The inclusion of hero pools is by far the biggest change announced in the most recent developer update. Not so long ago Jeff Kaplan announced that Blizzard would not include hero bans for Overwatch, but what he meant was that there would be no hero bans done by the players but rather by the developers themselves. Blizzard very likely wants to avoid the same heroes getting banned too often, therefore deciding that leaving the bans up to the players would not create the ideal environment. There are pros and cons to the players having the ability to ban heroes but that is an entirely different discussion.

To start off season 21, sometime around the end of February, beginning of March, Blizzard will be implementing hero pools. For each week, certain heroes will be removed from selection for competitive mode. Heroes can not be banned for more than one week at a time. These heroes will be picked based on the stats that Blizzard gets from what should be the overall competitive mode ranging from bronze all the way up to Top 500.

It seems like Blizzard is looking to ban the same amount of heroes per week as seen in the Overwatch League. One tank, two DPS and one support. With only four total heroes banned, the meta will likely not have a huge shift week by week, however, it will change slightly. The only role where the meta can be a bigger shift is with the tanks, if one of the main tanks gets banned, especially Rein or Orisa. In this case, the tanks determine your play style when you look at compositions like Winston, D.Va (Dive), that looks for quick fights or with Orisa, Hog (Bunker) that looks to take fights slowly and get picks.

Something that will be interesting will be seeing how they take into account stats from all ranks considering that certain heroes are stronger in different ranks based on overall mechanics and general team play. I think overall pick rates will be more or less the same throughout the ranks, it’s the hero stats that might have more variation. Perhaps something Blizzard can look into is maybe hero pools based on rank. Although I’m not sure exactly how they would go about that and if it is actually viable for the design of the game but I think it would be interesting to see. Of course, this also has its drawbacks when players rank up midweek where the hero pools will change for them and they might take out that one hero they have been playing the most to climb to the new rank.

This change comes with a lot of speculation and not much certainty. It is not something that can be decided if it will be successful until it has been implemented for a decent amount of time.

However, I do have my reservations about this change. To me, it seems like it is a bit of a faux way of balancing a game. It seems that even with Blizzard promising more aggressive and frequent patches they still do not seem to know exactly how to balance the game effectively to weed out strong metas based on this change. It seems to be the same approach they had with GOATS. If you can not nerf it then just make it unplayable by not allowing three tanks and three supports to be played or in the case of hero pools, not allowing strong heroes to be played.

With a constant changing hero pool, there might not be a way to find a meta in time before the hero pool changes again. It usually takes quite a bit longer for the meta to be figured out just simply by the nature of players needing to figure it out through playing and testing. This means the balance patches might seem a bit obsolete in their attempt to target the meta as the meta will not really exist.

However what this might possibly mean is that while a hero is too strong and accordingly banned for a week, they use that week to balance out that hero, possibly with the experimentation card so that players will still be able to play that hero regardless of if they are not in the competitive rotation.

This is the biggest change we have seen since the implementation of role queue a few months back, and while I do have my reservations about it, I am still excited to see what comes of it and considering the fact that Blizzard is willing to make quite a big change to their game means that they are most definitely committed to seeing Overwatch continue to thrive as well as they are willing to take risks and if they do not work out, willing to rework them and retract them if necessary.