Oh no, we are 100% in agreeance on that from the start. That’s for sure.
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Casuals are the biggest populations of games who buy and play it. They make sure you have servers to be “Not Casuals” on. They stop games from dying.
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And that’s where it gets really tricky too, because the simplest way to improve her playability outside of long, difficult to contest sight lines is to give her more health or improve her primary fire, both of which would inherently make her better at dueling flankers, which isn’t something we want to do too much if she remains effective at long range.
Changing grapple to go on cooldown for a shorter than usual duration, roughly 2-4s, after taking damage should effectively kill grapple for escaping flankers, but doesn’t really hurt or change her mostly anywhere else. I don’t necessarily think this is a whole solution by itself, but it’s one of the less painful adjustments I’ve seen. Possibly also make grapple cancel if she takes damage during it, if the cooldown change alone isn’t enough. Seems to me prior attempts to bring down Widow’s ability to be slippery by globally raising grapple cooldown failed because she could still make sure she had it ready when she needed to escape, and these changes shouldn’t allow her to play like that outside of being very predictive and leaving before she’s under actual pressure.
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Maps: Create actual alternative 2nd and 3rd covered routes that are clear to users. While sidetracked from the objective, are useful to lead to attacking or defensive flanks, not optimal for most ranged heroes. Widow sightlines should remain objective based or specific to the shortest/main choke paths, not just random or all routes. This allows players to choose to play the short routes with shield or high health heroes, or risk with mobile heroes, or to play the safer covered routes and sacrifice time or objective progress. One should be more obvious than the other, but there should be more than one path.
Some of the maps in question already have areas that could be opened up to allow flanking, which could be accessible specifically during capture point events. Say, a doorway of a hotel or store on the far left of Casino Royale can be opened if the team reaches first check point. Or is that too MOBA-esque or TDM for players or Blizzard to add?
Hero adjustments: Just lower damage to require a bit more charge? Does Widowmaker need to deal 300 damage? What is the adequate or minimum amount that everyone would accept? Is killing 200-250 heroes okay? No ones really talking about that. I also got one shot by a Mercy boosted Widowmaker on a max HP overloading Torbjorn (350 HP).
Range adjustments: Widowmaker is at 70 to 100 meters. Ashe is at 20 to 40 meters, Why the gap? Is Hanzo or projectile users supposed to cover between that (sojourn railgun is 40-60)? Maybe 50-80 instead? Or 40/45-70/75? 45 is like 2 Roadhog hook lengths lol.
Health or Mobility adjustments: Some want to adjust health or make her less mobile. I guess you could but would that make the hero lame to play? If it was just lower damage or less likely to one shot, but felt more fluid to use, wouldn’t that be more fun to use and more tolerable to fight? I’m not sure.
Random Additional or Rework ideas:
- A mechanic where the higher the charge the longer the downtime in scope as well?
- Maxed charge could force the player out of scope after the shot?
- Scope Charge Boost: Lowering base and/or critical damage but and giving her a overcharge or stimpack type buff for a limited time on cool down to make some plays. Like Torbjorn’s Overload or a self-Nano Boost, its a transformative state that could damage boost the base damage and/or allows the scope charge to raise to higher percentages like 125-200% etc. This could work with or make more sense with the scaled charge cool down after use as it overloads (overheats) the weapon, and might also work with SMG. Maybe makes the primary or poison mechanics more interesting/useful.
I’d say beyond better map design, make it longer between one shots, this will make it more punishing when she misses and stops her from getting multi kills, her job is to get key picks, whethere it’s on an ulting mercy or high noon, she gets that pick it what she does, not wipe teams.
2nd thing I’d do is make her grappling hook not a mobility tool but a positioning too like pharahs flight, she can use it to essentially cling or hang off structures to get cheeky sniping angles and makes for the spider girl, the caveat however is that she stucks in that position and has to do a long animation to get out of it like bastion old turret and she can’t reach absurb postions with it like top of towers or something, and makes it so she cant escape when doved on tho that’s just a fun idea
Well, that depends on how much healing is needed. If standard Lucio healing is enough to beat it, then Lucio players will just accidentally save lives and deny widow any sort of play making opportunity. It wouldn’t be fair considering the change is a reduction of play making ability already.
Naturally, its fair to say Widow denies play making ability herself, but I think a solution to that is to introduce down time between her actual one shotting.
