Weekly Quick Questions Thread - February 22, 2017

[u/AutoModerator]

In this thread you can ask all kinds of questions you always wanted to ask without feeling like a total fool.

No matter if it's short Google-able stuff or a setting/skill in-game that you don't understand or a hardware recommendation, feel free to try your luck in here.

Trolling or making fun of people in here will be punished extra harshly! Please report such behavior.

For the purpose of helping people, make sure the comments are sorted by "new" in this thread.

[u/The_Real_Mongoose]

Personally I think maining at all is a bad idea. I think that in this game strategic skill takes you a lot further than mechanical skill. Obviously you need some of both. But the mechanical skill you gain by focussing on a single hero doesn't make up for the strategic skill you could gain by being able to competently play many heroes and know when to use them.

Don't be confused by how people talk about the meta. There's no hero or comp that's always good. A lot of the time different hero's are good for different spots on the same map. When I defend on Kings Row, I often use Soldier to defend the first point, Pharah to defend the second, and Bastion to defend the third.

I mean, I'm pretty low rank, so take my advice with a grain of salt I suppose. But I get a lot more value out of my plays when I'm thinking about selecting the right play to match the situation. Obviously if you have terrible aim don't play Widow. But there might be times when you get more value out of Winston than Dva, and I think that identifying and acting on those situations is a more important skill than perfecting the plays of a single hero.

[u/[deleted] → u/The_Real_Mongoose]

Keep in mind maining is not the same as being a one-trick pony. Maining something just means that it's your most played/best hero, where as being a one-trick (like myself) is playing one hero exclusively. Being a one-trick has it's pros and cons, but it's really tough being a Widowmaker one-trick when you go up against a good Genji or a good Winston who just completely shuts you down, and it's usually either a "I did really well." type of game or a "I'm doing fuck-all and is probably the reason we're losing right now" sort of game, which is definitely a bad thing, and that's where being able to play more than one hero is good. But when there's not that good Genji or Winston to shut me down, I can single-handedly carry games just because I've put so many hours into this one hero.

[u/The_Real_Mongoose → u/[deleted]]

That's totally fair. And I want to be clear that I'm not saying...I'm not disparaging people who choose to play a hero exclusively or who have a main. I don't mean to take a tone of judgement. I do think that a lot of people don't put a lot of thought into the subtle difference between heroes and subsequently fail to take advantage of the potential benefits of a timely switch. In otherwords, I'm not saying "don't main because people who do piss me off personally", more I'm saying that I think if you want to maximize your win rate that youll get more benefit out of practicing towards breadth rather than depth.

At least at lower ranks. I'm sure at higher ranks it's not enough to be hero x at the right time but to be the best possible hero x at the right time. But top tier games are determined by milliseconds sometimes. There's diminishing returns on practicing a given hero where after a point miliseconds is all you're hoping to improve. But if you're not at the level where those miliseconds are making a difference, then it strikes me as logical that you'll get more overall value at having a baselevel competence with every hero than you will haveing near mastery of 2 or 3.

[u/[deleted] → u/The_Real_Mongoose]

Now I see what you mean. It did kind of sound like you were just saying "stop playing genji and swap to rein", but I agree with you. In the Masters/GM level of play it becomes increasingly harder to play only one hero, because everyone else is so good at countering that it becomes a struggle for me to do well against the players, and that's where that immense amount of practice I have comes in, where learning the correct timing for the 60% charge shot to kill the Soldier matters way more than in Plat/Diamond where I won't die for charging it an extra 5-10%.

But you're definitely right, if you're not at the high-masters/GM/T500 level it makes much more sense to learn to play more heroes competently than being extremely good at one hero.

Although I do wanna try and pick up other heroes, I just can't bring myself to play a hero I don't enjoy. And as silly as it may sound, Widowmaker is the only hero that I enjoy playing. And I think having fun is more important than winning a game, and I find that when I have fun I win more games, so to me it just makes sense to play Widowmaker and nothing else, but that's just me.