During some recent Overwatch League matches, Houston’s Jake Lyon backed off after his team took the first point to switch out his hero. Turns out it wasn’t to Sombra or maybe his signature Junkrat; it was Torbjörn. A momentous moment for Torb mains and a horrific omen for everyone else.
Screenshot: Blizzard
While this isn’t the first-ever Torb pick in the Overwatch League, it is — as far as we can tell from scouring the stats and replays — the first attack Torb pick, and the distinction is pretty important.
Torbjörn is an engineer who can build a defensive turret and distribute armour packs to his team, fuelled by cogs dropped from dying heroes. His ultimate, Molten Core, powers up both his turret and himself, turning both into unstoppable machines for a short time. Torb naturally veers towards defensive play due to his zone-control, team support kit, but heaven knows that hasn’t stopped players from picking him on offence anyways.
As to Torbjörn’s role on the Houston Outlaws last night, the plan seemed simple: build a turret on top of the payload, drop an Orisa barrier in front of it to soak damage, and ride the cart of death to its endpoint. Teams often run a similar strategy on other maps, albeit with a Bastion. It’s affectionately called a “pirate ship” because of the way the whole team rides on the payload.
How did Jake and the Outlaws fare?
It kind of worked. The Outlaws got from point A to B, but it was more due to Jiri “Linkzr” Masalin’s Widowmaker play and the stellar Houston tank duo than any turret was. Once they reached the next point, Jake switched back to the more common Tracer pick.
Here’s a breakdown of Jake’s stats from his brief stint on Torb.
Screenshot: Twitch
The idea was likely to build up a bunch of armour and surge through to the next payload stop, possibly forcing a team composition switch from the Gladiators. Then, if Jake had Molten Core by the time they reached the last leg of the push, pop that and sail on to through to the win.
Great in theory, but in execution, not so much. Looks like Torb is staying out of the meta on offence for the time being.
Comments
5 responses to “Attack Torbjörn Makes A Surprise Appearance In The Overwatch League”
Wish more teams would do stuff like this. There is a distinct lack org originality and variety in pro games.
Overwatch as a whole seems to have incredibly stale metas, that last way too long
It’s pro games. You play to win, not to have fun. You want fun, you go quick play or arcade like I always do
exactly and there lies the problem, there are virtually two ways to play death ball or dive. So team one thinks the others will use A, so they use A, or when they realise they are playing B, they play B. Sure little things get shaken up but no one is willing to risk anything to shake the sport up.
Not sure they bother making the seasons so long when there is virtually no room for creativity. Yeah I know they have to play to win, but anyone who plays quickplay knows how sometimes the craziest choice can be the most interesting. there needs to be some way to encourage teams to think outside the box, to take risks. (like how some sports have scores for difficulty/brave choices.
My guess is when they have their end of season All-Star matches, we’ll see a bunch of random fun games with people running some quickplay options. Hopefully a team composition of Widow, Zen, Hanzo, Ana, Torb and Rein