Blizzard Removes Hero Pools from Overwatch Competitive Play

Overwatch is over 4 years old, with a sequel in production. However, over the years Blizzard has added a lot of new heroes and altered the existing characters radically such as Mercy and Symmetra. Due to balance issues, some heroes were inaccessible in Master and Grandmaster tiers of competitive play called Hero Pools. Now Blizzard has removed Hero Pools entirely.

Community manager Molly Fender confirmed the news on Blizzard Forums. The new policy will go into effect this June 13th. For the time being a single hero pool will be used for 2 weeks of each tournament cycle.

We have a new update to share regarding Hero Pools. We’ve been listening to your feedback and constantly iterating on the feature behind the scenes. We initially implemented Hero Pools to address issues with stagnating metas and to keep match-ups exciting and fresh. However, we’ve found that the introduction of Experimental Card and increased hero balance updates has helped us work towards a healthy, changing meta in Competitive Play without needing to disable heroes.

Overwatch is now available for PS4, PC, Switch, and Xbox One.

Adam Siddiqui,
Managing Editor, NoobFeed
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