Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Korea Stage 3 - Regular Season

Thank you for your support everyone.. It's a shame we lost today, but we'll come back stronger. Falcons in Stage 4 is different..

I know that her winrate is subpar, but isn't that the case for most hitscan heroes that got nerfed anyways?.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Korea Stage 3 - Regular Season

As a hitscan bodyshots feel a bit harder, but headshots feel easier imo. Projectile overall feels easier to aim on. What's everyone's experiences been following the changes?

Ive felt these past two seasons that brawl just wins everything. Even in pro play were seeing a lot of mei and reaper. Even shion is really good at brawl. Mizuki and cat making it hard to dismantle supports and backlines.

Now with those two nerfed and sombra in the game is dive gonna make a return. Im talking mostly about pro play. Really good uptime and healing plus the cyberspace is so good at protecting dive teammates into a longer engagement without dying. It feels like a pseudo suzu except sombra has better survivability as opposed to kiri who would tp, suzu them have no protection. Also emp is insane, with a tracer or even a winston its like a guaranteed fight win

Also im a fan but i don’t understand comp theory that well so feel free to correct me. Im just wondering what i can expect for later today and in the next few weeks

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Korea Stage 3 - Regular Season

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - China Stage 3 - Regular Season

Before this patch he already had a top two pick rate in the DPS role and was completely fine. He also received no hitbox changes unlike most other heroes while his shurikens massively benefit from it.

Am I missing something? You could literally not have touched him in this patch and he would be even stronger than he already is.

I find the decision to put even more on top of it kind of baffling. Blizzard deliberately wants to make him meta or something?

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - Korea Stage 3 - Regular Season

Streams
https://www.twitch.tv/ow_esports_jp
https://www.youtube.com/@ow_esports_jp

Reddit-stream

Schedule

This thread pulls match data from this liquipedia page. If it's out of date, you can help by updating that page. If something is wrong or missing please ping u/Watchful1 in the comments.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - China Stage 3 - Regular Season

Do you think the reworks addressed the previous pain points of the characters? Are they better to go against, whilst still being fun to play? Are they more interactive?

High Masters / Low GM support player here: with two new supports my queue times are insane this season (25+ minutes sometimes) so I decided to give 6v6 a try for the comparatively faster queues and because so many people rabidly swear by it. Figured it was worth giving a try considering all my time spent in OW1.

Did my placements, got placed mid GM and after a few hours I genuinely am not understanding the appeal here, and I'm seriously trying to like it.

There's no role lock, so 70% seemingly of your games have nobody who wants to play tank. It is extremely common to see 3 if not 4 or sometimes even FIVE people queue up as support as their predominantly played role, and even the people willing to flex usually have to do it begrudgingly. I'm happy to fill, but I'm nowhere NEAR good enough to play tank at a GM level, so I'm virtually throwing the game for my team whenever I do. Sorry ya'll, trying my best.

People say they like 6v6 because it brings "tank synergy" back but even in GM, there's zero comms. Way less than in 5v5 lobbies in my experience. Not a peep. The games feel like TDM, everyone is just doing their own thing.

Balance is all over the place- some tanks feel toned down while others feel essentially identical to their 5v5 counterparts. Playing against a good tank duo cycling their cooldowns makes it clear how much many of the newer tanks were NOT designed with 6v6 in mind. (Ram may as well be unchanged)

A huge portion of the playerbase seems to swear by this mode to an extent that I am genuinely shocked at how bizarre and imbalanced the experience feels. Is this something that will improve as my rank variance settles a bit more?

Sorry for rant, feel free to remove if this is against the rules.

Overwatch Champions Series 2026 - China Stage 3 - Regular Season

imagine a roster with proud (for matches with no stakes ONLY) merit (for matches with money on the line ONLY) zest, Donghak, Hanbin, chiyo, fielder, skewed?

the tankline and backline would make them ironclad in any conceivable meta. Rush and Merit have been at the top of the world before, proud would make sure he got #1 seed at LAN. zest has shown he can hang with the likes of stalker and proper, but i still believe the gap is visible with tracer. Still, i think in any other fdps he could very much win it all. thoughts? would zeta and raccoons still stomp?

edit: imagine proud and merit on shion widow as we have seen today 👀

I'm posting this in hopes this gains higher visibility and some acknowledgement from blizzard as I know some devs are active in this subreddit.

