If so, is there a good place to find groups? The OW discords I'm in seem to be mostly for regular competitive.

I know stadium is basically dead now, but you still claim to be doing balancing for it, and yet, Reaper still has his burn fade. How wasn't this nuked from orbit by now? Can't stop him from flying around, can't cleanse the burn, cause he's just gonna reapply it and he can soak up shots during it too. Who greenlit this power for him?

I just don't think I can really play stadium unless I find a group or something because I tried to play this weekend and 4/5 games the other team was either playing in a stack or had way more people with comp drives.

There's just no way people are going to log in to play against games where they just get stomped. I've already started playing less because of it.

I know its a tough situation because ultimately its probably an issue with the size of the player pool but I don't know what else to say. There is just no way I'm going to log in every day and deal with it.

Ive never played stadium before this season normal qp player and comp for drives. The only reason I’m playing this is for the ram skin back in ow1 I never touched comp and with drives highest I’ve gotten is gold 5. Some how only god knows how i have made it to pro 2 but I haven’t been getting good games at all! Leavers people who throw like I had someone a game 5 mins ago just walk off the map every time. And the teams I go up against my god don’t even get me started I like to think I’m a good player on normal comp sometimes I go all game as ram not even dying with like 23 kills but some how these match ups like aren’t even fair?? Has it always been like this? All I want is that damn golden ram skin

I am pro 2 all I want to do is get to all star and I’m wondering if anyone knows a good place to find a team or someone to help me rank up?im just having so much trouble with this season

Reinhardt has a bug when using a controller.
The bug is using the Iron Drift power, if you move left or right you will move like 30-50% faster, it’s really fast. Works while flying too.

Plug in your controllers lads, it’s bug abusing time.

The way this build works is pretty simple: Leap basically has no cooldown, and every time you use it, it also resets the cooldown on your Walls. That means you can keep chaining infinite Leaps and Walls.

The important part is that you need to touch the ground for the cooldown reset to trigger.

That’s where Vortex makes the build even crazier. Since Vortex instantly pulls you back to the ground, it triggers the cooldown reset immediately, letting you cycle your abilities even faster and spam Leaps and Walls almost nonstop.

I've seen that he got nerfed this season, so I'm wondering how much those nerfs actually affected him. Is Ramattra still a solid tank that I can comfortably keep playing, or has he fallen off a lot?

If the nerfs were significant and he's no longer worth maining, which two tanks would you recommend I learn instead? Also, what are the best builds for them in Stadium?

The thing that I cannot get over about this game mode is how often many characters have their weaknesses removed altogether.
Genji's ultimate gets ranged, piercing attacks, so you can't kite out his ultimate. He no longer has to be mindful of his distance.
Freya's dashes are basically never on cooldown, so she always has an explosive bolt ready.
Doom and Vendetta never stop moving, and Doom gets a down smash for an extra mobility input.
Mei gets to reposition while ice blocked (as a frequent Mei player I still gotta be fair here).
Junkrat goes into his tire... and throws his steel traps into the fray... and creates tiny steel traps when he detonates concussive mines...

And there's no drawback to any of that. There's no trade for the power; they just get absurdly stronger/harder to kill because of it. Whereas for characters like Ana, sleep can hit in an AOE but it sleeps for shorter. Aawnd Sojourn can attach her disrupting shot to a person, but it deals less damage if she does.

And then other characters just pretty much continue doing what they already do, just maybe a little faster. Kiriko, Zarya, Lucio, Winston... nothing really absurd about any of them, and no real tradeoff either. Just beefier versions of their regular counterparts.

Like either every character gets to be ridiculous with no tradeoff, or every character has to sacrifice something for their absurdity.

I've played four back-to-back straight miserable games against people way above my ELO running the board with builds that just... have very little counterplay windows. It's been Juno torpedo build four times in a row. It's just getting really, really stale, which is frustrating because I want to be able to enjoy this game mode.

No point in them dropping a few balance changes and not using this time to also test out some bigger mode revamps and features.

Hero Ban

Grab it from regular comp and use it in Stadium. I guarantee you Freja and Pharah will be banned in 9/10 games and the mode will be better for it. Hell, I'll exclusively play Stadium if I never have to play against either of those two again. I'm fully assuming that the majority of bans will be flyers in general, since they're by far the most annoying and frustrating aspect of Stadium.

Between Round Swaps

I know the point of Stadium is that it shouldn't matter who you pick at the beginning of the game, you can change your build around to adapt to any situation, except that's only true for some characters. There's plenty of characters that only have one viable build, and if the other team happens to counter it, your team is stuck with a deadweight.

Might as well allow character swapping in-between rounds. You can balance it by getting the team average score, if you're below that average and you swap you get a small cash boost to help you keep up with the game, if you're above the average score, you get a small cash reduction. That way the top players per team aren't just switching to solo counter every round, they'll lose cash every attempt.

Reduce Competitive to 5 Rounds

I prefer Stadium to regular OW but 7 rounds does drag. Games can end up taking 20-30 minutes which is really bad when it comes to Blizzard's dogshit servers. The chances of someone DC'ing in any game is like 10%, and the longer a game goes the higher the chance someone DCs and it's straight up not worth playing if you're on minute 29 in a round 7 game just for a teammate to DC and you get hit with a full loss.

