The Dallas Fuel have a process for moments like this, when they aren’t playing like Overwatch League world championship contenders.
Back-to-back 3-0 losses to the Atlanta Reign Saturday and San Francisco Shock Thursday will do that to a team with title aspirations.
Kim “Edison” Tae-hun said the current OWL meta not suiting the Fuel was a big deal, but not necessarily in a bad way.
“I think that’s the biggest challenge so far, Kim said via interpreter.
Baptiste and Zenyatta got buffed, as did ranged DPS hero Sojourn, the newest member of the hero cast with the early version of Overwatch 2. Now the meta is long-range poke compositions, long fights and damage-dealing support heroes with great survivability.
Dallas wasn’t immediately equipped for that, and the Fuel are in the process of finding a variable. Because that’s step one.
“The process of coming up with our own variables starts with trying different comps against our opponent when it is an even matchup,” Fuel assistant coach Ko “Aid” Jae-yoon said via interpreter.
The Fuel try out different styles against the current meta. Maybe a dive composition works well against the current meta, or perhaps its a rush strategy. Dallas doesn’t have the answer yet, but Ko said they know the steps.
Once the Fuel find something that works, and they think they will, they work out the details.
“Then we start working around our individual players’ hero pools and skill level,” Ko said. “The next step is creating our own color and building different scenarios for when we could use an aggressive one or defensive one.”
Ko said the difficulty of the current meta wasn’t because a particular player was struggling, or because the Fuel were incapable of matching a poke composition. The strategy with Sojourn, which is to charge up the railgun and hit a shot before the opponent does, is more fluky than reliable.
Waiting for a shot isn’t how the Fuel like to play. They’ve struggled early in metas before. It probably sounds like a broken record at this point, but Dallas was mediocre through the first four matches of the 2021 season before completely reshaping the meta with Symmetra and Mei.
It did it again in the Kickoff Clash. The Fuel’s Zarya-Reaper composition was so dominant that they didn’t need anything else until the Los Angeles Gladiators handled them in the Grand Final.
But even that loss backs the Fuel’s decision to use this time to experiment. The Gladiators only reached final form after a series of losses and shaky performances. It was only through tribulation that Los Angeles had multiple strategies ready for any scenario.
The Fuel know how they like to play, and what they are likely to see. Now they have to figure out how to get to that comfort zone.
“It hasn’t been too long since the meta has changed. It’s really the start of this new patch,” Kim said. “So I know that there are teams that have already been good at this type of playstyle. This is probably something that suits certain teams a lot better.
“But at this point in time, this is just a process we have to go through to become better. We do end up learning a lot more from what we are doing currently, so I do believe it is pretty important.”
Dallas is still in good shape for future tournaments. Losing to two quality opponents that were more suited for the immediate meta wasn’t the end times.
But this is a crucial moment for the Fuel. Figure this out, and there’s no reason why they couldn’t hop over future hurdles, too.
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