Hack is a low-skill, exorbitant-impact ability with a pretty low cooldown. Its utility is unparalleled by any other damage hero and, with the addition of virus, sombra is also now capable of punching pretty hard in terms of damage. At one time Hack’s utility was justified because it was hard to get off and Sombra herself didn’t do a ton of damage. Now every single step in the process of hacking a target is easier, and all of the buffs to Hack intended to make it more consistent to pull off and harder to react to feel overwhelming to try and fight against. A number of heroes have to either instantly swap against Sombra or dramatically reduce their presence in a match just because she’s on the board.
I think personally that ability lockout should be removed from the game entirely. There is enough crowd control, healing, and immortality in the game at this time that hyper mobile heroes can be feasibly shut down or otherwise punished for engaging badly in ways that are much more reasonable than Sombra clicking on you for less time than most people can process a threat and line her up in their crosshair (especially on controller) and getting value because you had the gall to play the game isn’t healthy, it’s oppressive, broken design and needs to be changed.
I do acknowledge that ability lockout is core to her hero identity, and probably won’t go, but Sombra should either have to earn it or Hack should be significantly easier to mitigate, like the route the team went with Discord Orb. I don’t see a way for the latter to work, so to me the best course of action seems to be raising the skill floor of the hero somewhere above putting a brick on your rmb/lt/l2. I love Virus, I love the new stealth system, I think translocator’s interaction with the stealth cooldown could use some minute tuning but is otherwise fine, but leaving hack as it was (buffing it actually) in the rework was a colossal mistake. Value like Sombra’s should only exist as a form of mechanical skill expression, not as a constant and nearly inescapable burden on anybody who has the audacity to solo queue or to have an aggressive playstyle.
How many times have you popped off on any tank and had the enemy team immediately bring out a Sombra, Mei, and Orisa? For me, it’s been almost every game, and it slows the match down to a crawl. This isn’t even counter-picking anymore, it’s just the crowd-control simulator that Overwatch 1 died to try and bring into line. “Let’s see how many debuffs we can stack on the tank at once before they finally have to play like they’re AFK!” isn’t fun to play into, and if the team really wants to speed up matches they don’t have to literally increase objective capture speed and decrease the base match timer, they’ve got to bury this idea and alter the overall amount of damage and healing the game (which they’ve already said a million times they’re working on.)
Hack is not the problem, invisibility is the problem. Being able to freely position with no amount of good tracking, listening, watching by your enemy just goes against any principal of fairness and frustrates and annoys people.
What if they made it so sombra had to land virus on someone before she can hack them? It could stack to a limit of 3 virus’ before she needed to start the gameplay loop again.
What I mean is she can soft engage with virus, and translocate out, but the person hit with that virus, is now susceptible to being hacked. It makes sense, since virus whittles them down and makes their defenses compromised, then, sombra swoops in and hacks the target.
This is just off the top of my head, but I feel like it would be a lot of fun for both teams, since whoever she marks with virus, knows they might be the target for an ambush next team fight, making both teams strategize for the next fight around sombra.
sombra is really weird, if you have decent supports then she’s bad, but if your supports are 0 brained then she becomes unstoppable. i feel like her hack cast time should be increased again as 0.65 is really fast, but not to how it was pre-rework. maybe 0.7 seconds and revert EMP back to 30% dmg and 1.5s ability lockout.
she’s really odd to balance, but there’s many ways of adjusting her power to balance her better
To balance hack I feel like sombra having to input 4 random keys on the keyboard or buttons on the controller in 1 second for hack to activate. Otherwise hack fails. Give her the real hacker fantasy, hacking anything irl takes more than just holding down one button like cmon.
You’re forgetting the time frame in which you have to
process that Sombra is behind you
stop what you are currently doing
spin around
move your crosshair on her
shoot
This can all happen within the extremely small window or it can take just too long (or you miss your shot) and so you are hacked. It’s also worth noting that your reaction time will always be better when you are anticipating something and will always be worse when you’re distracted. If you have even a slightly below average reaction speed then good luck.
And if you still think hack is hard to use and easily countered for whatever reason, shouldn’t you want this to change so that you have an easier time?
But Overwatch is all about split second decision making. Especially when flankers are involved.
It may blow peoples mind. I don’t want my mains to be easy. And sombra statistically is showing us that she is underperforming and you need to be good to bring value. Unless the enemy has a widow. In which case that’s an easy kill. Widow is the only hero that’s truly hard countered by sombra right now.
But I also know majority of people on here couldn’t care less if widow is being hard countered.
That isn’t decision making, that is reacting. With decisions, you can be proactive. You can predict what is going to happen and have a plan. You can learn over time what decisions to make in what scenarios. When making fast decisions you have the fast anticipation reaction speed, not the reaction speed when preoccupied. Reaction time has physical limitations.
Wanting a character to be hard doesn’t mean they have to be underperforming. Sombra mains always complain about their hero being weak and a lot of people find her obnoxious to play against (and a detriment when on their own team), so why not change the hero in a way that actually makes her stop being mega annoying and yet is still strong when played well?
I guess the question is what about Sombra specifically is enjoyable and how can that be implemented in a way that doesn’t make players want to alt+f4.
You’re right. Hacking doesn’t require skill, but timing, and timing is not something you can just quickly learn. Even if you master it, it changes with each opponent, as every opponent plays slightly differently. This makes hacking much more challenging to use compared to other abilities.
Yes, as the affected player, you may not notice it, but a hack must be placed at the right time to show its full effect. Additionally, the hack lasts only 1.5 seconds, and Sombra needs 0.4 seconds alone after the hack to do something again. So, the hack itself doesn’t benefit Sombra much. If you factor in the virus, it adds another 0.4 seconds, delaying everything else.
Apart from heroes like Doomfist, Sigma, or Moira, whose abilities can be disabled by the hack, the hack has little impact and behaves unreliably. Why can I cancel Kiriko’s ult if the timing is right but not Genji’s ult?
You also mention Zen and his orb, saying that the hack needs an artificial cooldown. Let’s put it this way: if you had played Sombra, you would know that she has such a mechanic. Her cooldown is 6 seconds, but for rehacking a previously hacked target, the time is 8 seconds – 2 seconds longer than the cooldown. Additionally, the hack conflicts with EMP. I cannot re-hack a target hit by EMP, similar to Kiriko’s ult. The hack has no real effect in that situation, as the target just hacked cannot be hacked again, and hacking multiple targets in combat is practically impossible.
Hack is the weakest ability. It requires too much skill to place a genuinely effective hack!
No, placing a really effective hack that impacts the fight is significantly harder than many believe. Let’s take Genji, for example. You have to execute your hack before he uses his ult because you can’t cancel it, not even during its activation. This means either I delay his ult by 1.5 seconds or he’s without abilities for 1.5 seconds during his ult, which often doesn’t help much. Sombra has to use her EMP against Genji, but it only lasts for 3 seconds. However, 3 seconds are enough to eliminate Genji.
By calculation, Sombra would need 3.5 seconds of effective hacking to fully utilize it herself. With an 8-second cooldown and without the virus, this would make Sombra a hacker who lives up to her reputation. Perhaps reducing the time hack lasts on tanks and that would be good. Or bringing back a second tank into the game.
I’ve been playing Sombra since 2016, and the hack simply has too infrequent an effect. When I get hacked myself, it’s annoying, but not the end of the world. One should be able to survive 1.5 seconds. So, I’m not afraid of getting hacked. I still have my teammates to cover my back. It’s a team game, after all, so you have to rely on each other.