The match between the Dragons and Valiant has just ended, both teams have obviously started off Stage 2 with a poor performance, but the Dragons have improved on some aspects (such as running pure dive) since Stage 1, while Valiant have played completely different since Stage 1.

But, I'd still like to talk about the Shanghai Dragons.

Many problems still plague the Dragons, but the biggest problem in my opinion is they can't put up a roster with a lot of strategical depth.

I'm not saying that it's hard to put 6 players in a team, but there is no definite meta in Overwatch right now. Even if there is one, the room for error would likely be very small (e.g. in the Sombra meta, you'll need your team to wait for your EMP to come online, and even then you are not guaranteed to win the team fight).

So you'll need a roster that is capable of changing their playstyle to best counter the enemy. So far the two best comps are dive and double hitscan, and they are the hardest to perfect.

Take dive as an example, sometimes you need to make some weird tactics, other times you just need to simply focus fire. Or you need to plan the ult economy for the next fight or even the fight after that. The team has to set up these kinds of strategies before the match begins, especially when facing against stronger teams where you may need to switch directions midway through the match, such as when your Genji is getting shut down constantly. If your team doesn't set a proper direction, you'll be at a disadvantage even before the match begins.

Taking a common exmaple, on wide open maps with high ground a double hitscan comp can shut down a dive comp fairly easily, but is susceptible to being dove on themselves.

This is where tactics come into play. If you can hide behind map obstacles and close the distance between you and your enemy, and dive onto your enemies cleanly, that disadvantage of running dive against double hitscan would be diminished.

Take another example: Widow against a Sombra defense. As the attackers making space for your Widow would quicken the tempo of the fight, leaving the defending Sombra little time to charge and use her EMP. But, as the defenders if you deny sightlines for the Widow and fight in small, enclosed spaces, you slow down the tempo of the fight (since the Widow cannot pop heads), giving you time to charge your EMP.

Without a right and proper strategy to deal with the enemy, your team cannot use their full potential, it's as though you're playing football (soccer for you Americans, though I guess the analogy works with American football too) with your hands tied behind your back.

This is why I haven't really been critiquing the individual skills of the Dragons, often times they're in a poor position even before the fight begins.

Reading your enemy's strats and adapting on the fly is indeed not an easy task, it's easy to see as an observer, but not so when you're trying to explain it to the team.

But OWL requires this kind of ability since the competition is very tough. Other teams have put in the work on these aspects, both on individual skill but also on making sure the enemy team are not in an ideal position, and then cleaning up easily.

The previous examples of switching strategies are extremely simplified, since in an actual fight there are a lot of details and antecedents and consequences to consider.

Hence, it's still possible for teams not at their full potential due to these tactical errors to defeat well prepared teams. For example, Dragons vs. Valiant on Hanamura round 1. On the second attack on point A by the Dragons, they were still being shutdown by Valiant's double hitscan, but Diya's kill on Fate, followed by mistakes Valiant made, allowed the Dragons to take the point with ease.

But failures would definitely be more common than these fluke successes, and failures would often lead to the team to be confused, everyone wanting to take a different direction, then questioning whether the hero picks were appropriate (and switching to some of the flashier heroes like Widow, McCree, or Doomfist). The team would just be going in blind, if they win, it's not a decisive win, and you don't learn anything.

That's why the Dragons are now taking a multi-tank approach (running triple, quad tank), because on both a team and individual level, the players feel like the play has improved, since the direction rarely changes when running multi tank. Just get to the desired position as a unit and then crowd control using your ults.

Of course, on the execution aspect it still requires some skill, but the direction of the team won't change radically. Hence, the team is able to focus on individual performance, and not wonder why the enemy team is in a superior position. This is when the team reaches near its fullest potential, and you can really see whether an individual is underperforming skill-wise, instead of them being crippled by positional errors. (If a team has poor direction, they are their own enemy)

But only playing one comp in a variety of maps is definitely not viable (tell that to the Dallas Fuel back in Stage 1), the Dragons need to come up with a game plan in Stage 2, and spend time improving their situational awareness, instead of simply grinding out mechanical skill.