What to Expect with Hero Pools Around the Corner

Hero Pools: What are they?

Written by: Landon McBee

In case you have not been staying up with the developer updates, lead game designer for Overwatch, Jeff Kaplan, announced a concept called Hero Pools. In essence, hero pools are a rotational set of heroes that would be unavailable to select in competitive play for a certain set of time. With the current Overwatch competitive season ending soon, competitive hero pools are right around the corner. Love it or hate it - hero pools are coming, and these are the things that you can expect. Below I will include the developer update where Jeff Kaplan discusses and announces hero pools himself.

How do they work?

When hero pools come into play during the coming competitive season, hero pools will be changing on a weekly basis. These pools will include one tank, 2 DPS, and one support that you would not be able to select in the game during that week. This change is meant to influence the meta and cause, through bans, a more rapidly changing meta.

How will hero pools affect the Overwatch League?

These hero pools have the opportunity to affect the standings of the Overwatch League drastically. As we saw in the 2019 season, some teams thrive in chaos while other teams thrive in perfecting a meta and set strategies. An example of a team that would thrive from chaos would be the Chengdu Hunters. Quite obviously, a team that thrives in perfection of a strategy is the San Francisco Shock. During the 2019 season, we saw the Shock rise to dominance through their perfection of the GOATs meta. However, when GOATs fell out of the meta, we saw the Shock adapt quickly. That is why I do not see hero pools being too much of a problem for elite teams such as the Shock. However, in the mid to lower parts of the standings, I could see this having a large impact. I feel like this change could make the coach role even more important than before, and if teams have less time to perfect a meta, the teams that thrive in chaos inherently have an advantage.

Thank you!

As always, thanks for reading. Do you love hero pools or do you hate them?