Regrouping is a simple aspect of Overwatch which players do not understand how to execute. This may be because other FPS games do not require regroups or other things Overwatch has. Regrouping is important because you cannot win a fight on your own. If a team fails to regroup, a phenomenon known as "The Trickle-In Effect" will occur. Your respawns will stagger, and another phenomenon will occur. It is called losing.
Take a scenario where your team goes down three players at the beginning of the opening fight. Those players now have a 12 second respawn with extra time depending on the spawn distance. Also, your fight is now 6v3. Who is favored to win here? In lower ranked matches, this fight will be dragged out and each death will be staggered. With each death coming at different intervals, another 12 seconds are added on to the respawn timer. As those 3 players die, there are another 12 seconds before the team can regroup. It can take about a minute to regroup and get back into the fight if this occurs. A minute with no impact fighting is a devastating scenario.
Now imagine if those first three players did not bother to wait to group up with the other three. They tried to catch up with the helpless players who did not bother to get out of the fight. This is how the Trickle-In Effect starts. The team keeps trying to catch up with each other, causing them to be killed one by one, delaying respawn further and further, until they ultimately lose.
Now, how do you stop this?
I have other guides which help with this like my target prioritization and staggering guides. Check those out to further help this concept.
Hope this helps.
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It's almost scary how accurate this post is. Not to mention said "phenomenon" is fueled even stronger by Tilt, but I'm pretty sure you have a post on how to fix that as well! Nice job Neo, and thank you for another great read.
Great post and vitally important. The most important of which to me is point 3. Don't poke.
Poking causes stagger. We all know how irritating Hanzo can be with scatter, Junkrat with nade spam, Widowmaker just begging someone to stick their head out and, of course, the least said about Roadhogs impossi-hooks the better.
I would add here that when you have randoms in the team...spamming the group up with me does tend to get a response in my experience.
An addition that I would make to the post. The person calling for the group up needs to be 100% certain that all of the team are together before heading off into the fray...also, making sure that you then move in as a team.
There have been many times when I have grouped up on the request of, say, a Winston...only for him to jump pack away when 2 people join him and the rest of the team are still waiting to respawn...it's crazy.
What causes it? Panic. People have an in built fear of the timer...they panic into thinking that jumping on the point stalls it out and helps..it doesn't. That only helps in Overtime, and only then if it isn't possible to group before contesting. What you just did was force a 5v6 engagement when you could have had a proper team push.
Keep calm, try and avoid panic and,check the spawn timers of your team before you rush the objective for that 0.1 second stall. You know how long it will take to get back there, you can see how long before people are available again..use the information at hand :)
Thanks for this post i think i am also guilty to those poke issues at times.
Must read for all TAW OW members !
As always, great post Neo :)