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After the introduction of Sombra at the start of November, Blizzard upturned the Overwatch meta yet again last week with the long-awaited redesign of everyone’s favourite tech support, Symmetra.

The latter change has yet to make its impact felt on pro games, but Sombra, and the few heroes who saw touch-ups alongside her release, are slowly fumbling towards their full potential at the hands of high level players.

As Season Two comes to a close, we look at what happened in the team compositions of pro games to see what Sombra’s arrival and, more importantly, the nerfs and buffs she overshadowed have done to the meta.

Firstly, the lady of the hour, Sombra. Though she’s only just been introduced to the game, pros wasted no time getting her into active duty – albeit with mixed results. In her debut week on the game’s live servers, she ended up in quite a few matches at South Korea’s OGN Apex tournament.

First to put her on the board was Lunatic-Hai‘s Esca, who didn’t set the world on fire with his hacking skills, but did manage to nail an EMP against Mighty Storm, nullifying Lucio’s Sound Barrier. However the rest of the team’s picks didn’t seem suited to supporting someone behind enemy lines.

Her potential is widely recognised by the pros, and it’s only a matter of time before she’s being used in effective team compositions. In their Alienware Monthly Melee match against LDLC, Misfits ran such a comp to very quickly take over the first point on Hollywood – a map with a difficult to break chokepoint, but plenty of behind-lines flanking options once you do. As a result, Misfits ran quite a cheesy all-in composition of heroes that can jump deep into the enemy backlines and harrass everyone, the Sombra way.

With Winston, Genji, and Tracer helping out with the DPS, Lucio in amongst things being hard to hit and providing constant healing, and an Ana hanging back and healing from afar, things went very well as you can see below. Jump to 26m20s into the video to see what we mean. However the constant arms race of strategies may mean a counter to this is found quite quickly if teams keep running it in predictable ways, such as this point of Hollywood, and also Lijiang Tower.

Not all heroes get the same instant acceptance as Sombra has seen, even with a sub-10% pick rate in her opening month. Ana was initially shunned as teams failed to find her utility, and now, after being buffed patches ago, is one of the most prolific characters in the pro meta. As a result,  a slight nerf to nanoboost, removing the movespeed increase of her allied target, has quite effectively ducked her pick rate, but also changed the preferred partners she tends to boost.

No longer are teams plagued by the nanoblade or reinboost, as Anas will tend to use Nanoboost on someone who doesn’t need increased mobilitiy to get close and do melee damage. Someone like the newly improved Soldier: 76, with a boost to his effective damage output while only slightly nerfing accuracy. But since Tactical Visor removes the need for spread compensation, and Nanoboost increases the number of magazines you can tear through while the visor is active, there’s a new power couple in town.

Counter to this, D.va also gets lots more play thanks to another 100hp and a movespeed increase of her own while firing. But also, more importantly in the rock, paper, scissors of professional gameplay metas, as a decent counter to the Nanovisor through her Defense Matrix. These very slight changes all have their own knock on effects outside the sphere of influence of just the character being changed.

If Geoff Goodman and the team at Blizzard keep their game up, Overwatch’s pro meta has a healthy future ahead.

Source: Redbull