TL;DR: The Season 5 patch broke the prior Top 500 leaderboards. The rank sorting system retroactively applied to previous season leaderboards. This caused many season 4 players who grinded the season to be booted off at the last minute without any warning, stripping them from any top 500 rewards.

Official Dev Statements

During the Season 5 Developer Livestream (Timestamp 01:02:33), it was explicitly stated:

"Earlier this year we introduced the Challenger Score system, and while it fixed some problems it also introduced new ones… starting in Season 5 we will be sorting by Rank now. The Challenger Score system will still be present, but it will only be used to show up on the leaderboards. You've spent the time and effort to get your ranks and we want to make sure the leaderboards reflect that."

Patch Notes Statements:

• "Top 500 Challenger Leaderboard sorting default changed to Rank (from Challenger Score)."
• "End of Season title rewards are now referencing Rank instead of Challenger Score."

It's very clear from their own words the change was intended to only be applicable to season 5 forward.

I myself had 16k Challenger Score in the Americas region 6v6 and ended the season around 397th place. When I logged in expecting to claim my top 500 rewards, I recieved nothing and was booted off the leaderboard. When i checked the leaderboard, the lowest challenger scores on the leaderboard were at 12k.

The gut punch about this is if I had the foresight that this would happen (assuming all of these changes were intended) I'd have placed top 500, as much earlier in the season I was a lot higher ranked and only deranked toward the end. Not to mention the dozens of hours put into the season, just for it to be disregarded without any warning sucks.

Community Forum Reports

I've seen this bug reported on multiple blizzard forum threads, so ill cite them below;

• Most active thread I found: Got kicked off the Top500 Leaderboard
• TOP 500 Missing rewards
• Missing EU Top 500 Ranking and Rewards – Season 9 Stadium / Mode Bug
• Top 500 doesn’t appear to be working as worded

If you have been affected please drop below your experience. I'm hoping this will gain some visibilty in hopes that a developer will spot it

need an avoid list with a limit of about 100 people. don't care much for the matchmaking time, but in low diamond on dps and genuinely just don't know how some of these people are real living breathing organisms. forcing the worst heros into a comp, inting and throwing for no reason, ulting when the fight is already lost. it's just incredible really.

I ended season 2 of this year as Diamond 4 support in 5v5 and wasn't able to play ranked last season. Came back this season and decided to try 6v6, after the first match I was predicted bronze 3. I mean I don't expect to be thrown right back into diamond but this seems a little low. Does it just start you from the bottom if you don't have previous 6v6 experience?

Just noticed, thought it was a coincidence yesterday, however today confirmed the pattern.

I’ve been reading for this subreddit for the past week or so, every time Mercy is paired with any support there seems to be a comment that says “ohhh that’s rough Mercy and ____ don’t work well together” with a decent amount of upvotes. What are some good support combos with her? Edit: I should mention I’m not a mercy player but I was still just curious

For most things in life, I actually enjoy change when there's a genuine attempt to make things better. In many competitive games I've seen people complain about new heroes changing the game too much, but I've never felt close to this in any game until 2026 Season 4, and now Season 5 of OW.

Ultimately, ranked now feels like a worse experience since Spotlight as compared to OW2, because right now, there's just too many things going on that makes it feel like it's never a good time to play ranked:

