After amicably splitting with half of their roster last week, ANOX.OW has revitalised their roster by picking up three players from 4-25. The new ANOX.OW team competed recently in the GosuGamers Weekly 11 and managed to place 5th, knocking nubris to the Lower Bracket in the process.
Earlier this week, half of ANOX.OW split from the roster and formed a new team, Fortress. This move left sharyk and the two Quake gods Cooller and Cypher searching for replacements, which they found by merging with another CIS team, 4-25.
These players have history with each other, having played together previously in the beta. Their roles differ slightly from the previous iterations of these CIS teams: sharyk as usual picks up the primary tank role, with Anak helping him out on the flex role. That frees Cypher up to return to a pure DPS role, allowing him to exercise his fragging muscle once again, helped out on DPS by kensi who handles the Widowmaker and Pharah when required. Their supports are Rubikon and Cooller, normally on Mercy and Lucio respectively.
ANOX.OW manager Sarque gave us his thoughts on the team:
Anak and Kensi are really promising players with good history in TF2, and they've played Overwatch with Cooller and Cypher few months ago, so it's like a reunion if it can be called so. We qualified on The Battle tournament, and are having good results in weeklies. We are focused on trainings and willing to maximize our performance. Our current goal is top10 world, top5 Europe and top1 CIS. At the moment we can beat the goal and even overdo it.
The team appeared to gel straight out of the gate, achieving 5th place in the GosuGamers Weekly 11 and knocking down nubris in the process. They did proceed to get annihilated by REUNITED and subsequently knocked out by Graviton Surge in the Control BO1, but nevertheless this was a relatively strong showing in their first tournament against good competition. Following their performance in the Weekly, ANOX were able to qualify in The Battle Qualifier #2, beating OWKings 2-0 in the process. Could this be the first team with old Quake gods to shine in Overwatch?
The ANOX.OW roster is now:
- Kiryl "Anak" Nikalayenka
- Artem "Kensi" Budiak
- Ruben "Rubikon" Zurabyan
- Normund "sharyk" Faterins
- Aliaksei "Cypher" Yanusheuski
- Anton "Cooller" Singov
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