Best Of

I was wrong for the first time in my entire life. I thought Yelena would be the most boring champion in the game, considering how bland everything about her is in the movies. I assumed we would get MCU Yelena… but instead we got the sick Comics design…



Her special animations are also fire 🔥 I love characters that let bullets fly 🔫, and that’s exactly what Yelena does in her specials. Her reversal looks cool too (better than Patriots 😡😠😤 make Patriot a top tier skill champ! The Skill class NEEDS IT.)

Anyway… W to the Kabam animation team for knowing how boring the MCU Yelena is in terms of outfit, abilities, etc, and using her comic book design. I now Want Yelena 🤘🏽😤🔥🙏🏽💯💪🏽

Idk how controversial a take this is if at all, but I did want to get it off my chest at some point; I actually like the defensive powercreep that everyone’s been complaining about, at least in the grand scheme of things.

People say that before the new wave of defenders that bgs was only about skill, and that was true in a sense, but if you played at any reasonably high skill level then what that usually meant was that your defender was getting nuked in ~30 seconds no matter what you did so it became this extremely tense match where the slightest error or AI inconsistency cost you a few seconds and thus the round. Lots of my games came down to me losing because I nuked my opponent in 31 seconds at full health but my opponent nuked my defender in 29 seconds at full health so too bad. Part of this was that the nukes were so versatile, so people had very little reason to switch off the meta of CGRs and Archangels and Hulklings; the few defenders that stood a remote chance against one usually folded like paper against the others. Drafts felt very samey, and if the opponent had the meta attackers I couldn’t really stop them from using them barring a ban.

With the defensive powercreep matches have become more unstable and with higher variance, and I actually like that. Defenders pose problems that can’t easily be solved by blowing them up before they do anything. If I take some unnecessary chip damage in a fight, it no longer feels like trying to finish the fight is a formality since I’ve already lost; fights go sideways much more often. In the early seasons when I was still barely scraping by into GC I so frequently hit the wall of nothing but 55k scores (50k when they reduced time points). Now I can regularly get into fights in Quantum and still see matchups that get “scrappy”, where we’re both backed into uncomfortable positions and it feels like anything can happen. I know people say that certain defenders without a counter are a death sentence, but if you can pose enough of a problem for your opponent you’ll find that what’s an acceptable “counter” is broader than you think. You’ve still got the meta options, and there was growing pains when it was just Onslaught and Serpent and Bullseye as the “busted” defenders but now that we’ve had room to grow the defensive backbone a bit it feels like you have options in deckbuilding (the 30 champ limit comes into play, you can’t have everything so you gotta decide which pieces you find most valuable). With a few exceptions (Serpent should’ve been nerfed) I like where we’ve ended up more than where we once were.

TLDR: having a proper defensive lineup and more variable fight results as a consequence is actually kinda neat, even if there is some cost in higher draft reliance. I like “scrappier” matchups where people aren’t guaranteed the perfect solution to every problem and have to pick their poisons and know their matchups.