Week 8 was Overwatch League’s first time being hosted fully online. There were a few technical issues, such as the audio sometimes only coming from one ear, or the casters’ cats walking over their keyboards. Overall though, it was a success, with even higher viewership numbers than the average, potentially due to the number of people who are quarantined. For this blog, we will talk about the results for a few of the games!
The first notable thing that happened was that the dominant champions of season 2, who were currently undefeated this season, lost both of their matches this weekend. First, they were against the Los Angeles Gladiators and got absolutely destroyed by LA’s dive composition. With a core of OGE on Wrecking Ball, Mirror on Doomfist, and Birdring on Tracer constantly diving the supports of Shock and causing the enemies’ team collapse. The Shock was trying to force Rascal to play Mei, however, this hero pick was countered heavily by the Gladiators and did not work out.
In the Shock’s second game, they were against the LA Valiant. The teams played closer to a mirror composition, running and McCree, Reinhardt, and Zarya. San Francisco played a bit better in this game than yesterday, however, Valiant’s Zarya and McCree, McGravy and KSF, were outclassing their counterparts on the Shock. When this happened, the Shock tried to run a similar composition to what the Gladiators ran to beat them the day before, however it seemed like they had not practiced in much and lacked teamwork and focus with it. This led the Shock to their second loss this season.
Last week, we discussed the teams that would be playing for the first time this weekend, including the 4 Chinese teams: Shanghai Dragons, Hangzhou Spark, Guangzhou Charge, and Chengdu Hunters. I originally planned to talk about which of the four I thought was the strongest, however, they all seem to be at relatively the same level. Chengdu beat Shanghai, who beat Guangzhou, who beat Hangzhou, who beat Chengdu, in a weird cycle. If I had to pick which team would be the strongest, I would pick Chengdu, as they had the most convincing win, and had the closest loss. Their DPS lineup of Jinmu and Baconjack was EXTREMELY dominant, however, the team as a whole was fairly inconsistent. After playing a good map, they would sometimes look like a completely different worse team directly after. If they can consistently play well, which they have the potential to do, they could go very far in the league.
Example of Chengdu’s inconsistency: Jinmu kills 4 of the enemy team, but then runs into the environmental traffic and dies to a car
The last team I want to talk about is the Seoul Dynasty. This was the team I predicted to be very strong last week, and they certainly performed up to the hype, with 3-0 full wins against the Valiant and Gladiators (who both beat the last season’s champions!) Now that Profit finally had a good team, he played as well as the world-class DPS player he has been praised as. He put up an incredible stat line of 15 final blows per 10 minutes while dying less than twice in the same amount of time! It was extremely hard to find any weaknesses in the play of Seoul; they were like a well-oiled machine dismantling the enemy teams with ease. So far, they could easily be a pick to make it and potentially win the championships.
