This week’s Overwatch competitive Hero Pools remove 4 damage heroes

Overwatch developers are getting progressively wilder with their Hero Pools experiments in competitive mode. The Hero Pools feature normally “disables” four heroes in competitive mode in an effort to stir up the week’s meta or most popular team composition. This week, the developers have decided to throw caution to the wind and disable six heroes, including four damage dealers. 

Soldier: 76, McCree, Widowmaker, and Sombra will be disabled from March 26 to April 2. Tank D.Va and support Baptiste are also “banned” this week. This is the first time that more than four heroes have been removed from the rotation since the Hero Pools feature was brought to competitive mode earlier this month. This is Baptiste’s second time being disabled.

The past two weeks of competitive mode Hero Pools have been an ongoing experiment for developers. While the Overwatch League is bound to the rules of disabling one support, one tank, and two damage heroes each week, the competitive mode Hero Pools get a bit wilder. Last week, the developers disabled two tanks. Two weeks ago, two supports were disabled. Having six heroes out of rotation is unheard of and will be tough for players to navigate. 

While there are plenty of DPS heroes for players to pick up, this week’s competitive mode Hero Pools target one specific portion of damage dealers. Every damage hero disabled this week falls under the category of “hitscan,” or heroes with weapons that deal damage in a straight line with no delay. Hitscan heroes are normally used to take out aerial threats, like Pharah, or get critical shots on quick heroes, like Tracer. 

Without the threat of most hitscan heroes, Pharah will be back in the competitive mode meta in a big way this week. Tank D.Va is another common threat to Pharah, so expect to see a lot of the hero, paired with Mercy. It’ll be up to enterprising projectile heroes like Genji or sharpshooting supports like Ana to take out the aerial threat. 

Competitive mode Hero Pools are reset at 1pm CT every Thursday. This round of Hero Pools will last until April 2.