Neo Workxx » runs and six hits over 6 2/3 innings in his second straight wi

Blizzards newest game, Overwatch, officially launched last month and had seven million players within a week of release. Whats more, this is a game that went the traditional sales route rather than the increasingly common free-to-play one, meaning that all those players plopped down a minimum of $40 to play.Even before launch, there were a healthy number of professional Overwatch tournaments, populated by some of the biggest teams in esports. With Overwatchs audience growing and Blizzards focus on increasing the competitiveness of the game -- as evidenced by the games just-released Competitive Mode -- theres an opportunity for Overwatch to flourish as an esport. Any spectator sport, whether its hitting a ball with a large stick or dispensing an animated fighter with a Shoryuken, quickly develops its own internal strategies and trends as players become more experienced and the sport more refined. In gaming, we refer to this as the meta, an endlessly evolving state that forms the backbone of tactics employed in the game.We finish our introduction to the heroes and their competitive roles with the four five support heroes. Rarely flashy and even more rarely the subject of kill streak highlight reels on YouTube, the support heroes, and more accurately, the healers, are indispensable from high-level competition to your average pickup game.MercyThe most straight-up healer, Mercy is an absolute staple in every game mode now that were starting to see rules against Lúcio stacking in some maps. Situations where a team wont run a Mercy are few-and-far-between, limited mostly to last-ditch Hail Mary pushes where a player goes all-aggressive attack or the very rare King of the Hill situation in which youve gone with only a single Lúcio as the healer.While Mercy is a fairly straightforward character, it would be a mistake to think of her as a low-skill character. What makes a good Mercy competitor isnt reflexes or amazing aim, but situational and positional awareness. Not getting killed while focusing on preventing your teammates from not getting killed requires well-honed instincts about when to cut bait in a situation.A Mercy also shines when she has a well-coordinated team, which top teams tend to be. Shes not a mass healer in the way Lúcio is, and you get the most out of her when damage is spread to as few of your teammates as possible. In a pickup game with strangers, Lúcio is arguably better, but in competitive games, Mercys near-100 percent usage rate is for very good reason.Best maps: Uh...OverwatchLúcioAnd here we have the other main healer. While Mercy thrives in organization, Lúcio excels in chaos. Lúcio cant burst-heal an individual to the same degree that Mercy can (his ultimate, Sound Barrier, can probably be best described as burst-invulnerability), but he can keep most -- or all -- of his team well-maintained in a brutal firefight.Lúcio is a regular pick as the second healer in most situations, but King of the Hill maps tend to show off his wide-ranging skills the most. With a better ability to defend himself from flankers in this non-linear map mode and the Soundwaves for a measure of crowd control, its here that Lúcio provides something that Mercy really cant.And Soundwaving a player off the map to their death is pretty cool, too.Best maps: All the King of the HillsZenyattaNo hero saw his role fall further in the closed beta than Zenyatta. A hybrid offense/defense character, Zenyattas Orbs of Harmony and Discord were versatile, allowing a roaming flanker to get healed far away from Zenyatta and a Discorded enemy to have a persistent debuff until Zenyatta or they died. Given this flexibility, Zenyatta was a staple of competitive play in the early beta. Blizzard attempted to deal with this by increasing the number of abilities that could remove the Discord orb.In the end, Zenyatta got the full brunt of the nerf hammer, making it so that both orbs were removed if a player was out of the line of his sight for three seconds. Or to put it bluntly, Blizzard added a hard counter to Zenyatta: a wall.This reduced Zenyattas utility to the point that hes essentially fallen out of favor in competitive games.There may be some hope for Zenyatta, though. Blizzard increased his survivability by bumping his base shields, increased the projectile speed of the orbs, and increased both his movement speed and his healing power in his Transcendence ultimate. Will this be enough to get Zenyatta back into the meta? Not holding my breath, but there will hopefully be some experimentation.Best map: None right nowSymmetraIn pub games, Symmetra has a few interesting roles. Against less-experienced players, excellent turret placement can be annoying and her Photon Projector goes through shields and can destroy Torbj?rn turrets and inattentive Bastions.In competitive games, Symmetra has exactly one role: early in payload maps on defense, building a teleporter to help the team with the long travel distances. Without a quick teleporter, an attacker early in a payload map has a de facto numerical edge because the time required for the attacker to get back into the fight after a respawn is much less than that of a defender. Symmetra neutralizes this once she gets her teleporter up, buying the team valuable time.Best maps: Dorado, Hollywood, Route 66, Kings RowAnaIts far too early to tell exactly how Ana, Overwatchs first post-launch hero, will fare in competitive play. She was just officially released on Tuesday, after all. So we have to make some