Damage falloff on Widow's SMG makes no sense

Widowmaker was characteristically the only hero in the game that didn’t have falloff on her SMG. Widow’s SMG also has never competed against McCree and Soldier in the mid-range… she competes in the mid-ranges with her sniper rifle, and now these changes will trickle down into making her worse overall.

Her SMG could only realistically sustain two bullets at range before spread kicks in, otherwise you have to resort to manually clicking every shot at a pace of 180 bpm – one click every 1/3 second.

  • At her old SMG damage, she was achieving 13 damage per hit (2.0x on headshot).
    • With 50% falloff, that’s been reduced to 6.5 damage per hit.

For comparison;

  • Soldier’s damage is 19 damage per hit before falloff, at a firerate of 9 rounds per second.
  • He can do burst fire with pinpoint precision – he can fire 3 bullets, in the time it takes Widow to fire 1 bullet.

At mid-ranges, in the third-second it takes for Widow to manually fire one singular shot out of SMG for 6.5 damage, Soldier can fire a 3-round burst with near equal precision that deals 57 damage before falloff, 28.5 damage with the new 50% damage falloff.

Soldier can deal literally 4 times the damage Widow’s SMG can; McCree with 50% fallof changes, 6 times the damage.

Widow’s SMG was never particularly good at midrange. Quite literally the only thing it was good for was mopping up a kill if you mistimed damage charge on your sniper rifle – descoping and firing a burst was always faster and more damaging than staying in scope.

That niche use case, that also doubled as a deterrent for 0% sniper spam, is gone.

At the new 50% falloff, both McCree and Soldier will become more effective at dueling against Widow (especially damage-boosted), but because now she’s forced to stay in scope in order to clean up on a mis-timed shot, it’ll be doubly effective at counter-sniping.

  • She’s forced to stay in scope if she mistimes her headshot to clean up a kill
    • Furthermore, spamming shots at 0%, which has always been a poor way to clean up a kill, is now the correct way to clean up a kill… (why are we encouraging spam shots?)
  • She doesn’t have the ability to strafe between shots, making her a sitting duck
    • Her sitting duck problem gets worse because Soldier and McCree have received damage buffs… aim punch scales with damage.
      • Widow, who already stands still and already has aim punch, now has to stand still longer and suffer harsher aim punch.
  • She still has to suffer with the misprediction bug that causes her sniper shots to no-reg, which has no indication of being fixed.

Why would you do this?

Her mid-range damages with the SMG weren’t that high to begin with and were too inconsistent to be used regularly at mid-range, especially when her sniper was an incentive to greater damage.

By making SMG worse, when it was already bad, and then making sniper worse by buffing everyone else, the only thing you’ve achieved here, is make her harder to play for everyone who isn’t a professional.

  • People who knew the smarter thing to do was descope + burst fire (since descoping gets rid of immobility, cleanses aim punch, and was faster and more damaging) now can’t.
    • Widow duels where this was employed (admittedly dishonorably), are now solely based on who has better aim, instead of smart little tricks like this. There is no fallback for a lesser Widow player, no trick that they can pull on a better sniper to win a duel.
  • You’ve reinforced bad habits by encouraging sniper spam at 0% for cleanup kills.
    • People who snipe above average, now have to deal with stronger aim punch from counter-sniping.
  • You’ve introduced variable damage against dive characters if she has to panic fire in the mid-close range, making her survivability that much more questionable.

First you refuse to bugfix her.

Then you add more and more barriers, buff the barrier tanks, and give Symmetra a mapwide barrier.

Then you give Hammond a better version of the grappling hook.

And now, the first time since her disagreeable nerf pre-S1 she is finally getting regular play and you’ve gone and made her worse. You made her already lackluster mid-range worse, her sniping worse, her non-counters escalated to soft-counters, and you’ve turned a bad technique that no one should ever have done an actual proper way to play her.

I just… don’t understand.

3 Likes

For the umpteenth time, here is the list of bugs and problems that Widow faces.

I guess #6 is going to be nullified here, since this falloff addresses those concerns. But nerfing her this way was not how I expected this to be fixed.

If you’re going to push these changes to make playing Widow even worse than it already is, at least give us the damn common courtesy of bugfixing her.

You’re joking. This ‘nerf’ is like increasing the falloff on mercy’s blaster. A highly situational weapon that many players eschew entirely.
Considering widow’s pickrate in the meta, she should have got a much more meaningful change.
And every hero has bugs. No need to spam a list of them.

Falloff has buffed Bastion, McCree, and Soldier’s damage to be up to 6x the damage of Widow’s SMG. Furthermore, aim punch increases with that damage, making sniping harder.

There’s no reason for Widow’s SMG to have suffered a falloff nerf, it makes her inconsistent trying to fight for her life against diving heroes.

Furthermore, Widow’s pickrate isn’t that high, comparative to other heroes in the game, and Widow’s buglist has been public for over 8 months with no sign of fixes.

It’s purely for consistency with the other hitscans. Nothing else.

It comes as a double nerf. Whether it’s for consistency or not.

I know, it’s unfortunate.
Blizzard likes to do that. Eg. Losing earthshatter or sound barrier on stun or death- added for consistency; Lucio losing auras and wallride on hack- for consistency; Or Moira’s recent ‘bugfix’ which stops her healing through enemy barriers.

Widow has a long history of miscommunications, no communication, and nerfs/powercreep that make her matchups unfavorable.