Get Good At Widow?

Competitive Discussion
1

Widow main here. A lot of people often don’t give widow much of a chance in their hero pool citing the difficulties in picking her up. Last season I managed a 61% winrate with her and climbed from silver to plat. I am currently evening out in plat but I am still climbing currently. I’ve come up against a lot of diamond level widows and I’ve learned a lot about them and what makes them “good”.

I am writing this loose guide to document my experiences and to let you know what I’ve observed.

The first thing is obvious: practice. There is no trick to getting good at widow other than playing her a lot. I played widow for a solid 42 hours across all modes to get to where I am now, semi-competent most of the time. And this isn’t even my most played hero as you can probably tell. Almost 60 percent of that was just forcing myself to play her in FFA deathmatch. You’ll generally face down the most difficult heroes to hit in that mode like genji, brig, etc. And after the 500th time genji dashes towards you you’ll learn. I know that this sounds unsatisfying. But really there is no trick. You just have to play her a lot. And learn the patterns of movement for each character. I would say that you learn to counter mccree particularly well playing FFA DM. Genji can be a mixed bag if they’re good. But you will learn how to line up a close range headshot in time.

The second point I’ll make is that widow improves your skills with a lot of DPS. I think you’ll find that after you play an essentially aim only character the fact that other characters get value without aiming feels like a welcome reprieve. Particularly ashe, solider, and Ana. All feel much easier to play.

I will say this about plat widows. Many of them who actually play widow have GREAT aim. And I really mean that. They can aim very well. So well that I would argue that anyone that makes it to plat based on widow skill and can hang at that rank (you’d know if this was true) could make it to high diamond on that mechanical skill level. The thing that separates a high tier widow from a plat widow is solely positioning. The high tier widows know how to grapple and get to the wierdest places and the wierdest angles. They are very disciplined about not staying in one angle too long and the assumption is that peaking without the element of surprise or without protection is suicide. Indeed at high ranks it is.

But the thing is again that…they’re not actually that much better than plat widows. Most plat widows win because they have very good aim and the enemy team makes mistakes. They entirely lean on raw mechanical skill. Higher ranked widows have pretty similar aim but they only fire high percentage shots on valuable targets. They simply know how to maximize the damage they get from their aim even if that aim isn’t actually any better.

So once you’ve got the aim down the key work is discipline. The discipline to know when to peak, when to take a different angle, when to move. And if it comes to it, when to switch and then switch back. Min maxing and not throwing your life away.

That is literally all it takes. There’s no complex mental meta game. There’s no combos to learn. There isn’t even really ult management. You learn the aim and mental game and you can be in the top 5% of the game no joke. And I do believe that it is within the reach of most players. It really only take the will to lose and die a lot first.

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The best thing I can tell any Widow player is that you need to put yourself in the situations where a Widow with perfect accuracy would wipe the team. There have been too many VOD reviews where I’ve gotten the excuse “I didn’t push on that flank because I wouldn’t have been able to hit the shots before they all looked at me.” The truth is that there’s absolutely no way they’ll play at the level of the pros if they don’t put themselves in situations where a pro would find value. It’s the best way to practice.

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A well written post.

As someone who mains Widow a lot, I agree. Aim, positioning, and mental acuity is key. A lack of any one of those can create issues in one’s play.

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I have been practicing widow in FFA for a long time now. Since this is my first FPS I started out just about as bad as you can be. But I really wanted to get good with widow so I pulled through and played lots and lots of FFA. After getting last every time I now get top 4 consistently. I’m still not amazing, but I’m 20x better than I was when I started and it’s satisfying. When I go into quickplay however, my accuracy doesn’t seem to be as good as in FFA. I want to start practicing positioning, but whenever I start, I feel like I need to work on my aim more.

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The most important ability to learn as a widow is to know when to switch off to something else that can bring more value. Even the best Windows choke and tilt from there every now and then. But there’s a lot of other reasons like map design, enemy managing to shut you down or play around you not to mention that it might be to hard for the rest of the team to hold their ground with one man short on/close to objective.

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I’ve a question (only about 6 hours in i think).
How do you position yourself when your tanks aren’t creating any space? Do you constantly move around to make your opponent always keep guessing?

Plus, how do you consistently land clutch shots. For example, sometimes I’ll miss like 4 shots in a row:/

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FFA is very different than qp and comp, especially widow hs only FFA, some widow is only good at dueling and cant hit other heros lol. Widow in comp need to get value in those critical moments, like hitting a hs as soon as enemy shield down.

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Missing shots is ok, especially hard shots, like a ad spamming target. But you need to make sure that you dont miss easy shot, like when you getting in a flank angle where enemy didnt notice you yet, you gotta hit the first hs to get a kill, if you missed, they will start to adad spam and avoid you, and you will have a much harder time hitting enemy.