educated guesses.Whats interesting about Ana is her versatility. She can do long-range damage as well as long-range healing, her Biotic Grenade acts as a form of indirect crowd control in that it hampers an enemy healer from healing their team for a few seconds. The Sleep Dart can situationally hamper an opponent, so long as a teammate doesnt wake them up with damage. I expect Ana to be a lot of fun to play in Quickplay and the built-in competitive mode.At high levels? The outlook is foggier. With only six players on a team, theres an emphasis on picking heroes based on their strongest attribute in order to cause exploitable mismatches. A team is not likely to run three healers and her skillset means shes not as strong at healing individual targets as Mercy or as strong at healing mass targets as Lúcio.So for her to displace one of the healers, what she does outside of straight-up healing has to be extremely powerful. Pre-nerf Zenyattas persistent orbs were extremely powerful, so he saw play. Is being like Widowmaker with a sniper rifle and short-term enemy debuffs enough? Im not so sure, but I hope Im wrong as it would be nice to see the Mercy/Lúcio stranglehold be released a bit, creating more dynamic team composition decisions.Best maps: TBA Cheap Diamondbacks Jerseys China . -- Catcher Brett Hayes has agreed to a $630,000, one-year contract with the Kansas City Royals, avoiding salary arbitration. Cheap MLB Jerseys . -- Yogi Ferrell orchestrates pretty much everything in Indianas offence. http://www.cheapdiamondbacksjerseys.com/ . -- Golden State Warriors coach Mark Jackson asked his players a simple question during Fridays morning shootaround: How many of them had ever been on a team 14 games over . Cheap Diamondbacks Jerseys Authentic . After taking two big hits this week -- losing at home and dropping back-to-back games for the first time all season -- Indiana struck back by playing its most complete game of the year. Cheap Randy Johnson Jersey . The No. 1-ranked Nadal tweaked his back warming up for the Australian Open final, which he lost almost four weeks ago in a major upset against Stanislas Wawrinka. His first stop after the layoff is the clay in Rio as he tests the back and tries to stay healthy for the French Open in three months. CHICAGO -- Carlos Carrasco was chased in the fourth inning, Lonnie Chisenhall misplayed two balls in right field and Roberto Perezs passed ball cost Cleveland a run.It was that kind of night for the Indians.Thats about as bad of a game as weve played in a while, manager Terry Francona said.Mike Napoli connected for his 33rd homer, but that was one of the only highlights for the Indians in an 11-4 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Monday night. Chicago scored in every inning for the first time since a 12-8 victory over the Boston Red Sox on May 11, 1949, according to STATS.Its a tough way to start a series, Chisenhall said. Offense and defense both werent going at the same time. Fortunately, its a four-game series and we can still win it.Clevelands lead in the AL Central was trimmed to six games over Detroit, which rallied for a 4-2 victory over Minnesota. The Indians had won eight of their last nine against the White Sox.Carrasco (11-8) allowed four runs and eight hits in 3 2/3 innings, hours after the Indians announced All-Star starter Danny Salazar could miss the rest of the season with a forearm injury.Those guys came in very aggressive and hit everything, Carrasco said. You just move on and tomorrow is another day.Salazar had an MRI in Cleveland and was diagnosed with a mild strain to his flexor musculature. The right-hander, a key part of the Indians rotation, will be sidelined for three to four weeks, leaving open the possibility he could return in some capacity for the playoffs.The one thing we want to do is get him healthy, make sure he knows hes healthy, because thats important, Francona said, and then if it fits somewhere, good. But the biggest thing is to gett him healthy.ddddddddddddTodd Frazier, Avisail Garcia and Adam Eaton homered as the White Sox improved to 4-3 on their 10-game homestand. Tim Anderson had three of Chicagos 16 hits and Jose Abreu drove in two runs, backing another strong start by Miguel Gonzalez (4-6).We swung the bats tonight, manager Robin Ventura said. All the way through the lineup everybody seemed to be clicking.Gonzalez allowed three runs and six hits over 6 2/3 innings in his second straight win since coming off the disabled list after being sidelined by a strained right groin. He pitched 6 1/3 innings in a 2-0 victory over Detroit last Tuesday.TRAINERS ROOMIndians: C Yan Gomes (separated right shoulder) is expected to catch nine innings for Double-A Akron on Tuesday night and then serve as the designated hitter Wednesday. Then well kind of re-evaluate whats going on after that, Francona said.White Sox: Abreu was shaken up when he was accidentally hit in the face by Jason Kipnis while applying a tag in the third inning. It also looked as if something was bothering Abreu after a hard slide back into first in the fifth, but he stayed in the game. Hell probably feel it tomorrow, Ventura said.UP NEXTIndians RHP Trevor Bauer and White Sox LHP Jose Quintana get the ball Tuesday night. Bauer (11-6, 3.86 ERA) is looking for his third consecutive victory and career-best 12th on the season. Quintana (11-10, 3.13 ERA) is winless in two September outings, but 5-3 with a 2.70 ERA in 15 career starts against the Indians.---Jay Cohen can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/jcohenap ' ' '