Poke Team Comp Guide

A Poke team composition refers to a strategy of using heroes with medium to long-range abilities to win or gain an advantage in fights before the enemy team can move in close.

Compared to other team compositions like Rush or Dive, Poke comps look to slow down the pace of the battle, control space through projectile pressure, and get the enemy team to use up their resources during their approach. When executed successfully, Poke teams overwhelm the enemy with ranged attacks from multiple angles, while also protecting themselves from counterattacks by using shielding and environmental cover.

In this guide we'll break down how to properly play in a Poke team comp, the best Poke heroes in each role, and how to counter Poke comps. Let's start off by going over an example of a Poke comp.

How to Play Poke

• Drain Enemy Resources Early
• • Use your range to chip away at the enemy's health and force them to use defensive cooldowns before they can even reach you. Saving your own high-value cooldowns for when the enemy is already weakened is key to winning the fight.
• Create Crossfire
• • Avoid standing in a single cluster with your team. By attacking from multiple angles, you force the enemy to choose which direction to defend, ensuring some of your team's damage always gets through.
• Keep Rotating
• • When close-range enemies try to approach you, rotate around the map or objective to maintain your optimal range.

How to Counter Poke

• Deny Sightlines
• • Use the walls, pillars, and side paths to approach the enemy without exposing yourself to their line of sight. Don't stand where they are already aiming.
• Force Close-Range Engagements
• • Poke comps are weakest when they lose their space. Use burst mobility cooldowns to get in close where you have the advantage.
• Collapse on One Side
• • If the Poke team is spread out to create crossfire, don't let them surround you. Be decisive and send your entire team to overwhelm the most vulnerable enemies who are separated from their team.

Best Poke Heroes

Tanks

Tanks are the frontline and first line of defense in any team. The best Tanks offer protection to their team through damage mitigation or barriers, which makes it easier and safer for their DPS and Supports to take more aggressive positions and attack the enemy.

They also need to be able to attack from range themselves or else they'll will be very limited and struggle to find Value. This is why Sigma is a much better Poke Tank than Reinhardt, even though Barrier Field is much larger and has more health than Experimental Barrier. While Reinhardt is great for sheilding his team, his max value is being in melee range and swining on the enemy team

Orisa, and Sigma are the standard choices for Tanks in Poke comps because they all possess good survivability against projectiles, and can attack from range while mitigating damage. Other Tanks like Reinhardt and Domina get paired frequently as well depending on player preference, map and match-ups.

DPS

DPS are the most straightforward when it comes to Poke heroes. Kits that are built around playing at medium to long range like Ashe, Bastion, Emre, Hanzo, Sojourn, Soldier: 76, and Widowmaker are just a few of the examples of DPS who can work well in a Poke comp.

The job of the DPS is to chip away at the enemy's health and resources before they can close in or approach the objective. Ideally, they get an early pick like Widowmaker getting a headshot before the full fight breaks out, but even dealing enough damage for force out defensive cooldowns like Defense Matrix or Regenerative Burst gives your team a nice advantage when the fight gets more aggressive.

Supports

When it comes to Support Choices for a Poke comp, there are essentially two categories to choose from. You can go with Baptiste, Illari or Zenyatta to maximize your team's poke pressure and ranged damage output. Additionally, Orb of Discord raises the lethal potential of everyone on his team in exchange for significantly lower sustain than the other Support Choices.

Alternatively, heroes like Ana or Mercy are used to bring sustain and enable their DPS to get easier picks. Especially when the DPS are those like Soldier: 76 or Sojourn whose ults greatly benefit from Nano Boost, Ana can be a nice choice.

If you want to fully focus on the enabling, Mercy pocketing a DPS who is performing well is extremely difficult to deal with. Between her own movement for survivability and the healing and damage boost she gives to her focused teammate, she takes that ally from doing well to hard-carrying the game.

Example of a Poke Team

• Tank: Sigma
• DPS: Sojourn, Emre
• Support: Illari, Baptiste

Making the Heroes Work Together

Playing a Poke comp doesn't just mean picking heroes with ranged abilities. You also need to understand why they work together, and how you can enable your Poke teammates even if you are playing a non-Poke hero.

