Overwatch League Week 5/Stage 1 Recap
Notable Matches
LA Valiant vs Seoul Dynasty
With serious stage playoff implications on the line two of the best teams in Overwatch League faced off. The Valiant took what was once the most formidable team in the league to the woodshed and defeated the Dynasty 3-0. The performance of the Dynasty has fallen off a cliff since Week 3. While still sitting at 6-3 after this game, overall map wins are what determines placement in the case of tiebreakers for the Stage playoffs and Seoul have been dropping enough maps to make it an issue while the Valiant have not. The 3-0 win by the Valiant followed by a 4-0 win and Seoul dropping 2 maps in a 3-2 win over the San Francisco Shock would lock the Dynasty out of the Stage playoffs and vault the Valiant ahead.
Philadelphia Fusion vs Boston Uprising
In another important match for the playoffs, the Boston Uprising continued their hot streak with a 4-0 win and eliminating the Fusion from Playoff consideration. DreamKasper and Striker put on a show and the Fusion literally had no answer for the duo. The shutout put Boston in a good position in terms of map score but they would still need certain pieces to fall into place before they could claim that 3rd playoff spot.
London Spitfire vs Houston Outlaws
The Spitfire were heading into Week 5 the hardest schedule of week 5 starting with the Houston Outlaws. The Outlaws were victorious with the help of Linkzr who returned after missing last week with a bug that benched a few Overwatch League players. The Outlaws kept the Spitfire DPS in check en route to a 3-1 victory. In doing so, the Outlaws were able to move ahead of the LA Valiant in the standings via map score and secured the 2nd seed in the Stage playoffs.
London Spitfire vs New York Excelsior
In a clash of Overwatch League Titans, NYXL were victorious over the Spitfire with a 3-2 win and secured the number 1 seed in Stage 1 and will hold the league lead going into Stage 2. Saebyeolbe and Libero made their case for best DPS duo in the league seemingly only allowing the Spitfire to only do what they wanted at times (which was nothing) and outperformed the Spitfire DPS. Though the Spitfire lost this head to head matchup, by just winning one map, they eliminated the LA Valiant from Stage playoff consideration.
Stage Playoff Matches
London Spitfire vs Houston Outlaws
Playing the Outlaws for the second time this week. Learning from the mistakes of their first meeting, the Spitfire convincingly beat the Outlaws in the First-to-3 match between 2nd and 3rd in the league. Profit and Birdring out classed the Outlaws’ attack, winning 3-1. The Spitfire did not allow the only Western roster in the Stage playoffs to get comfortable and thwarted any plans that they had.
London Spitfire vs New York Excelsior
Playing in the First-to-3 match for the $100,000 Stage winner team bonus the Spitfire played the Excelsior for the second time for the day. New York broke out to an early 2-0 lead and just needed one more map to win the bonus. Then the Spitfire brought out all their tricks in the book. Behind unrelenting DPS and Tank play the Spitfire came from 0-2 down and forced a deciding game 5. With London going first on the Escort map Dorado, they managed to push the payload almost to the end but still got just 2 out of 3, leaving the door open for NYXL to secure all 3 points. London DPS players Profit and Birdring did all they could to frustrate the NYXL supports and stalled their push. The Spitfire made the finishing blow in Streets phase after Profit on the Junkrat used the RIP-tire on the NYXL Mercy and the deck of cards fell from there, securing the comeback and winning the $100,000 Team bonus. NYXL walk away with the $25,000 2nd place team bonus but seeing that they blew a 2-0 lead, they left a hefty chunk of money on the table.
League Notes
Free Agency and Player News
With the end of Stage 1, the Free Agent Signing window will officially open. Teams like the Dallas Fuel and Florida Mayhem can now officially sign aKm and Zappis respectively to their rosters. Official news of Shanghai’s 4 additions should come within the coming days. Teams can also trade players amongst each other. Personally, I can see Dallas Fuel DPS player Effect being traded or released from rumors of Effect being disgruntled and he has not played in the last 3 Fuel matches. The Signing and Transfer Window will remain open until the start of Stage 3 on April 3rd.
xQc’s suspension will expire as of the end of Stage 1.
Scheduling
The inaugural season of Overwatch League was bound to go through a few growing pains, scheduling being among one of them. A few teams like London and Seoul had a dreaded scheduling issue regarding international teams where they had the last match of the day then had the first match the day after. London especially had it rough having the late match Friday night that started at 7:30 PST then having the first match Saturday 11:00 AM PST.
Another issue was the staggered start times because more matches were going into extra time and requiring 5th sets, sometimes leaving matches to end around 1:30 AM EST.
The final scheduling issue was with where the stage playoffs were set after the final Stage games. In the case of Stage 1, London again bore the burden of tough luck, having the first game of the day followed by playing in the 2nd vs 3rd game then after winning, immedately playing for in the Stage Playoff Final. In total, The London Spitfire played 14 games in the span of 11 hours. Houston who also played Saturday, played 9 games. Dedicated fans at Blizzard Arena and watching the stream also felt the fatigue of 11-12 hours of Overwatch content and in terms of international audiences the time was especially brutal. In the middle of the Stage Final, Overwatch League Commissioner Nate Nanzer tweeted to the fans that they will look into having future Stage Playoff matches the next day on Sunday and also teasing other possible future changes to scheduling.
Maps and Meta-game
Stage 2 will usher in the patch that has the updates to Mercy and Junkrat that the consumer version has had for about 2 weeks as of time of writing. With Mercy being unpopular amongst pros (other than Snow from Boston Uprising) the idea of needing Mercy and the strength of the Resurrect in Valkyrie in order to win will no longer exist. The meta was especially hard on teams that had support players that were not very strong using Mercy like the Florida Mayhem and will allow other teams like NYXL to be more flexible to their support heroes. Junkrat’s mines were also a crutch crowd control tactic when throwing with reckless abandon. Now with significant damage drop off in the blast radius, players will need to be more precise with the mines that will be more of a movement nuisance than a tilt-inducing deathbringer.
No confirmation, but we could see a new rotation of maps in Stage 2. It was apparent early on that Stage 1 had its fixed map rotations for the styles of maps (Control, Assault, Escort, Hybrid). In stage 2 we might finally get to see new maps such as:
Watchpoint Gibraltar (Escort), Nepal (Assault), King’s Row (Hybrid), Hollywood (Hybrid), Hanamura (Assault), Volskaya Industries (Assault), Route 66 (Escort) Blizzard World (Hybrid){Blizzard World has not yet been added to the consumer Competitive maps pool. That will happen at the start of Season 9 so it is unlikely we will see it in Stage 2.}
Final Stage 1 Thoughts
Coming toward the end of the Stage, the skill gap between the teams became tighter as games often needed a 5th match to decide a winner. The once formidable all-Korean rosters all lost in the first 2 days of week 4. The top 7 teams were all mathematically eligible for the Stage playoff before eventual top teams asserted themselves. The Boston Uprising are the most surprising of the tier 2 teams, after starting the Stage shaky and unsure of their identity, they rattle off 4 straight wins. going through London and LA Valiant to become one of the formidable teams in the league. Dallas Fuel, Florida Mayhem, and Shanghai Dragons all had poor records but looked better toward the end of the stage. With the end of the stage and the change of meta, we may see these teams play much better in Stage 2.
Season Standings after Stage 1