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Practice
Headshots
Only
30 minutes
a
day

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Yeah, that’s why I often go back to working on my aim so I can land those shots.

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Adjust your relative aim sensitivity. I think the best setting is like 79 or something. Also move less when aiming. Make it more about reaction time and them walking into your crosshair.

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You either be blessed with insane reaction time and skill or you aimbot. There’s no inbetween.

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I’m gonna stop you right there, when you say plat widows can hang with high diamond mechanically. Plat widows, I’ll get right in front of them with no fear and kill them with reaper… diamond widows are scary.

A big problem with plats is their movement sucks. If all you do is improve your movement, any plat can get to diamond, EXCEPT widow. You need to be able to headshot players that can move like high elo players to get to diamond with widow. Plat vs diamond widow is probably the biggest skill difference in the game (between 1 elo and the next on a single character)

Basically:
gold widows can hit targets that stand still (they are bad)
Plat widows can hit targets that move in straight lines (they are bad)
Diamond widows can headshot targets that are ad ad crouch spamming and never in sightlines for more than like a second (they are good and scary)

A true diamond widow will destroy a team of plats. They generally have amazing aim but poor game sense (dont know what to do when being countered). The ones that DO know what to do when being countered move onto master or gm

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Relative aim senitivity is very important indeed. However 79 is the most extreme number I’ve seen. There’s no “right” value but most people I’ve helped have had an easier time when changing that setting to something higher than default (which is 30 I believe).

Now you can put it in 3 categories, low, medium and high. 30-38 in which 37.89 or 37.94 is seen as the most accurate value for micro flicks. However some prefer it to be a bit lower and a bit faster and since it’s based of your normal sense many with high sense prefer something like 35.

The medium category would be 39-45 in which you have many who prefer 40 and many who prefer 44-45, I think the horiziontal way many games like CS use have a value that most resembles 44.44 or if it was 45.44 however what you like is very subjective.

The high category would be from 46 to 51 in which I’ve seen different numbers which is the right but usually what most people find comfortable is 48 (surfour for example usually use this or at leasthe did) while many prefer 49-51. You’ll have to google the various calculations from people if you want the closest to an “accurate” value however it’s really subjective. People who have rather low in-game sense tend to have a higher relative sense and like mentioned above the other way around with people who have high sense who are more prone to a lower relative sensitivty sense.

Currently I play at 50.94 because someone posted why that’s good in some reddit thread, tried it and got stuck with it for a while. I have many of hours on 38 and around 45 as well and there’s pros and cons with whatever set up you go for really.

Higher relative sense equals more accurate medium to long flicks and you have more mobility. Lower relative sense is more accurate for micro & short flicks, the 38ish value is said to be the closest to 1:1 if that’s what you want to achieve.

However there’s no real support that 1:1 actually would be a good thing to have with a different FoV perspective, many might feel comfort from it while others will have it mess with their perception. It’s not like you can’t have more then one muscle memory at a time so its’ not really an issue to have a few different senses and again, there’s no such thing as a real 1:1 but the value for that is the closest you can get when doing short flicks, if you move the crosshair out of that short distance it will be anything but close to 1:1.

Advantage of low relative sense is that it’s easier to get secure kills and that you are more prone to position yourself to get easy shots. The disadvantage is that you are more vulnerable and have harder time to get kills from anything outside your lethal zone.
Medium relative sense is usually what most prefer because you are accurate with all type of shots. The disadvantage might be that you have no real “1:1” feeling but it’s not like it’s really that needed.
High relative sense (and medium) is more for those who come from CS and are used to drag shot aka like long flicks and those who mainly wrist aim (while scoped in). You have more accuracy across the board and can get those sick long flicks in (which will feel rather close to 1:1) however you obviously have a bit less accuracy mainly when trying to re-adjust your aim just a tiny bit and that it’s easier to over/under shoot resulting a miss compared to if you set up in a way in which you leave less room for failing.

TL;DR - Long story short, it’s subjective but you should mess around and read up on it along watching some guides in order to find what works the best for you. I have like 150-200 hours on widow and I still haven’t found something that I like lol.

17

Well, I never picked Widow because I’m gay and I main support.
I can’t aim. cries in lúcio

Jokes aside, she requires too much awareness while sitting on the same spot. Which is my biggest flaw in the game and I’m looking to improve - overtime. Aim WAS a problem, but isn’t anymore.

It’s mostly awareness. I feel like trash everytime I’m scooping and a hanzo headshots me meters away because I haven’t noticed him at all.

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play widow HS only FFA. You’ll get there eventually and it will make all your aim based characters even projectile a bit better.