She can be balanced or even underpowered, but she won’t feel good to play against. If she had just 1 hp then she’d be an absolute throw pick while still being unfun to play against.
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The problem with Widowmaker (and Ashe and Hanzo and to a lesser extent, McCree) has and always will be her clip size combined with her rate of fire/charge time.
In shooters like Overwatch (such as TF2) the best way to play around snipers is to bait them to miss their shots. You then use the snipers’ reload/recharge time as a window of opportunity to move into the open and reposition - usually closer to the objective.
In Overwatch, however, snipers have their next full-damage shot ready in no time at all. There’s practically no penalty for missing a shot unless your enemy is right on top of you and even then, you always have a mobility ability that you can use to escape.
You could drastically slow Ashe’s rate of fire and Widowmaker/Hanzo’s charge times and (assuming all were changed at the same time) they would still be strong picks in high ranks where people can actually aim. They would suffer in low ranks, though.
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Widow can be objectively balanced, and I think that she is right now. What won’t change is that some people will always hate dying to her.
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They should revert her nerfs and try the “Weapon is glowing when sniper uses ADS” function from other FPS games.
It would make for an interesting Experimental at least.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.
Can Roadhog deal 200 damage insta-kill with a single hitscan attack on half the heroes in the game from 60m away?
That’s why Widow is a sniper and Roadhog is not.
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No but hog gives a kill combo which you nerfed away from widow.
Stopping me from getting picks.
Reaper becomes a better squishy deleter than widow
Ashe is twice as good
Mccree is better…
Why play widow when ashe does almost more dmg (thresholds doesn’t matter there)
Does everything better widow does, except reloading and looks. 
Don’t tell me the nerfed max range is her niche 
bc ppl whine exactly about that
Is 200 damage not enough to insta-kill 17 heroes in the game regardless of healing?
Is it not true that 17 heroes in the game have 200HP (unarmoured) or less?
They’re too different to compare.
One has the longest effective range, the other has the shortest effective range.
Ashe’s headshot is only 160 damage and extends to only 40m.
Sorry, who do thresholds not matter?
Still hits the 200 damage thresholds which completely negates any amount of healing.
Ashe’s sustained damage has always been at a higher rate than Widow. 160 damage headshot every 0.7 sec is a higher damage rate than 300 damage every 1.4sec.
Except Ashe cannot insta-kill 200HP heroes without damage-amp
If there’s damage-amp available then Widow could do 260 damage headshot which allows her to insta-kill way more heroes (Doom, Mei, McCree, Symm, Reaper, Brig, Torb)
The complaint is that the damage drop off is insignificant as it’s dropping off from 300 damage headshot, the range where it drops below 200 damage headshot is way way further than 60m which is already a really long distance in these clustered maps.
I think she deserved to be made more fragile, however the change didn’t address the core problem which is how she contributes to powercreep and forces out shields (which is apparently problematic in this community)
To be fair hogs hook hitbox is insanely big and requires only a bodyshot, also it gets more value on tanks, but otherwise I agree.
Her health was never the problem.
Widows design is fundamentally flawed. If she’s going to keep her 1 shot then she’s impossible to balance for the upper tiers without gutting her kit and making her feel absolutely awful to play.
She needs to be niche with clear counters but that’s not fun at all for her players. Her design is and always has been broken.
The hook hitbox is an infinitesimally small point
It’s so small that it can pass through a 0.01m gap, the smallest gap that can be measured in the game.
It’s also a slow projectile AND has a 0.3sec cast time and has an absolute hard limit effective range of 20m.
And roadhog is a tank, not a damage-hero. In 222 you never have to chose between “should I play hog or should I play widow” if you’re in tank queue you can play hog but not Widow. If you’re in damage queue you can play widow but not hog.
Loads of other shooters have 1-shot snipers, they can manage just fine.
Other shooters don’t have dive heroes.
Insane idea, widow was never an issue except for your own subjective view originating from your own jealously and failing to accept other people are just better at FPS games than you.
Almost as if she didn’t need such change.
That counts against Widow. Widow is far more vulnerable to being dived.
Also most other shooters don’t have things like barriers, that’s another notch against Widow as you can’t crit barriers her damage against barriers is pathetic.
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Wait… so are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me on the hitbox? But if hogs hook can pass through such a small gap like that, I’d say it’s pretty buggy…
Here’s a video i made a while ago showing his hitbox against tracer
It’s not rlly a slow projectile tho, not insanely fast, but not really dodgeable especially if you’re close. A 0.3 cast time isn’t too large tbh (well if we take widows cast time into account).
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Shes literally only viable because Double Shields is meta.
If we were in any other meta she’d be way less viable, she might even be not that great…
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This is exactly my point.
If Widow gets heavy nerfs to her grapple to make diving her more effective she suddenly feels horrible to play as while still feeling bad to play against.
She’s still just as oppressive against everything except dive but is then a throw pick against dive. It’s terrible design.
I disagree. Sure her strength on long sightlines is as strong as ever but she is definetly more punishable now. And you don’t need to have a mercy pocket on your Ashe to duel her all the time.
The hitbox for interacting with enemies (barriers and player hitboxes are identical) has nothing to do with interaction with the environment.
Huge projectiles like Rein’s firestrike interact with walls by where the middle of the projectile intersects the wall/floor. The huge projectile hitbox looks for where it intersects with “targets” that is anything that will generate a hitmarker on collision so enemies, barriers, turrets, junk traps, mei wall, etc.
You don’t seem to be aware of how wide Tracer’s hitbox is, it extends significantly beyond the apparent edge of her visible model. This STACKS with projectile width, the wide projectile hitbox then only has to barely touch the invisible hitbox that extends beyond most players.
Tracer is a hero with the greatest mismatch between visual model and invisible hitbox.
It’s slow enough that combined with cast time it’s well within human reaction time to activate abilities that negate it.
That’s a different sort of cast time.
Roadhog can’t cast hook then hold hook ready to instantly shoot it out, Widow can do that, she can charge up and then hold it to release it in an instant.
It would be cool if he could but he can’t.