:

I don't think I understand how the knockback is exactly changes.

I haven't experimented but the description is that knockback will affect targets more consistently, regardless of their movement before the hit. My guess is that the current behavior just adds an impulse to the target (meaning a target moving towards you will get knocked back much less than one moving away), and the change will be to dampen the target's momentum before adding the knockback.

The other change says that flying targets will now be affected similarly to grounded ones. It sounds like flying targets are currently a special case, with slows and knockbacks being much less effective against them.

The moira left click one is odd. She already does a ton of healing and damage. Not sure why she needs more healing. I don't think this will change her pick rate in the upper elos.

Mei is already the devil. I know she's not used much in pro play but there's a lot of characters who fit into that.

Mercy is also getting more free movement during rez. Not necessarily a buff or nerf but different. The boop changes are a nerf to rez, though.

fenomas wrote:

[*] Symmetra left click ramps up 20% faster

Is this in addition to the 20% she already got?

My understanding of the boop changes is that while it technically makes boops "more consistent" (since moving against the boop no longer means you get booped less / moving with the boop no longer means you get booped more), in practice it's a buff to booping, since it means the boop-ee can no longer "fight" the boop.

The boop's going to boop you as much as the boop is going to boop you, regardless of which combination of WASD you try to press while being booped.