Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - EMEA Stage 3 - Regular Season

Chills (source)

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - EMEA Stage 3 - Regular Season

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - EMEA Stage 3 - Regular Season

I saw this post today and after I wrote a reply, I decided to just make it its own post because I think more people should hear it. I have a longer post I've been working on about these things, but for now I'm giving the short version of my manifesto on win rates, pick rates, and balance discussions by OW players, redditors, and content creator coaches.

• Because silver-GM players have 50% personal win rates, pick patterns are not just a bias on win rates, they are fundamental to their production. There is no such thing as an unbiased win rate.
  • If every player were a one trick who never got banned, all heroes would have a 50% win rate outside of champ and bronze.
• If kiriko, cassidy, or sojourn were picked in the same way heroes like junk, pharah and sym are picked, their win rates would skyrocket. Yet we consider pharah and junk situationally strong, while the heroes who don't have hard counters are ironically considered weak precisely because their counters are soft so they don't trigger their player to swap.
• In most ranks, the strength of individual heroes is immaterial. You are all in the same rank. You are a diamond D.Mon, playing against a diamond Junker Queen. It doesn't matter that D.Mon is way stronger than JQ right now. You're both diamond. The game can, by definition, go either way. The important balance questions are whether it's fun/healthy for a hero to be in the meta and be seen in many games, and whether the value they get feels commensurate with the skill they take.
• Strength is contextual. Tracer seems to have shot up this season despite not getting any buffs. It's probably because doctrine and support sombra both synergize with her well. Other dps heroes naturally fell because they're getting crowded out by heroes who are stronger with sombra and doctrine. This is similar, but not exactly the same as those heroes getting weaker.
• The best information we can get from win rate and pick rate stats comes from differences. The differences between patches, the differences between ranks, and the differences between regions, for example. All of these ways of looking at these stats give us a lot more interesting and useful information than just their raw values.
  • There are, of course, some cases where we can be confident raw wr/pr data says what it appears to. Doctrine, sombra, genji and tracer this season have very very high pick rates and win rates. Thus, they almost certainly don't have the pick patterns that tend to produce high win rates, yet they have extremely high win rates. These heroes are clearly stronger than the average other hero in their role right now. But tracer didn't get stronger on her own, sombra made her stronger, so we still have to look beyond just the stats to understand what's going on. One could say that definitely makes tracer strong, but in games where doctrine and sombra are banned what does her win rate become?
• Some heroes can be strong and be healthy for the game! Way too much of the balance discussion is about which heroes are stronger than average and which are weaker than average, and therefore they must get nerfs and buffs respectively because every hero must be equal. Personally, I'm of the opinion that Overwatch recently has been rather balanced. Strong new hero releases are hotfixed fairly quickly to parity and it's okay if they're strong for the half a season where they're new. The important balance discussions we need to have should be about which heroes belong in the meta or have been out of the meta for too long, or in it for too long, and other things of that nature.
  • For example, I am someone who thinks Cassidy gets too much value compared to the skill he takes, particularly with flash. I think his value-ceiling exceeds what his skill-ceiling justifies. He is too well-rounded and being a counter against heroes that are typically more difficult/interesting/complex/fun makes him a fun-vampire. Even when not playing against the heroes he counters he's reliably strong anyway. Now, a reasonable person might take the counter position that he is a "necessary evil" to keep dive and high-mobility heroes from dominating the meta. Or they might argue that the simplicity of his kit makes him a very good onboarding hero for new players. I think that he can serve those functions without being quite this strong on all fronts. This is the kind of reasonable discussion we should be having. Instead, the discussion gets shut down from the jump by people who insist that cassidy is weak despite his strong consistent presence in the picks of top 500 and OWCS players.
    • The argument explaining why Cassidy can be strong despite his win rate is mathematically sound, but it is involved and can be counterintuitive even for those who have a strong background in math or stats. Additionally, players' egos are wrapped up in their mains' strength. A weaker hero means they're personally more skilled and also more likely to get buffed in the future. Many many times I've made points that are just how the math works without any specific claims about a hero, and I still get a dozen downvotes because some players take the fact that raw win rates are not everything as an attack. So, now we're having a silly discussion about stats and math, often with people who are intent on misunderstanding, when the important discussion we should be having is about things like skill curves, fairness, and fun. And, as I'm saying, it's not actually essential that we answer the question, "is he stronger or weaker than the average dps?" I'm not really motivated by wanting him to be exactly as strong as every other hero. I'm motivated by my feeling that he is too strong for the skill he takes, and he is strong in ways that I feel are unfun. This is not a quantitative discussion for either person in the argument, but we're both pretending it is.
  • The flip side is a hero like tracer. There have been seasons where she is too strong and seasons where she is too weak. But I think it's generally agreed that she should have a place in the meta. She is a high skill ceiling hero that is a lot of fun to play and losing to her doesn't usually feel like she got free value with little effort. Last season she had a high pick and win rate in GM+ and I think that's entirely appropriate for her, and Overwatch would be a lesser game if the hero in that spot were heroes like Widow or Roadhog.

