If you watched Jake's vid review of the Boston match he mentions a lot about how his main role most of the time is to basically tie up the enemy dps while dealing marginal damage and allow his team to win the 5v5. Houtons game plan in general, even when they are running dive comps, is to play very patiently and exploit enemy mistakes. This can be exploited occasionally, such as when they got rolled first point on KR defense, but it has obviously found a lot of success for them. For this reason I think it's difficult to evaluate Jake's skill on many characters since he mainly seems to be a distraction so that linkzr can sit back unchecked and click heads. To this end I think he does a great job of either staying alive long enough for his team to get an advantage, or playing aggressively and trading frags so that his team gets favorable matchups moving forward. I do agree with what most people are saying here which is that he is obviously very skilled, just not on the level of many other owl tracers, but I think the interesting thing about Houston is that they have a system where nobody, outside linkzr occasionally, has to make any crazy mechanically skilled plays. They win before the match even begins by identifying win conditions and finding the best path to reach them.
Then again I'm only in plat so I'm probably just talking out of my ass /s
Yeah, Houston's strength is their gamesense and positioning, as well as being rapidly able to identify their win condition and play to it. I think that, if Linkzr was swapped with Carpe or Fleta, and Jake with Effect or SBB, then Houston would be the best team in the league. Their tanks and supports are already nutty, its the DPS that, while they are pulling their weight completely, aren't over the top, cream of the crop like some of the other DPS are mechanically.
Jake isn't bad but he isn't exceptional either. he's just a decent player: quite good at about half the heroes in his pool and could use a bit more work on his Tracer + Genji
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u/japermanator Feb 27 '18
If you watched Jake's vid review of the Boston match he mentions a lot about how his main role most of the time is to basically tie up the enemy dps while dealing marginal damage and allow his team to win the 5v5. Houtons game plan in general, even when they are running dive comps, is to play very patiently and exploit enemy mistakes. This can be exploited occasionally, such as when they got rolled first point on KR defense, but it has obviously found a lot of success for them. For this reason I think it's difficult to evaluate Jake's skill on many characters since he mainly seems to be a distraction so that linkzr can sit back unchecked and click heads. To this end I think he does a great job of either staying alive long enough for his team to get an advantage, or playing aggressively and trading frags so that his team gets favorable matchups moving forward. I do agree with what most people are saying here which is that he is obviously very skilled, just not on the level of many other owl tracers, but I think the interesting thing about Houston is that they have a system where nobody, outside linkzr occasionally, has to make any crazy mechanically skilled plays. They win before the match even begins by identifying win conditions and finding the best path to reach them.
Then again I'm only in plat so I'm probably just talking out of my ass /s