I hate widowmaker

As a support player you are at the mercy of your tank and DPS. If both of these roles are slacking at their job then you are already in a bad spot. Sadly Widowmaker is probably the least of your concern if this is the case.

Dude what :exploding_head: a bright orange combined with a poppy pink/magenta … that’ll look awesome

I agree with everything here but want to add to this.

There are also heroes that are very strong in low ranks but weak in high ranks. So that can go both ways. However the heroes that are strong in low ranks CAN be played in high ranks too only they need MUCH MORE over all skill to be played in high ranks. Widow on the other hand just needs good aim skills and she can keep an entire team hiding, even tanks.

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bUt ShE tAkEs mOrE mEcHaNiCaL aIm So ItS fInE fOr HeR tO bE bRoKeN aNd oPpReSsIvE

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Yes, i have a dispute with her aswell.

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Forum Widowmaker strikes again.

It’s got nothing to do with how powerful widowmaker is or is not, and everything to do with how she completely warps the game around herself. She has counterplay, but there’s too little of it and what does exist is just bad.

Widowmaker only has hero-level counter-play. You counter her by counter-picking her, or by not playing the game.

You can dive, you can stay out of LOS, you can hide behind a barrier, or you can mirror and out-snipe her.

Diving and barriers requires counter-picking her and reduces your possible hero picks to [two of] Rein, Sigma, Orisa, Monkey, [two of] Widowmaker, Genji, and Sombra.

And if you’re diving her, you have to to in at least as a pair unless the Widowmaker is bad because she has enough mobility to escape, and her team will be peeling for her (if they’re smart) which means that solo dives onto a widowmaker are actually risky. Especially in the higher ranks where widowmaker players can plink your head at point blank range with a fair frequency.

If you opt to stay out of LOS you’re not playing the game because most control points don’t have significant sources of cover for the attackers. If it’s a payload your job is a bit easier, but good luck trying to defend yourself from her teammates while you crouch behind a truck.

If you’re hiding behind barriers you have the most freedom, however no matter what you do your strategy will always have a single point of failure because if that barrier goes down Widowmaker is going to eat your entire team.

And if you mirror the widow everything in every teamfight will end up coming down to the 5v6 that follows one widowmaker killing the other.

Now, the actual problem here isn’t that none of these counters will work. All of them will. Widowmaker is counterable. The actual problem is that these are the only ways you can counter widowmaker. So dealing with her is stagnant, limiting, and boring. There are no choices to make. No options to leverage. No sub-game you can play.

And there’s no default option for normal heroes. If your team isn’t running one of the “correct hero picks” to counter widowmaker there’s no way to mitigate your disadvantage by changing how you play since the only option available means you cannot go onto the majority of the control points in the game and actually do the map mechanics because if she sees you, you risk being deleted.

Not even ADAD spam is a viable option because she just gets to keep trying to hit you, and you only get to mess up once. Meanwhile she gets as many tries as she wants.

But, once again, countering her is possible. The problem is not a lack of A counter. It’s the state of her counters in general.

Let’s compare her to another hero who is completely OP and is definitely going to get nerfed in the near future, but who has healthy counter-play.

If you’re playing into an enemy Reinhardt, you have options. You have a lot of options.

You can counter-pick him with tank-busters, barrier-breakers, CC, repositions, and disablers. You can mirror-rein and shatter-duel. You can go dive, run past his barrier and jump on his supports leaving him high and dry. You can focus down his barrier as a team to open up target options. You can go around his barrier with AoE splash damage. You can take heroes who bypass barriers entirely. You can flank his position to force him to make a choice about which direction to face his barrier. You can bait out his hammer or a charge with some kind of valuable target. Or you can forcefully reposition him with a boop or pull to expose his team.

Rein currently has a 12% overall pick rate out of 32 heroes (average for a healthy hero should be closer to (but not necessarily exactly) 3.125% putting him 4x over the average. Compared to just tanks, where the target average should be around 12.5%, Rein has a pick rate around 40% with his most synergistic off-tank pulling in a pick rate over 20%. And with this exaggerated pick-rate, he still maintains a win-rate overall above 50% (slightly above average).

Rein is demonstrably OP, but he also has an absolutely massive amount of counter-play available, which is where Widowmaker absolutely fails by comparison.