Like I was saying, I have a larger manifesto I'm working on that gets into all the nitty gritty about how win rates are produced and all the stats stuff I do find genuinely interesting. But for the purpose of balance discussions, I just wanted to make this post saying that we've lost the plot when we argue under the premise that the best form Overwatch can take is one where every hero has equal pick rates and a 50% win rate. The important balance questions are about skill curves and fun. Win rate discussions very often bury those important questions.

OWCS Major 1 is added for 2024 since the date and event matches Champions clash for 2025-2026.

• English Streams Rebounded Spectacularly: After losing a third of its peak audience in 2025, English broadcasts surged +169.1% to achieve a record-breaking peak of 155,795 viewers.
• Co-Streaming Fueled the Explosion: This turnaround was directly driven by a shift toward community casting, which expanded unique broadcasting channels from 80 to over 250 YoY.
• Sustained Japanese Growth: Japanese viewership climbed consistently across a three-year horizon, growing +138% in 2025 and hitting a new peak of 75,058 in 2026.
• Untapped Hyper-Growth Markets: Arabic and Spanish streams led 2026 growth with staggering gains of +315% and +281%. Expanding local talent pools and dedicated co-streaming hubs will instantly capture these infrastructure-starved communities.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Korea Stage 3 - Regular Season

They went from a dominant stage 2 to this, what happened? Did the new meta destroy them this much?

Saw that this Dallas Fuel feature wasn't posted here and wanted to share it here after just seeing it today.

I remember during owl season 1 there was a game where one team was playing hog and the other team was playing dive. They were playing on junkertown and when the winston jumped onto the point to stall, the roadhog whole hogged and yeeted the winston off the map. Am i delusional or did this actually happen, and does someone have the link?

Switched to PC from console. Emerald all roles right now. I never played Winston on console but I have started to now on PC.

This character is literally hitler. Like you can just do whatever you want. His bubble uptime is outrageous now. If you ban bastion there's nothing that can really stop you. Like yeah w chain Mizuki the shield I just plopped in your face is gonna HATE that lil bro.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Korea Stage 3 - Regular Season

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Korea Stage 3 - Regular Season

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - EMEA Stage 3 - Regular Season

Streams
https://www.twitch.tv/ow_esports
https://www.youtube.com/@ow_esports

Reddit-stream

Schedule

This thread pulls match data from this liquipedia page. If it's out of date, you can help by updating that page. If something is wrong or missing please ping u/Watchful1 in the comments.

Theres been a lot of talk about this for years, but if ever there was a time it would be now. They have lost two of their star players in Proper and Stalk3r, a third star player in Hanbin has essentially vanished off of the map similar to how Proper and Stalk3r did when they first started becoming disgruntled even though the current meta would likely be more effective with Hanbin over Someone. There have also been posts from Falcons players joking about how they will "come back in stage 4" which may very well indicate a lack of interest and resignation, possibly due to a known region swap.

Right now EMEA has only three partner teams compared to the four of NA and KR. Even with an expansion for next year (likely Geekay receiving a partner spot) Falcons could still slot into EMEA easily for a total of five partner teams in the region, though this depends on any expansions the scene has in the next season. I think this is the likely plan, because there just doesn't seem to a future for Falcons in Korea. Many of the top stars of the region already have bad experiences with them, and their current team looks like the completely lack any motivation. A region swap may be the best outcome for the team, and allow for a new team/teams to join the Korean region and take up a partner spot (I know people want GenG but I do not trust Arnold at all after the mess he made in EMEA).

Overall, thoughts? Do we think its finally happening, or do Falcons double down. I doubt they leave OW, though I suppose it is a possibility. OW has been a central to their esports operation, literally carrying them in 2025 to the number one spot in the EWC club championship, and with it being one of their most successful esport brands until this year I highly doubt they drop it entirely. That said, they have spent a decent amount on it and in 2026 did not receive the return they were likely hoping for. Maybe they do shutter the entire esport? I doubt it.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - China Stage 3 - Regular Season

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - China Stage 3 - Regular Season

If my team is up against this team do you guys have any tips on how to beat them?

