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Tired of seeing the same team compositions in your Overwatch ranked games? Blizzard Entertainment is aiming to alleviate these grievances with a new feature named Hero Pools—and this fix is coming sooner than fans may expect.
The Overwatch developer revealed today an upcoming feature named Hero Pools, which will disable a selection of heroes from competitive play for an entire week. Each week’s selection of heroes will be decided by the design team, which could likely lead to the most popular picks being banned first.
The release of Hero Pools aims “to help move players off of the meta or to prevent players from stagnating on any one meta too long,” according to lead game director Jeff Kaplan. With new heroes rotating out of selection every week, team compositions will fluctuate frequently enough to keep players trying out new strategies as seasons progress.
Hero Pools will first be introduced in ranked play during Overwatch’s season 21. The feature won’t affect quickplay or any of the game’s Arcade modes. The Overwatch League will also see the feature implemented into pro play starting March 7.
Even though Hero Pools will release on the live servers in March, the feature is still subject to change after its release.
“This is what I would consider to be something that we would be willing to change if we don’t feel like it’s going correctly,” Kaplan said. “We could make the Hero Pools last longer, we could make the Hero Pools move faster, we could make the Hero Pools change every match—there’s all sorts of ways that we could adjust on this.”
For now, however, the Hero Pools feature will stick to weekly rotations. Fans can look forward to trying the feature out when it launches alongside season 21 on the live servers on March 5.
