Make her grapple break if shot while attempting to / or grappling to a location. Similar to Sombra when her hack is interrupted the cooldown would be lowered. She would not lose momentum from the grapple. This would allow dive characters to actually try and duel her instead of her just getting away at the press of a button and immediately gaining the upper hand.
edit: You can also make it break depending on the damage received or break only if attempting to grapple, etc. The idea remains.
Nah it would make grapple too inconsistent when some guy 50 m away tickles you when trying to do a hook shot or reposition. The only good suggestion I’ve seen so far is making it like sombras hack in that if u take damage it goes on cd, but excluding the break part. So say if you take 15 damage over .2 seconds, grapple goes on cd for 1.5 seconds or something like that.
Break means the ability stops and goes on cooldown. The cooldown is lower so if the fight takes too long, stops or she is like you said shot from 50m randomly she can do it again in a few seconds. You can include the damage rule and make it so it’s only when she takes 25 damage for example. It’s up to balancing.
But imagine a dva from eichenwalde second point was spamming from the massive doors at a widow on ground level at the 3rd point attacker spawn. This would prevent a widow from repositioning or finding a different angle from taking potentially 1 damage. That seems like terrible design to me. I also don’t think the hook should just straight up break because again, it’s just really inconsistent and too ez to make happen.
But then she literally couldn’t get away from Winston, and D.va wouldn’t be likely either
Why do y’all suggest these changes that would turn her into a no-skill-free-kill for dive tanks? This change and 150 hp would be absolutely terrible changes.
You’d be better off bumping her cooldown back up to 12 seconds, but I’m sure they dropped that to 10 for a reason.
How about this: Leave her alone and add a tank with a railgun to the game? Not only would this give tanks a long ranged option (and free up the dive tanks to go after supports), but it would also look and potentially sound really awesome.
OK in all honesty, nerfing her is the more viable choice, but no ability should really be inconsistent. Having the grapple break makes it unreliable, which makes it automatically a garbage ability. An ability shouldn’t be nerfed by making it depend on how much people are spamming her. Having the grapple break would actually create a situation worse than Tracer/Brig. She would literally be unplayable against dive tanks.
I’d be more in favor to give her 150 HP. This gives the dive tanks more time to kill her, but it also gives her a chance to actually get away. Maybe a small nerf to her grapple cooldown could work, too, of course.
I still think 150 hp is an awful idea.
Winston can do 135 damage in one second with the jump melee combo, so it would only take a tiny bit more to kill Widow with that low of hp.
And he does the least damage of the dive heroes per target!
Edit: I meant 135, so even worse!
You have a point there…Widow is really hard to figure out how to nerf, isn’t she? x’D
Pretty much it’s grapple cooldown or charge time, those are the only two ways to weaken her meaningfully without destroying her, and that’s only if they’re tiny nerfs.
Yeah. Widow is in a precarious state where if you nerf her too much, she’s worthless since Ashe/good Hanzos exist. Small nerfs like that are probably the best that can be done.
I think that’s a sign that she really shouldn’t be nerfed.
Either that, or we should leave it up to blizzard to figure out.
Yeah, the community around here hasn’t produced any ideas I’ve seen that wouldn’t either ruin the character or have very little impact
I don’t think she’s as broken as people want to believe
It’s just a suggestion. I’d think they’d throw it on experimental first to see how it actually is. Currently Widow has no weakness because of her grapple being able to ignore anything that’s diving her. Only character that counters Widow is Widow. She NEEDS nerfs because in the right hands she is so extremely oppressive it can become a Widow diff game really quick. She makes space by simply existing because the threat of getting headshot is so huge it completely changes the positioning of characters in order to not die. You either nerf her ability to run away or her gun.
I would make it only stoppable in start up. If the grapple hits a ledge before you can hit her, she can still grapple. But if she’s hit during deployment it goes on a 1.5s CD
That could work too. You are often already on top of widow in the first place so it would have the same effect.
Grapple Hook is already a mobility/escape ability that comes with tough restrictions: aiming your trajectory at an appropriate surface, the delay between activating the ability and actually getting movement, the trackable straight-forward line she moves in, the inability to shoot or use other abilities while grappling, and to top it off, it’s on a decently long cooldown. If Widow doesn’t land herself in a good position, she’s stuck grounded for 10 seconds, making her extremely vulnerable if she isn’t able to make an escape.
