If they are played a lot in top 500? Seems a lot of people uniornincally think Tracer takes no skill and are using her gm pickrates as an excuse to nerf her further. If a hero only gets value for the top 1% of players and is meh everywhere else, does that mean they take no skill? Seems the opposite to me. If the only ones who can make a hero work are the actual best players then it seems that hero is indeed skillful.
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I guess it depends, and I think people misuse “no skill” when they mean “the effort to value ratio doesn’t feel fair”.
Like Sojourn in Season 1 - yeah she takes skill to hit shots and she was rampant in Top500. But she didn’t require that much skill compared to how she was able to dictate matches.
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tbf in a role based team game the skill it takes to play a hero doesnt really get u any respect. thats more of a 1v1 game thing.
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Yes. People who say otherwise don’t have a proper understanding in this regard.
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Ik this is a rhetorical question but anyone who seriously says any character takes no skill is just a whole clown 
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This is it, exact definition of cheese in this game and there is a lot of it.
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Anyone who says that Tracer isn’t one of the hardest DPS in the game has never played her at a level where mistakes get punished at all. Tracer is hard because mistakes get you one shot.
Pickrates mean nothing. People choose hard meta in GM, that’s nothing new.
Right, she’s picked because of “skill.” People will always pick the path of least resistance in this frustrating game. Tracer’s not being picked for the challenge.
tracer is literally the hardest hero in the game and has been for years. This new wave of f2p players trying to say otherwise and call everyone else wrong, are a bunch of idiots sadly.
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To get top 500 with? Absolutely not. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t take skill, but Tracer is definitely not the hardest hero to get value from at a high level of play. Not even close.
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Nobody thinks this. The opposite is true. Who are you talking to that led you to believe this?
Tracer could be the hardest hero at low level of play. 
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Seems pretty common thinking on this forum.
We’re changing the argument from hardest to play to hardest to get value with. If that’s the case, doom is the hardest in the game or hog.
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I’d say a Sym in Top 500 is more skillful than a Tracer, Weaver over Ana or Hog over Queen. Hard meta characters, especially Tracer, are meta not necessarily because of the skill they take but because of their impact. Weaker characters like Sym, Hog and Weaver are 10x harder to play in Top 500 than the point and click adventure game meta we’ve had since the start of OW2, especially on console where a xim Widow or Sojourn will always dominate.
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People that don’t think Tracer is hard don’t understand movement, tracking and timing in the slightest. Tracer might be a linear character and not really as in depth as others but how she is played is extremely hard to master.
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A hero doesn’t take skill if they kill me consistently. Those are the forum rules.
Real talk though, Tracer is the Smash Bros is heroes. Very basic and accessible on paper but impossible to master. Playing her at a high level requires a mechanical effort substantially greater than that of her peers, in addition to extreme gamesense requirements. It seems universally accepted among OWL that Tracer is the highest skill ceiling hero in the game, which is of no surprise.
Unless she’s dumpstered, she’ll always be popular at T500 because as players approach her realistic human skill ceiling (her true theoretical ceiling will never be touched), she allows them to do things they can’t do on other heroes. She has a very high effort to value ratio, but that ratio scales up with player experience much longer than for other heroes. And for a 1K hour T500 Tracer, the effort may not feel particularly high anymore either; they’ve been doing this long enough for it to become second nature (why OWL casters have referred to her as a comfort pick for some players when they use her in scenarios where she seems less than ideal).
On the other hand she can be valuable at low levels just by distracting the backline and blinking around to stay alive. This is a low skill playstyle that probably causes a lot of Tracer frustration. This method can still win games, but it doesn’t win enough to climb. She’s generally unviable beneath Master and only truly good at GM+.
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I’ve seen this sentiment posted here by multiple people, sadly.
Ultimately every single hero takes skill to main in gm/top 500 and anyone saying otherwise is out of their mind with bias.
It means they have a higher skill floor than other heroes. So they require more practice/skill to get baseline value with. In that case yes, they do require more skill.
On the other hand heroes who struggle to get enough value in top ranks see their skill floors increase exponentially as the other players skill levels do. Those heroes are often highly limited by their kits so while the mechanical skill floor does increase it’s nowhere near the increase in gamesense requirement.
Basically if your hero is incapable of getting as much consistent value then the player on that hero must play with a higher level of gamesense to make up for that limitation. If you can’t outplay the less limited heroes with better gamesense then you’ll get stomped as your hero simply can’t stand up to them mechanically.
So yeah. All heroes require skill to play in top ranks but which skills and the extent you need to improve in each skill varies from hero to hero.
As for Tracer she’s considered such a difficult hero due to her requiring high mechanical skill as well as gamesense. It doesn’t mean that she requires the most in either of those but both are quite demanding when played in top ranks.
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No, Tracer is hard because she legitimately does require the most game sense. And I still don’t understand why people call her mechanically difficult, because she’s absolutely not. Her guns have no recoil, Blinks are one button, Recall is one button, and you don’t have to aim either one. PULSE is mechanically difficult, but that’s only if you’re dumb enough to try to aim it and don’t just throw it to get a new one.
The reason Tracer is hard is because mistakes will get you killed 100% of the time. If your Recall is forced, you get focused and die. Blink an inch out of position, you die. At a high level you have to be playing near perfectly to get value. However, Tracer gets more value than other characters when she does this, so it’s easier to get value on her than other heroes. But just playing Tracer, not considering value, is harder than any other DPS, just because everyone else can afford to make mistakes as long as it’s less common than the other team. Tracer is the only hero who absolutely can not make mistakes.
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