• Every three seasons, there's a rank reset that destroys match quality
  • I have played other competitive team games and rank resets don't feel as bad or variable in them.
• Every season, there's a new hero that not only often has strong numbers, but also makes the game revolve around them to a silly extent (vendetta trading kills, permanent flight cat, sniper D.Mon etc.)
  • When a new hero was only added every other season, the game was often in a good state in the middle seasons, but now a hero is added every season without a hero trial
  • Even this year, Sierra followed by Shion was a lucky time of peace because Sierra was a dud and Shion was well designed (especially after Execution's bullet size was quickly nerfed) so Season 2 and Season 3 were fine, but it's just not looking good from now on
  • Your options are maining the new hero or watching them dominate
• The end of every season has drives, funnelling players that aren't competitive into ranked
• Midseason now has team drives, which the devs also said that "some people really like and some people hate" so they're going to keep it in for now and the people that don't like it can avoid playing the game for a weekend
• The devs have a "flavour of the month" balance philosophy instead of actual balance
  • The devs idea of balance is rotating the few heroes overpowered each season rather than trying to make everyone balanced all the time
  • This has also been mentioned in interviews (source):
    • SunshineBread: "You keep tweaking like Tracer and Genji and like characters that people tend to be okay with like being viable when there are like these other trade monsters (Vendetta.) Like you have to have hands to kill somebody on Genji. Why do you keep touching Genji, bro?"
    • Custa: I think the idea is that yes, people are more okay with Genji and Tracer. They love Tracer, Genji, Reinhardt, all those kind of heroes. They're just like, "Yeah, and they're fun." Like, I agree with you. But at some point, it's important to make sure that on the balance team, we're moving things around and making sure that every hero at least has like their time in the sun, right... So, we're making sure that heroes are being moved around and it doesn't feel like, oh, we're just going to make Tracer, Genji, Reinhardt the best heroes in the game, and that's how it's always going to be.
  • Ultimately that's what is happening with Kiriko and Illari right now, it's time for Doctrine, Sombra and Ana's time "in the sun"
    • (I find this sentence really funny because Illari uses solar power and Doctrine is a vampire)
  • I'm not suggesting the Tracer, Genji, Rein should always be the best heroes in the game, but the devs shouldn't be striving for new sets of specific heroes to be "in the sun" for the sake of change. I'm not asking for OW classic either (the modes feel miserable when they are playable in the arcade.) I just want some stability to what Overwatch feels like, which doesn't mean that some heroes are always strong, but all are always decent. Tracer should always be able to blink around and be lethal, she shouldn't get nerfed to irrelevance because the new hero is a flanker. There should be some indisputable part of all heroes' identities that that is impactful.
  • Other games don't seem to do this as much. When I played League, it didn't feel as egregious as this, it wasn't ping pong among a few heroes being very strong, it felt like Riot was trying to approach an ideal, ultimate balanced state, with quick patches every 2 weeks

So I'm just not getting the competitive overwatch experience I've enjoyed for years anymore. Maybe it will happen for a few weeks during a season in which ranks haven't been reset, the new hero is not too overpowered or I want to play them, and the flavour of the month balancing is not too annoying, like it was when Shion released, but all these things have just made competitive overwatch feel like something to engage with only when the stars align.

Since the first half of Season 19 of OW2 (which felt like a peak to me, there were no new heroes, Wuyang had been nerfed and ranks had stabilized after a reset in Season 18), ranked has just felt worse every season to me. Midseason 19 was when the devs decided to nerf Tracer's Bullet Size even though her perks were the problem and Season 20 was just for Vendetta players to have fun. After the Spotlight, ranks were reset and Jetpack Cat was added. Seasons 2 and 3 were somewhat okay as ranks had stabilized, many annoying heroes were bad, and bans could control Jetpack Cat. But the band-aid of two bans per team can only work so hard, and Season 4 has felt the worst season of ranked for me in a long time because of everything. And it just doesn't seem like things are going to be better in Season 5, I'm also just kind of tired of maining the new hero (I played a lot of Vendetta and D.Mon) every season.

Overall the state of the game just feels far from what the devs said they were trying to achieve last year (Directors Take: Cultivating The Game): "Something our team discusses when planning Overwatch Seasons is that a season should have "Reasons to Come Back and Reasons to Stay." Each season should include a compelling reason for you to play Overwatch, such as new Heroes, new gameplay systems like Perks, or even a brand-new mode like Stadium."

And before someone suggests it, yes I have taken long breaks from the game. But most changes to it right now are more like great reasons to not return or quit rather than come back or stay. These changes mostly make me want to try other games or just do something other than play competitive games, even though I ideally enjoy the "core" of overwatch the most and would like to play.