You see, a well-designed hero won’t just remove options from the enemy team. It will also create new options for them to use at the same time. A well designed hero will introduce more options than they remove, and widowmaker’s problem is that she is entirely subtractive. She removes far more from the game than she adds, and it’s just not fun.

It doesn’t matter if she’s balanced or not. She could be dumpster-tier and it wouldn’t matter because her design is just awful.

And, she’s not alone. Her problem stems from how hyper-focused she is on a single mechanic (her scoped M1 headshots). By comparison Ashe very, very similar, but attracts nowhere near the same amount of hate. Same with Hanzo after his latest round of nerfs. He can OSK with his headshots same as widowmaker, and nobody really QQs about it (they hate his E more than his M1).

If Widowmaker’s sniping had more limitations, she would be more fun to play against. She needs to introduce more counterplay to the game. More opportunities that her opponents can take advantage of to get the upper hand or otherwise influence how her and her team play the game.

Widowmaker needs to be more fun to play against.

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I dont like widowmaker, maybe its because I dont like one shots, doom I can handle cause there is a moment where you can response, widow just feels you either kill her or she kills a lot. And I have no idea how one can nerf her, also smurfs just pick her and solo carry because of the amount of impact she can have. In lower levels many will say just kill the widow she probably isnt that good, but having played against so many smurfs and amazing widow, you subconsciously give her so much space, cause she can potentially delete you

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It literally comes down to your team taking space from her and being aggressive. Mercy is a good support against her because you don’t need to LOS, rez is a counter to one shots, and if you see her isolated you can p gun her down if you’re careful. Lucio can also harass her a bit and Zen if you’re confident you can volley her. A widow alone though can’t just carry a game. If she doesn’t have space and doesn’t get peeling she wont do much. Best counter to Widow is taking away her sight lines because if she doesn’t have sight lines, there is literally no reason to play Widow.

Widowmaker sucks because with 1 button push they can turn on/off their aimbot and it’s easy to conceal.

Aimbot sucks.

I hate Widowmaker because getting one-shot feels terrible, and I’m pretty trash at this game the majority of the time so trying to counter her doesn’t tend to go too well.

I hate playing against her more than any other character but I’ve recently heard an interesting thought: she is balanced in pro play because there is good teamwork to shut her down, and she’s balanced in low ranks cuz nobody can aim.

But she’s crazy busted in high rank ladder where people have good mechanics but teamwork is not even close to OWL level.

So she’s basically shooting everyone like in practice range because without good teamwork you can’t shut her down. You just can’t, a Widow who actually can aim is un-1v1-able (you cannot kill her alone no matter which hero you play – similar to good Tracer, Doomfist or Roadhog, but at least they need to get up close). Witnessed it in my games a lot.

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i can understand the hate at gm level, gm widows are a nightmare i bet but the other end of the spectrum-low rank shes a throw pick. crazy how heroes work like that and some work the other way around like being a throw pick at higher rank and dominate in lower ranks

thats just how overwatch is

Snipers raise my blood like no other. Point n click coward way in back is unfun to fight.

It’s because the map design is horrendous. No seriously try taking natural cover from her trying to get to the objective. Yeah you can’t. The game lacks natural cover stations/intervals on it’s pathings to an objective.

Oh yeah, if it’s a bright orange and magenta it’s ok but I’m biased towards that because I like magenta.

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I have actually never thought about this before :thinking: Interesting!

It is nice to see people get this. It is very much a thing.

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Yeah i play on console though so its 50/50 to be honest

50/50

She’s also THE most popular smurfing hero, and usually the goal of smurfing is to get as low as they can so that they can get that rush from carrying games.

Alternatively, widowmaker mains below diamond tend to have awful positioning, awareness, and gamesense and have this irritating tendency to frequently click heads and then lose anyway. Either you get tired of their BS and dive them or they get into a situation where they decide to swap to a “more effective hero” and immediately cease to have any positive effect on the game for their team whatsoever because Widowmaker allows them to carry themselves far beyond their actual rank.

So you’ll run into widowmakers who are legit good shots when scoped in, who just cannot play the game once you demonstrate to them that you’re not going to leave them alone to play sniper-elite: OW edition against bots.

The problem is that at no point does Widowmaker create fun for the enemy team.