I figure most people would say the hog rework was a success. He’s more interesting as a not one-shot bot, and I figure as players get used to him they’ll learn and perfect a more healthy playstyle for the character.

Who should be next? Which heroes are a bit of a problem, in terms of how they interact with the game and certain members of the cast? Bad or good, just straight up fun killing design?

Interested to see what you think.

So it's not exactly a secret that the pro meta often becomes kind of stale, right? Like, Kiri/Lucio has been meta like, atleast a dozen times now. Even before OW2, we had like a year of dive into a year of GOATS into a year of double barrier... it gets stale.

The same picks show up routinely: Tracer, Sojourn, Kiri, Lucio, and Dva are essentially the faces of pro at this point, because they're just such valuable repeat picks. It can become stale, for one... but I think maybe more importantly than that, it affects ladder balance in a really monumental way. Regardless of how terrible stats-wise Kiri or Sojourn get, they still get spammed in Pro, and as a result the perception that they're meta trickles into ladder. The result is that we get a handful of heroes (Kiri, Soj, Dva... dare I say Sym) who are basically kept in pro-jail because they're too relevant in coordinated games.

Well, I've got a bit of an unconventional theory. I actually don't think Kiri, or Soj, or any of these other heroes are actually that good. As in: If you were to restart OW2 today, with all the heroes in their current states patched back in with players having zero knowledge of how to use them, I think they'd be considered fairly weak. I actually think that, even in pro, these characters would most likely be considered pretty weak. This is because professional teams value practice and experience over a heroes actual strength. This is a trend which has been seen repeatedly: Pro's played GOATS long-past the point where it was the strongest comp, not because it was actually the "meta," but because they had invested so much time into learning the strategy that the practice overrode the value that "stronger" comps provided; quad DPS/Ball might have been better, but because nobody had practiced it, it simply couldn't compare to GOATS.

Let's put it this way: At this point pro players have become so accustomed to playing around Kiri or Sojourn that even as "weak" heroes, the practice which they have invested into them overrides their actual strength. It doesn't matter how weak you make Kiri or Soj, the players are so proficient in using the utility which they provide that it outweighs the raw power of any other individual hero. As long as these heroes remain in rotation, players will continue to perfect them, and the gap between their "practiced" strength and "fundamental" strength continues to widen. I will quickly mention: yes these heroes are also just better in coordinated environments, but again that largely has to do with the amount of time people have spent learning and experimenting with them IN those environments. Once again, this is basically what we saw with GOATS: players got so good at playing the individual heroes/comp, that even when these heroes became "weak," the amount of time that players had spent perfecting them outweighed their weakness. When this becomes cyclical, meaning that someone like Kiri keeps getting played for her "practiced" strength over her "fundamental" strength, you get situations where the gap between a heroes power in pro and ladder become ridiculously, problematically wide.

This isn't just a trend exclusive to Overwatch esports either. In league, we saw the same thing happening. For example, Aatrox was extremely powerful for an extended period after his rework, and even when he had been nerfed down to an extremely low winrate pro players continued to pick him, because the practice that they had on the champion outweighed the nerfs. Karma is another great example, she's a 3-lane flex pick who had been played and practiced so regularly that she remained the highest priority enchanter in pro play even when she was at a 33% winrate in pro, at ~47% on ladder. Basically, these characters became so practiced that they became unbalanceable; the devs were left with two options: either nerf Karma/Aatrox while they were already at extremely negative winrates on both ladder and in pro games, or buff them and cause them to skyrocket in priority in pro.

League actually found a solution to this: fearless draft. Essentially the way that fearless works is that once a champion has been picked or banned, they cannot be used in future matches in the 5-set games. So, if Ahri gets picked in game 1, she is no longer eligible to be played in games 2, 3, 4, or 5. I think that this is the system that we need in Overwatch, and I think we have enough heroes that it's a viable option.

I think we as a community simply need to admit and acknowledge, no matter what we do certain heroes are ALWAYS going to be pro-play monsters. Kiri, Tracer, Sojourn, Dva, ETC are ALWAYS going to be relevant in pro play, and no amount of balancing is ever going to have them in a place where they can be both viable on ladder, and not pick/ban status in pro. Sure, we could rework all these heroes, but realistically I think that's unfeasible, upsetting to players who like these heroes as they are, and eventually new heroes will simply fill in the old gaps. Instead, I think it's time that Overwatch moved to the fearless system for professional matches. This of course means: once a hero has been picked once (per team), they can no longer be played in future matches.

