Instead of clicking on heads to wipe heroes out, couldn’t it just function as poison that heals Widow for a percentage of the damage dealt on headshots.
Widow’s Headshots would kill in 2s as opposed to instantly. She would also gain health regeneration. Win-win, especially if they actually consider the laughable suggestion of making her hp 150
Edit: Like Ashe’s fire damage but concentrated on a single hero
The primary concern is that it’s a very heavy nerf to her offensive potential, meaning she’s going to require additional buffs to compensate, and deciding exactly what to do in that regard just makes finalizing the design, testing, and tuning, a potentially slow process. Giving her sustain by healing from the DoT she inflicts isn’t going to be enough in and of itself; she’ll need ways to make up for the loss of damage. Turning a character designed and tuned based on high burst damage to something closer to a sustained damage profile is a big change and needs to be treated accordingly.
Caveats aside, this is a reasonable direction to consider. It just needs enough compensatory buffs to go along with it, and more playtesting under those conditions to see if it works in practice.
I gave an answer that addresses this in another thread.
Giving widow the ability to regenerate health on headshots is a good way to counteract the removal of the one-shot, while also making it deadly. Kinda like a super charged Ana shot, which also weans away health over time each shot. Giving Widow more survivability is what’s needed if she gets her one shot removed imo.
I would say add poison to her Auto fire but idk if that’s overkill or not
What are your thoughts on something of this sort (dot) being paired with bullet piercing? Not barriers or constructs, just player models.
Also curious how open you’d be to Venom Mine buffs. In Widow conversations, it very rarely seems to be considered as a talking point.
Kinda seems like they simply need to give her a more offensive ultimate
This basically covers my thoughts very well since what her strength is would be threat range and scaring the enemy into forcing position into taking cover from your angle. If she has none, the enemy team can just not worry about her and force a 4v5.
All the power budget in Widow is damage and making the enemy feel like they can’t just rush forward and win a team fight. If a Widow is bad at aiming or can’t get damage/elims in, that team is going to force a 4v5 and probably win it.
Sustain does little to someone who uses distance to keep themselves safe and rarely is damaged. It is not a good trade.
Thought about it before, and giving away your sniping position so easily doesn’t solve what the issues are in the game: her gun being the best at that range with no other possible hero equal at that rang except mirroring. Still, she is guaranteed one kill if no one is aware of where Widow is and that alone is powerful.
Mines are solely to alert to being flanked so you have a chance to escape. It’s basically a signifier to gtfo from your sniping position. A buff does not address what people don’t like about her and a buff would do virtually nothing beneficial.
I apologize but I don’t know how you read my post about the issue about her primary fire sniping being too strong and thought “She needs a stronger ult”.
Why would she ever need to heal on hurt? First, she needs to play far enough to adequately snipe, so she’s far enough to not need healing due to not being in the fight, and then she has to line up a head shot that won’t kill anyone anyway?
Also, when dove by any flankers or tank, she’s probably not landing a headshot to heal, so this mechanic seems like it’d be useless in game.
But I assume poisoned targets would be saved if they get healing within those two seconds. With the abundance of healing, this sounds like its just a sneaky way to eliminate widow’s primary threat potential.
The problem is that the whole issue IS her threat potential. And reducing her health to 150 is laughable because it won’t really change anything.
So changing her primary fire to be something that is still effective but also buffs her in some way is what needs to be figured out.
So far, it seems like it could be a rework of her ultimate, which is ultimate just x-ray vision. Maybe something more flashy is needed?
I’m asking if these sorts of buffs would be a good start to compensation IF her weapon were nerfed from burst to a damage over time.
The Widow conversation often pushes to butcher the character and make her plain bad. But I’m curious where her power could be redistributed if her sniper was “made more manageable” for players to fight against.
Taking everything that you said into account, if Widow is nerfed in any form, wouldn’t the obvious thing to do be a change to her ult?
Have Dot would hurt Widow’s ability to get kills. Any drop of healing would negate the shot.
Those compensation buffs would need to be very big.
I know. I answered this.
What I mean by this is it either goes dramatically two ways:
((EDIT:
I realized I was confused, some people are saying DOT as in damage-over-time and some are saying DOT like a laser dot and my feelings to both are questionable.))
Unless you meant about her mines which I also answered.
If Widow WERE to theoretically need to be nerfed due to OW 2 meta, it is not in a way to eliminate her damage or make her more visible. It would be to make her aim worse and give her a harder time to flick targets.
Widow has no weapon sway, recoil, and does not have aim-jump from being shot at while scoped. Her value to aim very accurately is strong and it should have a decent amount of strength in a fast game like overwatch. However, the meta has changed and now the question is how healthy is it now?
That’s a tough question because it greatly depends on how you nerf someone and changed around their power/ability. That is not a simple question and would require some conversation to explain why.
but it is much harder on people who have ALL their power based into one thing. In the case of Widow, that is sniping and getting elims for trading off NOT being directly in the fray of battle. She still needs to be a threat. I just think personally that you can fix this issue (if it is an issue) that you make her aim more difficult so her likelihood of getting consecutive oneshot kills back-to-back is reduced.
The question is what it could be. It boggles the mind to be quite honest. What would work??
Honestly nothing as it would totally change Widow into something that is not a sniper.
As someone who actually plays Widow, that’s not being realistic let’s be honest here. If they nerf Hog, they will come for Widow eventually. The question is how to stop Blizz from nuking the character, hence why we are discussing potential paths that would actually work
I am saying unless they give her completely new abilities changing numbers for grapple and venom mine will not be enough of a compensation.
Bullet piercing would realistically be a fairly small buff; sometimes cool in a dense team fight, but irrelevant the majority of the time.
With venom mine, it would need drastic changes to help make up for the loss of burst. You’d need at least two charges so she can set them up more flexibility, and a much flatter trajectory so she can deploy them towards the front line reliably even when she’s positioned distantly.
Then, the tune of what you’d be looking at to make this work is something that effectively restores one-shot possibilities while providing additional benefit beyond that. Which probably means something like the mine producing a debuff causing DoTs other than the mine itself to apply their full damage instantaneously, or something along the lines of anti-nade healing mitigation.
Alone, even then, I’m not sure it would be enough. Leaning too heavily into offensive use of traps to function effectively is also a dramatically different playstyle. But good mine buffs could be a piece of the puzzle.
And, I’m going to mention this more as point of emphasis on how much of Widow’s power is tuned based on what burst damage does to fragile heroes rather than strictly in response to your post-
Widow takes 1s to charge to full power, but in practice it’s always slower because scope in time is non-zero, and there’s a 0.5s delay after firing before she starts charging.
That means with headshots, her DPS at full charge before accounting reloads is 200, the same as Mercy headshotting with her pistol. And Widow’s scoped shot DPS on body would work out to 80, given the same considerations. And Widow also has an ultimate that doesn’t contribute any damage directly.
So the scale of what we’d need to buff is significant.
Thank you. Your explanation puts it well. That’d definitely make it tricky to change her.
Hmm…maybe give widow additional evasive abilities in general? 
. Something other than the grapple I mean