The main component of winning with a Poke team is to keep your distance and win by exploiting your superior ranged damage. Here we'll go over some solid tips to help you deal consistent damage, create opportunities to score eliminations, maintain control over the objective and how to stay alive.

The Poke Checklist

Before even engaging with the enemy, there are a few questions you should always ask yourself.

• Is there any way I can set up and attack from where my target enemy won't see me?
• Where on the map can I use off angles, flank routes or high ground to my advantage?
• Where does your team want to be positioned?
• • What nearby environment can be used for protection?
• Should I stick with my team, or am I able to survive on my own?
• • How can my teammates and I split up to create crossfire?
• Where is each member of the enemy team?
• • Can anyone help defend the target?
• Where is my escape route if I need to retreat momentarily?

Going over these questions will help you to be intentional with your setup and gain an advantage against the enemy before the fight even starts.

During the team fight, here are a few more questions you can keep in mind to help yourself increase your success:

• Does the enemy have any heroes with burst mobility who can suddenly attack me at close range?
• What are the flank routes that an enemy could surprise attack me from?
• What cooldowns and ultimates are available?
• • How can I play around these resources?
• Are there any burst damage threats like a Hanzo headshot?
• Where is the enemy team's focus? Where can I reposition to exploit the distraction for a surprise attack?
• Where can I reposition to exploit the distraction for a surprise attack?

The focus of these questions is understanding the enemy team's threat and win conditions. Figuring out the answer to these types of questions enables you to create strategies that counter what this specific enemy team is trying to do.

Create Crossfire

One of the most impactful elements you can create to help you and your team deal meaningful damage is crossfire. A player can only look straight ahead, and most abilities only function in a single direction.

For example, if you are playing against a team with D.Va as the Tank, her Defense Matrix is a powerful defensive tool for shutting down your Poke team's ranged damage. However, she can only aim it in one direction, so if you and your team are attacking from multiple angles simultaneously, she is forced to choose which damage to let in, and which damage to absorb.

Similarly, when you and your team all attack from the same angle, the enemy team can easily hide behind shields and walls to avoid your damage anytime they need to heal or refresh cooldowns. If you are creating crossfire, on the other hand, you can put the enemy in a situation where backing behind a corner away from your attacks puts them into the line of fire from your allies' attacks.

Rotations

Extremely important to Poke comps is a concept referred to as rotations. All this really means is how you and your team can move around and navigate the map areas, maintaining your optimal distance from the enemy team.

What this looks like for Poke comps is when the enemy team's heroes with superior short-range combat capabilities move in close to you, your team moves away to create distance without giving up control of the objective. This is why planning ahead is so important. You need to know where you can move, how you can move, and what CC abilities you have that will help with this task. Most of the time, rotations end up as moving in a circular fashion around the objective area.

Sometimes it's ok to give up objective control momentarily if it allows you to survive and re-engage with an advantage. For example, on Numbani's first point, you may need to back off the objective to buy time to refresh resources and take a few seconds to walk up one of the staircases to get onto the high ground. Then, when you re-initiate the attack, you have the high ground advantage, and even if the enemy team had the health and resources advantage before, you've now evened out the playing field.

Target Priority

Target priority means which hero on the enemy team should be the focus of your setup and attack. Poke heroes can use their superior range to quickly swap between targets at various distances. Just because the Tank is out front and a large, easy target to shoot doesn't mean they are always the best target.

At the same time, if the enemy backline or Supports are so far away you are unable to deal any significant damage, it's not gonna be worth spending a bunch of time trying to land shots on them.

There is no simple answer like, "always shoot Supports," but as a general rule, you want to look for two things:

• Which enemy is the most vulnerable to dying
• Which enemy poses the greatest threat to your team

Answer these two questions and you will identify who should be highest priority target to focus fire.

Resource Management

Resource management plays a major role both surviving and winning your games. Cooldowns should be used deliberately, with players ensuring they have a plan or ability to escape alive when the attack goes all-in to try and eliminate you.

