Winston GOATS Deconstructed

written by Hopalong

 

Since the end of the inaugural Overwatch League season, the 3 tank-3 support GOATS comp has become a normality in all types of competitive play. The original composition has inspired many modifications, including Winston GOATS. Winston GOATS focuses around dumping resources into a diving Winston, who cuts off the enemy team from a detached target, such as Ana or Zenyatta, creating an opportunity for the rest of the team to speed boost into the other team and end the fight quickly.

 

The composition consists of Winston, D.va, Zarya, Brigitte, Zenyatta, and Lucio. An ideal team fight would go as so: Winston leaps through the enemy team on to an enemy Zenyatta as his friendly Zenyatta discords the enemy Zen, dropping his bubble over the choke to prevent any high value cooldowns from making it through choke. Zarya projects her bubble on to Winston, saving him from any stuns, removing any discord or anti-heal, and giving him the edge to begin cleaving the enemy Zenyatta. As soon as Winston hits the ground, and the opposing team begins to react, Lucio speed boosts Brigitte, Zarya, and D.va into the enemy team, while Zen remains in choke to keep his discords effective. If the enemy team has an effective flanker, the friendly Zenyatta can push in with his team, but D.va must remain close to keep him alive with Defense Matrix. The team fight progresses as a normal GOATS fight would, and ideally, putting resource into Winston weakens the dive target enough for the Winston-GOATS team to come out on top.

The first key part of this play is that Winston drops his bubble in choke, and that Zarya bubbles him. With Winston bubbled, all enemy debuffs will be cleansed, giving him time to hurt his dive target considerably. When Zenyatta is the target, it removes discord, and the bubble in choke prevents Zenyatta from discording any of Winston’s teammates. When an Ana is the target, the bubbles prevent sleep darts and anti healing from incoming Biotic Grenades from making it through. Due to the low hit points of Winston’s bubble, his team must speed boost through choke as soon as Zarya’s projected bubble leaves Winston. As soon as the enemy Zenyatta is picked, the team fight is won through effective focus fire on discorded enemy heroes.

On defence, a similar strategy can be employed by having Winston start behind the enemy team and dropping to save leap with the same resources being poured into him, but leap needs to be saved for an escape if needed.

Effective counters to the Winston-GOATS team comp are compositions that include high poke damage heroes such as McCree, Hanzo, or Soldier. Consistent damage will not give Winston the opportunity to get through choke as the Zen-Brig-Lucio heals are not bursty in the slightest when Brigitte has to save her armor pack. I would speculate that Bastion comps are effective against this comp with his buff, but I have not seen it tried in a match since his buff. McCree, as stated before, is very scary for Winston with his newly buffed Flashbang-Fan The Hammer combo, but waiting for flash to come out or get blocked by one of the various shields still makes the comp useable. As with any composition, you should swap quickly if being hard countered.

With new hero buffs and various nerfs to heroes included in the newest PTR patch, the composition is inherently worse, but it’s still a fun comp to rush in with until that patch goes live.