Hack is a bad ability

General Discussion
1

Genuinely, in most circumstances it becomes a noob trap. Hacking offers less DPS than just virus + shoot, and TTK decreases dramatically if you don’t take the time to hack the target. But her TTK is not low enough that Hack can act as a guarantee against mobility / defensive abilities.

The primary power in the ability seems to be its wallhacks, but that’s a huge non-sequitor since Sombra can essentially just spot people while invis anyway, and it’s not worth wasting the time and concentration on hacking people. Especially since, again, if Sombra’s engaging, there’s very few use cases where wall hacks are actually going to be useful to her.

So we realistically end up with a 1.5 second ability lockout. Which is such a small amount of time that most often, its real functionality is to cancel abilities that are already in progress rather than to stop abilities from happening in the first place.

But since “in progress” abilities, particularly ults, have been slowly cycled out so that they can’t be cancelled, again, realistically, hack has a few very specific interactions:

-Stopping Cass ult (not brilliant)
-Stopping Moira ult (Takes some planning, if Moira just 180s with her beam it’s just going to stop the hack)
-Stopping Sigma ult/grab
-Stopping Rammatra/Doomfist block (Doomfist block being much more useful since he’s a sitting duck while doing it and it drains a CD, unlike Rammatra
-Stopping an in-progress Ball slam (very useful since now he’s stuck in the middle of the enemy team)
-Stopping Illari/Torb turret
-Stopping Immortality Field (shooting is usually just as fast.)
-Stopping Ress (again shooting.)
-Stopping hog heal (not great since it’s no longer a CD)

So you end up with an ability that doesn’t actually have that many great use cases. But when it is used, it still manages to be annoying, and it polarizes very specific matchups (Doom and Ball).
-Hacking HP packs (fine.)

Blizzard has zeroed in on making Sombra an assassin. Hack is like a vestigial organ left over from when her kit was more focused on team support.

EMP still works as an ult because it’s allowed to be long. Hack honestly doesn’t fit in her kit any more, and it’d be far better for it to have either different functionality or to be replaced.

1 Like
2

basically you are right, it does make virus tick down quicker but yea its a troll ability

one of the reasons i like it since once in a great while you get that funny hack that confuses the enemy or makes them fall to their death. hacking junkrats tire is hilarious sometimes since the junkrat stands there confused

this is how i feel playing sombra sometimes

`https://youtu.be/woySeSNBL3o?si=B50rNevvdqJblk6n

3

EMP is what now? Every time I get EMP’d, by the time I look down at my cooldowns to see if they’re still red, they’re good again. I genuinely don’t know what good EMP does unless timed perfectly with a burst-damage ult like D.Va’s or Pharah’s.

4

Yeah, I mean… it makes Virus deal an additional 20 damage and it takes 1 second instead of 2. But if you’d just fired off virus in the first place, you would’ve had .65 seconds more of your gun (which is going to be more than 20 damage unless your aim is REALLY bad) and hack will have started .65 seconds earlier. Not to mention, ANY chip means the hack was totally pointless to begin with.

3 second lockout. Original was 5, but they also added damage to it, so it’s fairly solid imho.

1 Like
5

Huh?‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎

6

you can hack junkrat before he gets his ult off so it doesnt happen if you time it right. it confuses them all the time. hard to pull off tho and i barely do it

7

It stops him from detonating it? Didn’t know that.

8

nah it just never happens. basically it just cancels and then he gets pulled out of the tire sequence before it happens. disorienting i guess

9

I completely agree with the above except for the parts about the ultimates. Disabling every ultimate with a simple ability is a fair trade, the problem is that it’s unreliable. You mentioned some hackable ults, but there are a few more that can be hacked: Kiriko and Baby D.Va. Both can be interrupted during the activation of their ultimates. Now, the thing is, Genji’s ultimate cannot be canceled, although his activation voice lines can be interrupted.

The wallhack itself, as you mentioned, is uninteresting for Sombra and is rarely useful. It’s nice to have because sometimes you catch players who forget about it (for example, a Genji climbing over a wall because he didn’t want to wait). However, the wallhack often has a good function for the team, but unfortunately, this is also rarely the case.

What I disagree with is the statement that hack should then be removed. It should actually be the other way around. Hack is Sombra’s main ability, and disabling is her trademark. Therefore, I would rather sacrifice Virus than Hack. The reason is simple: Virus has less justification in her kit than Hack. The virus we have here would suit a hero dealing with diseases because the virus we have doesn’t resemble what a virus actually does, let alone fitting Sombra’s hacking style. She is subtle, and the virus feels like I’m driving a tank into the house.

Moreover, Virus has turned her invisibility into a silly auto-active ability, giving the opponent more control over it than Sombra herself.

Let Sombra become a DPS supporter rather than turning her into an assassin.

It doesn’t take much for it. Sombra just needs to have her EMP as a hack. Remove Virus, and that’s it. Tanks would be hacked for a shorter duration or have a longer cooldown (although then Sombra would need an energy bar for this not to be strange). Sombra herself, if you approach it mathematically, would need a 3.5-second lockout on the hack so that she can fully exploit her own hack. Since she empties her weapon in 3 seconds and has a delay of 0.4 seconds between hack and shooting. This leaves 0.1 seconds to escape.

10

It does an additional 10 damage and then it lasts 2s instead of 4. The point of the pre-hack is so that after an enemy support intervenes, your 50 DPS virus, when combined with exceptional primary fire accuracy, provide you a small chance of finishing the kill.

Without pre-hack, you get in more damage up front before a support intervenes, but they still intervene, and 25 DPS virus + primary fire will not finish the kill. On paper the TTK in this scenario is lower, but in actual practice it’s moot because there’s no K. It’s more important that your burst DPS exceeds the support’s HPS by a large enough value that you can deplete the enemy’s remaining health before your mag runs dry. The caveat is that it takes more set up time to achieve this level of burst via hack.

Having said that, sometimes hack isn’t worth using. And other times it’s better to open with virus or primary and then hack the enemy the moment they want to evade. And hack is great for Mercy or Pharah to hack them out of the air then land virus as they fall.

It’s also worth mentioning that initially, Sombra had a hackpunch tech where she could animation cancel melee into hack. This allowed her to deal a free 30 damage during hack with no melee animation whatsoever. Sadly that was removed. :pensive: Not sure how many people knew it existed anyway, but hack was a little more appealing with that tech around.