As of right now, the Overwatch League (OWL) is the pinnacle of Overwatch and where everyone looks to when it comes to learning heroes, learning what the meta is and overall just watching the best of the best fight it out to become the champion. Consequently, it is important to look at how OWL will be affected by the changes made mentioned in the previous weeks.

There are slight differences that are made to the changes announced by Blizzard. Patches will not be used in OWL until two weekends later or if during a match weekend, a weekend later. This makes a whole lot of sense in the fact that players in OWL will need some time to adjust to the balance patches. Of course with this season being localized and teams not playing every week means that some teams will have more time to practice before they have to play on the new patches, however, I do not think this will have too much of an impact.

Especially with the inclusion of hero pools from the 7th of March onwards in OWL, it does not matter as much that teams have longer to practice on new patches since the compositions played may still be determined by the hero pools.

As for how much the hero pools will affect OWL I think it will have a far better impact. Although it will only be one tank, two DPS and one support, the constant evolution of compositions within OWL should potentially bring out the best in teams in terms of their adaptation and how quickly they can learn new compositions. Teams will have approximately a week to practice whichever composition they feel will be the strongest. What this potentially means is that we will not be seeing mirror matchups where teams will pick compositions based on what they see or prefer. However, this is not guaranteed to happen.

While the play we will see will not be on the same level that we saw during GOATS meta or bunker meta where teams would practice the same compositions week in week out to the point where they would reach near perfection of that composition. Something important to note is that now this brings out more emphasis on individual skill over team play.

Teams might get more affected by the hero pools based on the heroes that will be available to them. Some teams may be affected by certain heroes being banned than others. Of course, what this does mean is that players will need to become more flexible in the heroes they play as well as teams might need to have extra players added to fill in on certain roles. As an example with the San Francisco Shock where they have a Widowmaker specialist in ANS, they can bring him to play in series where Widowmaker is a must pick hero.

Overall this is a positive change to OWL as it brings out more individual skill, forces teams to adapt quicker, potentially not have mirror matchups every single game, encourages players to become more flexible and could present opportunities to players who perhaps are not as strong on what would normally be the meta heroes but are stronger on more niche heroes.

An argument can be made that perhaps leaving hero pools to just be implemented in OWL and leave it out of competitive mode as there is a chance that the hero pools will be different in OWL compared to the competitive mode. However, as far as this goes, it seems that both Blizzard and OWL want to keep the game as close to the same as possible for both OWL and competitive play. As before though, I am extremely excited to see how everything works out and how the different players and teams adapt to the new changes and constantly evolving hero pool.