The main problem everyone has with Widowmaker is that they can do little to avoid dying to her, because they never fight Widowmaker; they just play the game far away from her, and hope her aim is off.
There’s a lot of arguments saying that she’s fair and balanced, but they’re all terrible:
“Winston deletes her”
FPS games are sometimes designed to have one class optimised to directly engage the sniper, because smart gamedevs realise that extremely good snipers have no counters and automatically ruin the game.
However, this never works, for one simple reason: If an extremely good sniper is hardcountering all but one enemy player, the rest of the sniper’s team is free to protect the sniper.
For this reason, Spy and Winston both end up being shot at by half the enemy team if they go for a very skilled Sniper.
Also, a perfect Widowmaker player will always kill a perfect Winston player in a 1v1, because she can do 500 damage faster than Winston can do 200.
“Stay out of her sightlines”
Widow’s sightlines are literally the entire relevant play area. No, this is a terrible argument even ignoring that Widow has extremely good mobility and can turn up in extremely unexpected places and even land headshots while flying overhead.
Widow players will often put themselves between the enemy spawn and the frontlines to guarantee that staying out of her sight and playing the game are two mutually exclusive things.
“Use shields”
Shields at least make it possible to enter LoS of a perfect Widowmaker player without instantly dying, but it’s impossible to play the game with everyone behind a shield all the time. Stop pretending it isn’t.
Damage heroes leaving cover to fight aside, I’ve seen Widows roam between the objective and enemy spawn to kill respawned players before they can reach a shield. Nothing can be done to avoid that, especially if the Widow is stealthy.
“Move unpredictably”
All this achieves is making a headshot more difficult, it doesn’t guarantee the enemy sniper can’t do it.
Great Widowmaker players will still land a good portion of their shots even if someone is making an effort to be as difficult as possible to headshot whenever they’re exposed to her.
“Flank her”
Unless you’re flanking with your entire team, the whole “Extremely good Widowmaker leaves her teammates with little to do so they protect the Widow” thing applies in the case of a Widow that needs extra special attention to not be killed by. If you are flanking with your entire team, she’ll just reposition so she’s still a threat in the distance.
“Her winrate isn’t that good”
No one who hates Widowmaker cares about this. They want to have fun playing the game, and if they’re often dying randomly to something with no counter, they’re not going to have fun. It’s kind of like playing a racing game with a controller that disconnects every few minutes so you go off a cliff or into a wall.
“She takes skill”
Not exactly; it’s more that she rewards skill very highly. Too highly, and that’s a problem.
If you perfect Brigitte gameplay, congratulations, you’re able to apply mace to the face constantly but you still have a very hard limit on your damage and healing output.
If you perfect Winston gameplay, congratulations, you know exactly who to zap and can land perfectly on them.
If you perfect Widowmaker gameplay, congratulations, you can kill every unshielded enemy in LoS as you soar through the air using your grappling hook.
Clearly, the perfected Widowmaker is incredibly overpowered compared to the other two, and the other two are only relevant at that level of play because of niche team compositions.