Breaking the grapple by damage does not seem right to me. Mobility abilities are meant to be fluid and hard to interrupt, and that’s a rule for fun. If any decent scratch damage could cut the grapple, it would feel inconsistent and very awkward to use, since not only are you being denied an ability by something as conventional as just damage, but now you’re going to be misplaced by your own ability. This would also mean that if Widow was being hounded by Winston, she just wouldn’t be able to escape at all, short of finding a window where Winston is reloading to grapple away. That doesn’t seem right at all considering Winston already has an immense advantage against Widow – people really want to deny this, but Winston shuts down Widow extremely easily and makes her very difficult to get value out of, so I’m very hesitant to give Widow a nerf that makes her even easier to die against Winston.
Widow does not need to be more vulnerable to dive. Her having an escape option is not a problem – virtually all DPS heroes have either some sort of “get out of jail free” card or otherwise have something else to compensate. Reaper and Mei can become completely invulnerable, Tracer can rewind time, Soldier has no cooldown on sprint and access to a self-heal. All these characters have responses to situations where they’re being caught out, and they have those responses because it’s engaging to have enemies that can try and make a comeback. It makes for interesting dynamics when characters aren’t so hard countered that they can’t possibly get away or hope to turn things around the moment it starts going bad for them.
And for Widowmaker, that ability to escape is not a guaranteed escape, and it’s also the same ability she wants to use to access the best sniping positions in a map, it’s the same ability she has to use to take aggressive and forward angles, it’s what she has to use if she wants to chase after enemies. So the fact that this ability also has to make reservations for an unsafe escape, to me, doesn’t seem incorrect at all. Grapple Hook is a great ability for Widow and how she’s meant to interact with the game, and while I can definitely see it as an easy place to nerf, making it inconsistent like this is not the right direction. Lower the cooldown, decrease its range, other tweaks could possibly work, but what people seemingly want is for Widow to be a free kill the moment D.va or Winston are even being played – they want Widow to be useless, and they think that’s fair because uhh headshots I guess, and they don’t realize how difficult the character already is to play, let alone how unbearable she’d be to play if her one mobility option was denied to her if she’s ever taking damage (aka the exact situation she’d want to be escaping from).
This is a fact about Widow’s design that the community is going to have to accept. Widow was meant to escape using Grapple Hook, it’s hard for me to imagine they’d nerf it like this and not at least also give her better power elsewhere in her kit, and do people really want that? Like I said, they don’t – they just want an easy-to-kill Widow that doesn’t challenge them to navigate maps properly or execute dive tactics correctly.
this i wouldnt mind if its a mcree shot or a genji shuriken stopping my grapple but if its dvas spam from 1 km away like she does to mercy regen it will be broken and abused not to mention winston will kill her everytime he dives her.
The actual truth is coordinated dives dont happen even in gm level, mainly due to solo q, if you see a 6stack gold game will be better co ordinated than a gm solo q game.Im not sure a hero should be nerfed for solo q standards.
It just gives some widow some counterplay to her grapple hook being cancelled because it would mean she can start pre-emptively hooking. It would require a lot more spacial awareness this way.
The other way however she could be caught and just die with no counterplay on the widow’s end except swap when really she needs her escape to be viable at all.
If the change is too much I’d consider lowering both the cooldown and the damage cooldown to 10s and 1s respectively to let her reposition more and have a bit more of a chance. Or maybe instead of altering the cooldown alter the damage threshold. I don’t know unless it’s in practice.
I feel like I am in a time loop on these forums. The OPs suggestion has been made at least 10 times in the last 10 days by others. Almost every post now is a duplicate of a previous post. And then everyone answers as if it’s a new idea. Am I the only one with a memory more than a few hours?
The ability quite literally locks automatically to surfaces you can grapple to and you can set the sensitivity of it. If you die because you “didn’t land in a good position” then that’s on you for having poor positioning in the first place. There is no rule anywhere that mobility abilities are “meant to be fluid and hard to interrupt” that’s made up. And no, Winston doesn’t “shut down widow extremely easily” because she can just use Grapple to get away to safety 8 times out of 10. She DOES need to be vulnerable to dive otherwise she has NO WEAKNESSES outside of mirroring. Her having a escape option that is this free IS A PROBLEM because no other hero has a near infinite range one shot apart from Hanzo who is outclassed by Widowmaker because the projectile speed was nerfed. Widow can still outplay divers with the nerf. And again 8 times out of 10 it is a guaranteed escape. And yes ask anyone consistently in T500 that isn’t a Widow/Hitscan player themselves about Widow and they will ask for nerfs.