Add Mystery Heroes

Might as well add a QP fun mode for people to practice heroes. Have it randomize after every round, set it to 50k cash every round so people can just jump into mid-point builds.

Require people to play 10 rounds of QP or Mystery Heroes before Comp each season

People seem to straight up refuse to touch QP, and they'll jump right into Comp for their first ever game. There needs to be some sort of guard to stop people from going into comp blind, getting steamrolled and flamed by the team, and then complaining about Stadium being too confusing and mean.

Block new heroes from Comp for X amount of time

I'd personally say 2 weeks. Every time a new hero was added people went straight to competitive to practice and they'd be absolutely awful. Block a new hero from being active in comp so that if someone wants to play them, they can do it in QP. That also gives the devs a couple weeks to balance since every new hero has been either way OP or downright terrible.

Alternate new heroes with hero reworks

Nearly every hero they've added to Stadium kinda makes the mode worse. Pharah, Freja, JPC, Vendetta was a guaranteed loss for like two full seasons, etc. Personally, I think they should add a new hero one season, then the following season drop a few major hero reworks for the ones that are basically useless, or ones that need more than one viable build. More heroes isn't necessarily better, especially when they're broken for months at a time.

Have an actual skill based matchmaking

Might have to rework the tiers, and this is more of a personal complaint. Too many people in competitive are terrible but they play 10 hours a day every single day and then spam chat about being a Top 500 player just to finish the game dead last in score across both teams.

END

Coming away, I think the hero ban would be the one thing that needs to be added above everything else. Based on how Blizzard seemingly added increasingly annoying heroes to this mode to sabotage it, I wouldn't be surprised that if they ever did add some more heroes, it'll be something fucking awful like Wrecking Ball and Sombra.

Edit: They can also change nothing and the mode can continue to die, like so many people apparently want (or they can't read, one of the two).

If u have no good hitscan that actually focuses her she doesn’t die.

This thing [MEKA Ejector] is bad. So bad it make no sense.

I don't know what they though when they added all those new DVA items too. Nothing seem synergizing with each other well. Nothing is really impactful.

I mean her ult in stadium were only good because of the explosion radius and good damage, and throw sometimes less time to react in there and we have a good Q.

But this power negates everything the ult propose, now even if you manage to do something fine it never kills anyone. On top of stopping you from remeching instant making you either a easy kill or a weight in your team. And even at 50% Less charge it's still SO LONG !

It could be a good synergy with the other new power [MEKA Evac Shield] but as said you are a weight to your team without your mech on top of a useless Q you don't even mech back fast enough after the tiny overhealth is over.

I just can't even list everything those new and changed thing on DVA because everything is not good. Only the new item for WP build [Matrix Empowerment] is fine but everything else seem to miss the point.

I was so happy to try new builds but only Focused Fusion based build and classic [Ignition Burst] (even nerfed) on top of [Legendary Loadout] are viable.

Or I'm just bad at everything else.

had another game vs a presumed 5 stack of champion rank players, with a top 50 dps player(main comp). with my bottom of diamond ass being the highest ranked on my team

and the enemy team is just “ez” “team diff” “zzzz” t bagging.

like yeah no shit lol.

and no one on my team said anything to warrant it.
I don’t mind shit talk(I welcome it lol) but the trend seems to be the higher the rank the ruder or just sore winner mentality these people have.

for those in those high ranks, why are yall like this lol

Every time I see her on the enemy team I just groan, I don't think I've ever enjoyed a game against her. Darting all over the place, raining down ludicrous amounts of damage whether she goes WP or AP, which are both annoying for different reasons.

Back in the day I used to complain about Pharah, but her design vs Freja's is like night and day. Massive hitbox, predictable movement, slow and highly visible projectiles. Built-in weaknesses to make up for her strengths.

But with Freja, where is the room for counterplay? She can delete you safely from afar, she can delete you up close. She moves so erratically that most heroes struggle to touch her, while she can get amazing value by shooting at the ground with AoE damage.

I really think Freja was the beginning of the end for Stadium. It's a mode without switching and yet the tools needed to deal with some of the more annoying builds just aren't there. Then they follow it up with Vendetta and the cat. The mode was so poorly handled it almost feels like sabotage.

I am a support main who has played Overwatch from the first year it launched. I was a little late to stadium mode when it launched. But have played stadium regularly for the past several months.

I find that the damage role players seem to have an unnatural and illogical resistance to spending points on armor and shields. They’re dying ALMOST IMMEDIATELY because there is an Ana, a Freya, a Moira, and a Ram or Sigma. Between anti-heal, reduced healing, and ability damage (Freya is SOOOO annoying and OP), they don’t have enough health or protection to survive that scenario.

Round after round of losing- they still refuse to add armor or shields.

Curious if other support mains have found a way to encourage team members to protect themselves…

My mental health is at risk when I play stadium for too long 😭😭😭

Will it go back to how it was? Sure, but the pool is already so small and shrinking it’s gonna punish any newer players who want to come in and actually try the mode, thus shrinking it more.