I like the Sombra changes

Yeah, but then you pulled rank, literally. I never said i couldn’t do those things before, but now I can do it way more, because I’m not hampered by translocator time. It’s pretty nice. But you decided you knew better cause you’ve got a shiny gold border for playing too much. That I’m not a fan of.

And I didn’t say you had no right to an opinion. It’s how you state it. Blizzard owes you and everyone else nothing. They promised, for your money, new maps for free, new heroes for free, and regular updates. They didn’t promise you would like them all. I’m sure they want you to like them, but just because you don’t. It does NOT mean you get to act like you deserve something for your time. They. Owe. You. Nothing.

They were nerfed after they went to live and they were as broken as PTR feedback made it seem. The changes they’ve made to Sombra just make her slightly worse at what she does currently, and because Blizzard doesn’t (seem to) have a specific play style or gameplay scenario in mind for her, they don’t seem to be picking a direction to focus on hero buffs for her.

I mean, like, if Overwatch wasn’t a game where a match is decided on a 0.5 second difference in ability usage or pick timing, sure, go nuts with the Spectator Sombra thing and give her a bunch of annoying delays/penalties for being able to go invisible for a long time.

The pace of the game doesn’t allow Sombra to vanish from the map for long periods of time.

I mean, I played Cloak and Dagger Spy in TF2 almost exclusively, and I can tell you that being able to take a beat to feint someone is god in most situations. However, stealth is not cloak and it has so many penalties all the cool tech I can bring to bear in TF2 doesn’t work here–a single d.VA pellet instantly ends stealth and puts the ability on CD, making it arguably the worst in-combat ability in the game.

2 Likes

I’m saying I know better because I’m able to inform you that what you and others have told me is not true. The proof of my claim is my experience, and having done (and still doing) all of those things.

You’re right, they owe me absolutely nothing. That doesn’t mean I can’t openly criticize their decisions. I can also make demands, it doesn’t mean those demands will be met. If they don’t like my demeanor then they’re 100% capable of ignoring my opinion, but over the course of 5 months our relatively humble requests to simply fix her have turned into what we consider a massive disasters, and I’m of the opinion that being overly polite and “Oh, eh, I can’t really say I super fancy the decisions” won’t get across the level of displeasure I have from the changes, which directly impact me.

1 Like

I think that’s the misconstrued thing. I don’t vanish for long stretches now, I now vanish for 9 seconds. Or 10. But the big change, is now I control when it ends, so I can be sure I’m not being seen, I can be sure I’m lined up with the target, and I can be sure my escape route is ready in whatever form that takes.

Honestly, I think Blizz just needs to grow a pair when it comes to Sombra balancing. I mean, they need to tell the critics “Look, stealth heroes are a thing in this game, learn to live with it.”

Why make a stealth hero at all if you’re going to apply some stupid double standard to balancing her. They’re literally throwing out tons of nerfs to an F-tier hero who has never been meta. It’s pretty sad.

If I can deal with Doomfist, Hanzo and Junkrat, it’s fine to ask others to put up with Sombra.

7 Likes

Ok I actually laughed at that quote. Like I said in the original. You may not be the main culprit, but the pages upon pages of topics led to you being the straw that broke the camel’s back

I’m fine with the changes besides the translocator. Then again, I don’t play her competitively, so don’t take my word for it.

All I request is that the health of the translocator is increased. Preferably 30-60. Remember what they recently did to Sym turrets? You can’t accidentally and instantly destory them anymore, which was great for her.

Why wouldn’t this apply to Sombra?

I’m not saying “go afk for 50 seconds” with stealth, but why do I need infinite invisibility when we both know the usage time is going to be virtually the same as it is currently? Wouldn’t having stealth available more often, or making it more reliable as an escape/engage, be a better buff than changing how long you can sit in it?

Again, the issue with this balancing decision comes down to, “What does Sombra do?” She has a ton of abilities that do a bunch of things, but why isn’t there a clear message of what you use them for? Why do I ask five Sombra mains what her job is and get four different answers?

The one change I would like to see maybe changed is that Sombra’s Translocator can stick to walls. So many times I would toss it to get to a high spot to find out it just bounced off a wall and fell to a spot where is kind of bad and now I am kind of unable to really stealth and run in and use it as a way to get away.

Allowing it to stick to the wall may help in situations if I want to stick it on a all above the enemy team and use it and drop and use my ult.

Why does it matter? Because, as you said, seconds matter in this game. Destealthing too early due to timer restrictions in general is not great. Let me ask you this. If it was infinite but still 75% would you still be upset?

The speed buff is the Ana pre-heal argument, I feel. It affects a fringe set of cases where it’s super useful, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing a lower-skill Sombra would even think of doing, let alone be concerned they can no longer do.