If you line up a shot on a relatively mobile or even high mobile target, and shoot them in the face, I just think it is fair for them to die right there. People consistently disregard widow’s skill, but I think it’d be garbage to spend that much time learning to aim only to be told “By the way, you’ll never get a kill because we intentionally designed this sniper to do DOT damage, enjoy”.
I had a similar issue when people wanted Reinhardt to get a shield nerf in exchange for a charge buff and that fire strike buff. All that said was “We gave you two useless buffs, but don’t expect to actually tank anything.”. Thankfully, Blizzard just gave him a strong shield too.
What? Yes she is; that’s exactly what sniping is.
She’s supposed to be made to reposition though. Like, through actually forcing her to play. In your example, D.va can just tract her with her eyes and spray in her direction; that’s not really finding her since you’ll see a literally line leading you to where Widow is whenever she uses her hook.
So, D.va spots widow and Widow uses her hook to move a way. D.va, who’s hyper mobile and has infinite ammo, looks at where Widow goes and continues to spray her from range, and that’s Widow’s fault?
She would be hard countered by the role she should always counter: supports
I’m not necessarily opposed to a pistol, but it begs the question, why not just adjust the spread, rate of fire, and damage properties of her AR mode instead? At the very least it’d save the art department some work. In principle there’s no reason they couldn’t slow the rate of fire down to something consistent with a pistol, or even make it strictly semiautomatic if that’s what you had in mind, and either decouple the ammo pools or change the ammo consumption ratio.
If you were thinking that as a byproduct, she’d need longer to get to her pistol after unscoping, just add time to the descope animation instead, perhaps?
Only other note on semiautomatics, I’d appreciate that if it’s a strict semi auto, they go with a slower rate of fire than the 5/sec of Mercy/DVa…it’s a bit more ergonomically friendly, particularly on console, if it’s more like 3-4 rounds per second. Slower is less forgiving/requires more intentionality of aim, which is probably the direction you were thinking for the primary mode anyway, I expect.
10 less ammo. 30% longer reload time. 30% longer scoped charged time with a 1.5 second grapple cooldown reduction
or
40% longer scoped charged time and a bright red laser whenever scoped with a 1.25 second grapple cooldown reduction
The weapon swap is there to add intentional clunk into her kit. If she has to change weapons, and you hear her shooting her pistol, you’ll know you can move up. I chose a pistol because the TF2 sniper already has an SMG, and I think a pistol would fit the character more.
Of course, your ideas could work too. The general idea is all there when it comes to giving widow a useable side arm while also having it work negatively for her.
Considering this would leave her in a weird spot where her primary fire button wouldn’t do anything when not scoped in, I’d be surprised if it didn’t play terribly. Since surely you don’t intend for her to have any kind of hip fire, though I suppose at zero charge it would hardly matter if hipfire for it existed or not.
I’m inclined to think making her scope have bright glint, probably red for easy identification like most enemy particles, would be a better way to signal quickly that she doesn’t have her rifle charging. Her posture is already different when ADS, as is her movement and gunfire sounds. There’s a good chance that the glint would be quicker to identify anyway, especially if she’s partially behind cover or just far away.
I’m all for ways to better communicate when she’s vulnerable or otherwise not about to headshot someone, but building in a forced weapon swap button use would probably just be too clunky to go over well at all. Between that and the time/money Blizzard would save by not building and animating a pistol for her, I’d just be really surprised if they’d want to go that route.
Dunno, my favourite change would be to get rid of the charge up time, but remove her crit multiplier in case she flicks in the half second before pulling the trigger or is getting pushed in any way. Bots standing in the line of sight would still be punished, but it is harder for a widowmaker to deal with an orchestrated attack.
Casuals are what keeps the game alive. You might want to consider redirecting that anger.
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Ultimately there is no way of making Widow’s kit healthy. Either she’s garbage or she dictates the entire game.
Widow breaks too many of the cardinal sins in Sniper design for her to ever be healthy.
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Here is an idea: Git gud.
Widow is total trash, free kill, unless you’re in top 500 and you’re not.
Famous dead game Fortnite.
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that’s called a mass skill issue
the longer charge before it’s lethal sounds reasonable, it’s still instant death over long distance if you hit it, but also charge time, so she can be only as lethal after taking a shot until the charge time duration passes
Personally, I feel as like this is one of the better ways of dealing with her without completely dumpstering her. I mean…If it works with Ana then it can work with widow.
Turn her snipe shot into damage over time, then buff her health and grapple cooldown until she’s “good enough”.
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Widow & Hanzo now deal a maximum of 200hp on full charged headshot.