As previously stated, a key component of what makes Poke teams strong is their ability to drain the enemy's resources from a distance, before the enemy team can close in and approach them.

Whatever your hero's highest value cooldowns are, you should save those for when your target has already committed to using theirs, or when they are unable to easily retreat from your attack.

• Example: You are playing Baptiste. You get an enemy to low health, and in a desperate attempt to finish them off, you use Immortality Field so you can stay in the open to keep firing.
• • The enemies' allies see this, and know they can quickly push and attack you or your team now that your best defensive ability is unavailable. Regardless of whether you got the initial KO or not, you put your team at a huge disadvantage and are likely to lose the fight.

In this scenario, if Baptiste knew it was too dangerous to commit to trying to get that kill, they could've looked for any ally for protection with damage mitigation or healing, used Exo Boots to jump up from behind a wall, calculated it wasn't worth the risk of wasting his best CD, or possibly used Regenerative Burst instead since it has a much shorter cooldown.

Deny Their Sightlines and Crossfire Angles

Poke compositions thrive when they are allowed to maintain distance, control space and slowly chip away at your team’s resources before a fight ever fully begins. To consistently beat Poke, you need to minimize damage taken in the approach phase and force fast and decisive fights.

Use environmental cover like walls and corners to rotate around the map, and avoid open spaces whenever possible. Instead of taking direct paths, walking or dashing straight at the enemy, utilize side paths, alternative routes, and anywhere the enemy can't shoot you as you get close.

High ground control is also critical. If a Poke DPS like Emre or Sojourn is uncontested on high ground, they are incredibly difficult to beat. Use heroes with vertical mobility or take an adjacent high ground area to fight and force them to drop down and retreat.

The other component that greatly limits their strength is denying crossfire. Don't let them set up in a circle around you. Be decisive and counter their off-angle positions by fully sending your entire team to just one side and win the mini 2v5. Afterwards, you can turn your attention to the rest of their team.

Heroes that Counter Poke

Dive Team Comps

The strongest way on most maps to beat a Poke comp is to run a dive comp. Dive comps have the mobility necessary to chase down Poke heroes and bypass the long-range portion of a fight. Dive comps take extra time to set up their attack, using their superior mobility to take paths around the map the Poke heroes are not able to access, then unleash a coordinated attack on an isolated target to quickly gain a numbers advantage.

Check out our full in-depth guide on how to play Dive in Overwatch.

Example of a Dive Comp

• Tank: Winston
• DPS: Tracer, Genji
• Support: Kiriko, Lúcio

Rush Team Comps

The biggest weakness of a Poke comp is its reliance on space. Heroes like Sigma, Emre and Baptiste are much weaker in close-range fights.

Rush comps built close-range heroes with good ground mobility can be effective at both closing the distance and running over Poke Comps. The way to win with Rush comps against a Poke comp is to hold your mobility and damage cooldowns until you are almost in range. Then use the burst of speed and power to suddenly overwhelm the Poke heroes in close-quarters combat.

Juno can hit the "go" signal for her team with Hyper Ring, then as the enemy tries to retreat, Junker Queen can use Commanding Shout to sustain and boost her team to chase the retreat as an example of what this may look like in game.

Example of a Rush Comp

• Tank: Junker Queen
• DPS: Anran, Vendetta
• Support: Juno, Mizuki

Brawl Team Comps

Brawl comps have the hardest time against Poke because of their limited range and mobility. Poke comps lay down so much oppressive fire that by the time brawl comps get into their ideal close-range fight, they've exhausted their defensive resources and struggle to survive the remainder of the fight.

Winning with Brawl against a Poke comp is possible, but you have to outplay the enemy by a decent margin. You 100% need a speed boost from either Lúcio or Juno to move your a Tank like Reinhardt or Mauga around.

The goal is to approach in stages. Push up, use damage mitigation like Barrier Field, hide for a few seconds behind cover, then repeat until you are within range and have taken away retreating space from the enemy team. Once you are on top of the enemy team, your Brawl comp has a massive advantage.

Example of a Brawl Comp:

• Tank: Reinhardt
• DPS: Symmetra, Mei
• Support: Lúcio, Moira