The issue to me is, why is power being pumped into stealth’s duration, and not its utility? Sure, being able to stay in stealth to duck a staggered spawn you didn’t anticipate is great, but wouldn’t it be so much better if you could drop out of stealth faster, use stealth sooner, and/or use stealth to disengage instead of being forced to teleport all the way back to your team?

Like, is the occasional postioning error worth trading in the potential for other buffs that would make Sombra an overall more reliable hero?

Sombra is a really effective character when her positioning is used. To focus on her as a ‘scout’ is problematic, and counterproductive; arguably more so in a game as fast paced, and geographically isolated as Overwatch.
It promotes:

  • Staying out of the fight waiting for that ‘right’ opportunity.

  • difficulty engaging and disengaging effectively.

  • And doubles up on her already useful “opportunist” ability.

These are, by her initial design, what she was made for (to my knowledge). Hopping in, bursting, hopping out, disrupting the enemy team during a teamfight, not because she does an extensive amount of damage, but because she can take advantage of hitting where it hurts.
Her weaknesses, like Doomfist, are being caught mid engage/disengage, being outnumbered, being out-ranged, stunned, etc. Her strength is timing, and while the infinite invis. facilitates this, the 75% speed does more.
Please correct me if I am getting the wrong impression here. Tbh, new Somkbra just feels sluggish, I’d rather have the old one.

2 Likes

I hope text: TELEPORT E | G DESTROY (after using translocator) will be removed. That’s alot of useless info on a screen and there is no need to write that every time you throw a translocator.

But almost everyone who plays Sombra is of higher skillset. Look at the numbers. As rank rises, playrate lowers and winrate rises. It’s not much, but it exists. More players in higher ranking are having more success as Sombra. Higher rank players are having more success because they think of things like this and more creative ways to use her kit. Teamwork is a part of this, but the same trend for the available data is set in QP, where teamwork is largely non-existant.

To me, the issue is that they’re pumping more resources and strength into more useless parts of her kit as well as nerfing them nearly to the ground.

1 damage would be enough to point out where Sombra is. 1 damage would be enough to reveal Sombra. In some cases, it’s 0 damage (because the system rounds down) and could be as low as .6 damage (lowest in the game of a Dva over 20m). There’s no reason we couldn’t have had the speed or the ability to stall.

She’s already easy enough to counter with small amounts of damage and we shouldn’t negate the fact that almost her entire kit (TL, Stealth, Hack) are all disabled or destroyed by small amounts of damage. TL being the highest at 5 damage needed which still isn’t much (2 shots from bastion at long range at the most). It’s just not practical to have small damage when there’s bullets flying literally everywhere all the time in the game.

It goes beyond positioning as well. This isn’t just “Sombra’s in a bad position and she got punished for it via canceled abilities.” It’s much worse than that. Sombra’s entire goal is to be stealthy and go get behind the enemy lines and disrupt them.

These changes make it to where she can’t get in the backlines. While the “reverts” jeff described earlier in this thread help, they’re nothing compared to what she really needs to be viable. Especially in this meta.

4 Likes

God, imagine if we had to ‘just deal with’ mercy/junk meta, like we kind of have to just deal with hanzowatch.

if this speed nerf/inability to contest goes live I will join the rest of the community that left the game to play other stuff. I have had enough of blizzard screwing around with this hero. Here is a list of the things that I would go with if I had any leeway on making her better since I have been playing her for so long.

  1. revert the PTR stuff to how she currently is on the live servers
  2. make her reload time shorter(it is waay too long)
  3. have her gun auto reload when using trans-locator like reaper does in wraithe
  4. have her able to cancel her reload by pressing her hack key
  5. add it to where it takes more than just 1 pellet shot from across the map hitting her to bring her out of inviz/putting her skills on cooldown. Select a specific amount of damage it takes to do that.

That would make her a lot better. The PTR stuff makes her job harder to do. I play live server and do awesome. I come to the PTR and I feel like I am running in mudd because I am so slow thus causing me to get hit more often which defeats the purpose of perma inviz.

2 Likes

It seems you only reply to balance threads that agree with your opinion.

3 Likes

This is wonderful and all, Geoff, but now that Sombra has many, many ways to cancel and interrupt her reload, is there no chance of increasing her reload time by 33%? Or at least have the time lost reloading taken into account when she tries to reload again with the next 3s or something?

1 Like

I’d prefer it if she just got a damage threshold (preferably by converting some of her existing health to shields) for her abilities and could actually put out enough damage to warrant being a damage pick without having to land all headshots (preferably by buffing damage against targets impacted by opportunist).

The PTR changes do nothing but make me realize that the devs don’t know how to do their freakin jobs. It’s balancing the game, its not a think tank where you experiment for no reason (that’s what you do before the stupid game comes out)

K bye :wink:

These are the people I’m talking about.