Widowmaker Concept [Overwatch, again]

Hero and Skin Suggestions
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Sorry for clumping up the forum with my own ideas, but hopefully it’s not too much.

For this concept, I wanted to design Widowmaker as more of a nimble sniper without clashing with Nova, which tbh I think I’ve done pretty well. Where Nova focuses on burst damage and slipping away into stealth, Widowmaker focuses on damage over time and sustain damage with her auto attacks. Of course, she follows the Overwatch trend of being overly nimble, but given how squishy she is she definitely needs it to get out of tight situations. (Also, Grapple is a bit finnicky but only because the main mechanic of how it would have worked is already taken by Qhira)

Widowmaker

Title: Talon Assassin
Role: Assassin
Difficulty: Hard
Franchise: Overwatch
Attack type: Ranged
Health: 1330
Health regen: 3.2
Resource: Mana
Unit radius: 0.55
Attack speed: 4
Attack range: 4.4
Attack damage: 18

Q - Grapple - 12 seconds - 55 mana - Grapple to an ally or enemy character or structure up to 7 units. Can be cancelled during the grapple.

W - Venom Mine - 9 seconds - 40 mana - Fire a venom mine up to 6 units away, taking 1 second. Upon landing it activates after 1 second; when an enemy comes within a 1 unit range it detonates, dealing 110 damage over 4 seconds and revealing them for 4 seconds. 1 unit vision range.

E - Agile Manoeuvre - 10 seconds - 35 mana - Target an enemy within 1.25 units. Flip over them, and lunge 2 units in the opposite direction. Agile Manoeuvre slows the target by 50% for 0.35 seconds when you jump over them. Immediately cancels Scoped In.

Trait - Scoped In - 1 second - Aim down sights, altering your basic attacks. Decrease attack speed to 0.75 per second, increase its damage to 175, increase its range to 7.7, but decrease your move speed by 20%.
Widow’s Kiss - Repeatable Quest: Kill enemy heroes while Scoped In. Each kill increases your Scoped In basic attack damage by 10%, up to 50%. While at maximum stacks, basic attacks heal for 15% of the damage dealt All stacks lost on death.

R1 - Infra-Sight - 50 seconds - 50 mana - Activate to reveal all enemies for 12 seconds.

R2 -Widow’s Sting - 30 seconds - Activate to cause basic attacks while Scoped In to deal additional 50% of its damage over 6 seconds for 6 seconds.

Lvl 1
Nimble - Gain increased 5% move speed while not Scoped In. Gain additional 5% move speed for 1.25 seconds after exiting Scoped In.
Enhanced Spring System - Increase Venom Mine cast range by 33%.
Lone Spider - Repeatable Quest: Last hit kill enemies with basic attacks. Minions count as 1, heroes count as 5. Every 10 stacks permanently increases your health regen by 2.

Lvl 4
Out of Sight - Enter Stealth for 3 seconds after performing Agile Manoeuvre. You are unrevealable for 0.5 seconds. Passive: Decrease the cooldown of Agile Manoeuvre by 2 seconds.
Strategic Repositioning - Increase the jump range of Agile Manoeuvre by 50%. After using Agile Manoeuvre, your next Scoped In basic attack deals 25% more damage.
Flawless Agility - Agile Manoeuvre’s activation range is increased by 50%, and can target friendly heroes.

Lvl 7
In my Sights - Increase the trigger and vision range, and reveal duration of Venom Mine by 50%.
Taste my Sting - Quest: Damage enemy heroes with Venom Mine. Reward: Each time it damages an enemy hero, increase its damage by 5, up to 150. After damaging enemy heroes 30 times, Venom Mine reduces physical armour by 20 for the duration.
Oppressive Venom - Venom Mine slows enemies by 50% for 0.75 seconds, decaying over 1.25 seconds to 10% for the rest of its duration. Passive: Increase Venom Mine’s damage over time duration by 1 second.

Lvl 13
Envenomed Claw - Grapple deals 110 damage over 5 seconds to enemies, doubled versus heroes. Passive: Reduce its cooldown by 2 seconds.
Contagion - Enemies inflicted by Venom Mine’s damage over time spread the remaining damage to enemy heroes who come into a 1 unit range.
Let them Eat Cake - Restore health equal to 75% of the damage done by damage over time effects. Passive: Agile Manoeuvre deals 90 damage over 3 seconds.

Lvl 16
Toxic Minefield - Gain a second charge of Venom Mine. They cannot be placed within 3 units of each other. Passive: Reduce the cooldown of Venom Mine by 1 second. Triggering a Venom Mine reduces its cooldown by 2 seconds.
Widow’s Silk - Gain a second charge of Grapple. After grappling, gain 40 armour for 3 seconds.
Acrobat’s Dodge - Agile Manoeuvre gains a second charge and stuns the target for 0.75 seconds. After using Agile Manoeuvre, gain 20% move speed for 3 seconds.