Obviously, this is not an air-tight system, ESPECIALLY because Overwatch is a game that is already built around swapping heroes. However, I think there are solutions to this, and I don't think the cons outweigh the pros. Most obviously, the problem here has to do with how hero swapping is handled. In League, once you've picked your champions you can't swap them, and enemies get to pick around your champs; in Overwatch, you can swap and enemies don't know what you're picking. Well, I'd argue there are two ways you could go about this, 1: any hero who you swap to is now banned from being played in future matches, or 2: the hero you spent the most time on within an individual match is the hero who gets banned. I think it's important to recognize that in pro games players don't really make swaps that often, so I actually think that system 1 would be just fine. System 2, on the other hand, leaves more room for nuance. I should also mention: hero locking after playing them should be applied per team, that meaning: if team 1 plays Kiri, team 2 would still have access to her because they haven't picked her yet.

In any case for how hero swapping would be handled, the pros of this system are overwhelming. Because players would not be able to rely on the same handful of heroes for every game, we'd see meta diversity like we've never seen before. There would still be room for the pro play staples, but they wouldn't be as oppressive/dominant than we otherwise see them being. Instead of Kiri being played 5/5 games, she would, at most, get played in 2/5 games. We would also likely see heroes who we don't often see being played in pro make appearances, heroes who often get sidelined for stronger alternatives like Genji or Baptiste would be more likely to appear in later-stage games when higher priority picks have already been exhausted. Teams would be less likely to run constant mirror-matches of the current "best comp" because they want to save some of their "priority picks" to sprinkle in between games. Niche picks would see more playtime/higher priority because they could be used as economic alternatives on their best maps, such as Junkrat seeing more play on Lijang because there's very little opportunity cost to taking him out of your future rotation. Perhaps greatest of all, this would also stop the cyclical practice cycles which make certain heroes permanent professional staples; Kiriko would undoubtably still be the highest priority pick, but now that she can only be played in 1/5 games, players would have to diversify their hero pools beyond her, and as a result they'd have less time to invest into her specifically.

This is just my take, I'm sure this has been suggested before, go crazy and poke holes in my logic.

TL;DR: If players can play the same hero every single game it becomes optimal to invest all of your time into only practicing/perfecting them, which results in massive gaps in strength between pro players who have invested hundreds of hours into 1 hero, and average players. To fix this issue, we need a solution that prevents pro players from being able to pour all their effort into these individual heroes.

I recently had this game on tank where I felt like no matter what I do my backline just dies. I was killing 3 every fight but my team just does nothing and falls over. Am I doing something wrong or is the matchmaking just broken?

My hero pool is Mauga, D.Va, Orisa and Roadhog in case that helps.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - China Stage 3 - Regular Season

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - China Stage 3 - Regular Season

Streams
https://www.twitch.tv/ow_esports
https://www.youtube.com/@ow_esports

Reddit-stream

Schedule

This thread pulls match data from this liquipedia page. If it's out of date, you can help by updating that page. If something is wrong or missing please ping u/Watchful1 in the comments.

They actively lower skill floor and allow certain heroes to get away stuff they really have no business doing.

A good example of this is genji. In my opinion he needed the buffs he got, his damage was still fucked cause of season 9 until recently. After the buffs though, its clear that he's a beast now, especially in low elo, which is weird. He's a high skill floor hero who performs exceptionally well the lower in rank you go. The expected behavior in my opinion should be the inverse, similar to tracer. Why this isnt the cause can be explained through his perks. Two of them grant him some form of healing, while also being stackable, paired with the flanker sub role and its no wonder that he performs so well in lower elo.

This level of free sustain is most effective in lower ranks, since players are worse at punishing bad flanks and denying resources.

That said, genji is not the only hero with this issue. Anran who already has a low skill floor, becomes even more brain dead thanks to her heat shield and hungering blaze perks. This is why she can feel like an undying mosquito at times.

Vendetta, my main, has the same issue with siphoning strike. The amount of stuff she can get away with it online is crazy. In my opinion the flanker passive should be her only form of sustain.

I'm also not a big fan of tracers quantom entanglement perk either. She's a hero specifically balanced around 175hp, why are we giving her bonus health?

Freja with her updraft perk, emre with heatsink and a few others are also good examples of needlessly adding sustain to heroes that shouldnt have it.

If a hero needs life steal, healing, or bonus health to function, then make it base kit.

I dont know if I explained this well, but I hope I got the point across.