Lvl 20
Ultra-Sight (R1) - Increase Infra-Sight’s duration by 25%. Enemies revealed by Infra-Sight have their physical armour reduced by 25.
My Bite is Fatal (R2) - Basic attacks permanently inflict 50% additional damage over 6 seconds, activating Widow’s Sting increases it to 100%.
Black Widow - Increase Scoped In attack range by 2.2, and you are no longer slowed.
Never More Alive - After killing an enemy, gain 5% increased attack speed while Scoped In, stacking up to 6 times. Killing a hero grants max stacks. Lasts up to 8 seconds, refreshed by basic attacks.

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I like it, I was never happy with the whole “Nova’s already a Sniper! Widowmaker would be redundant!” line

Widowmaker doesn’t clone herself or turn invisible, Nova doesn’t use poison or have a machine gun mode for her sniper

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I like this concept in theory, but there are some issues that I think need to be grappled with before this concept is truely polished.

1.) This is a basic attack centric character but… her DPS both in scope and out of scope are both pathetically low.

Her out-of-scope form has very low range (4.4 is slightly lower than base tychus) and does about the same DPS as… Deckard Cain. Yeah no, she isn’t killing anyone while unscoped, and while that may be an intentional desicion to prevent Widowmakers from running around unscoped all the time, you need at least a little bit of power to allow Widowmaker to participate in soaking lanes, pushing, etc.

And her scoped form isn’t much better, 175 (+4% per level) every 1.33 seconds is barely more DPS than Valla at 0 Hatred… without factoring in her abilities. When you factor in that Valla has scaling damage amplification and two damaging abilities at level 1. Not to mention how incredibly unsafe wandering around at 80% movespeed is.

You can fix these issues with simple numerical changes–I’d say a good baseline would be ~30 to 40 for Widowmaker’s unscoped basic attack (even if she has 160 DPS unscoped, she’s still got less range than Tychus), and at LEAST 200 DPS for scoped though you could go more extreme and do an Nova AAS style basic attack (basic attack once every 2-3 seconds for ~400-600 damage). Since Widowmaker’s essentially sole damaging option is basic attacks, they should be inherently strong.

Also, Venom Mine is really, really bad. With a grand total of 27 DPS in a game where people have health in the 1000s starting at level one, there’s absolutely 0 deterrence for stepping on it. Considering they fill a very similar role to Abathur’s mines, I’d recommend a mixture of the following things

  • Increase damage to 200-300.
  • Have it slow or hinder enemy progress in some way (keep this tame, 20% move speed slow or something like that)
  • Give it multiple charges/lower cooldown and allow multiples to be out

2.) Scoped In outranges structures.

While this isn’t a problem due to the very low DPS numbers, there is a small concern that the main role Widowmaker would fill is a more mobile Sgt. Hammer. I’d recommend post increasing Widowmaker’s numbers tacking on a 50% reduction of damage to enemy structures while scoped in. This also allows you to force the Widowmaker to split between “I’m scoping in and bullying the enemy out of the lane while my minions push the lane” and “I’m unscoped and burning down the structure as quickly as possible, at full mobility but at a closer and more gankable distance”

3.) Both Heroics are both overly simplistic and kind of bad.
I’m going to go over each seperately.

  • Infra-Sight is at the very least FLAVORFUL but doesn’t really impact the game-state well enough to be well designed. There’s a variety of ways to do this, but the simplest while still keeping the idea of “The sniper can see you oh crap” is to just increase Widowmaker’s Attack Range while Infra-Sight is active, something like 2.2 units in both stances. Keep the cooldown low on this as well.
  • I’d suggest a complete redesign of Widow’s Kiss as it’s (in my opinion) rather uninspired and you also have two buff Heroics. I’ll give a quick idea but it’s really up to you, though I’d recommend some sort of active skill-shot.
Widow's Sting - 20 seconds, 80 mana 
Immediately Scope In and fire a long ranged 
shot that pierces targets, dealing ~400 damage 
and stunning anyone hit for 1 second, and 
dealing an additional ~200 damage over 3 seconds.

4.) A large portion of the talent tree needs a complete rework.
Try to compare this character’s talent tree to someone like Valla or Nova. Every talents needs to modify and buff different abilities in different unique ways. While Widowmaker does have some quite nice talents, some just… need some love. I’ll list the offenders below:

Nimble, Enhanced Spring System, Lone Spider, In My Sights, Taste my Sting, My Bite is Fatal, Never More Alive (which is a blatant copy of It’s Killing Time! from Zuljin). All of these should be fully replaced with stuff that is stronger/more uniquely modifies the moves in question.

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The problem isn’t their skillsets, it’s their silhouettes. They look practically identical. You can’t really give either of them skins to use because they’d be too easily confused for each other.