I'm not too sure the Devs actually play Sombra

This interview was released today. It’s an interview with Goodman, concerning the Sombra changes. It’s probably something that could have been said to the forums directly. Here are a couple of snippets from that article that just don’t make sense.


"The Sombra changes, I was a little surprised with the feedback online where people thought it was an overall nerf,” lead designer Geoff Goodman tells me. “We gave her a lot of buffs and a lot of nerfs at the same time. The Sombra changes are a lot about giving her more flexibility in how she plays, and that flexibility gives her a lot more power.”

First off, when Sombra was released to the PTR it was an outright nerf. I don’t know how anyone can think quadrupling the area she can be detected in, making her slower, and having her 5 HP translocator scream its position thrugh walls was a buff just for making a couple timers longer.

Second, the Sombra changes don’t make her more flexible, they physically make her gameplay slower. As I’ve said dozens of times before, anything Sombra can do with the PTR changes she can already do Live. For more on this, see So I guess this means there's one more week to give you feedback that you won't read on why Sombra's changes suck - #27 by Xaron-1831 or Infinite Stealth is NOT Powerful - #116 by Evolixe-2290


“It just seemed like this intense game of micromanagement and these timers, and you often have these situations where you slightly mistime something,” Goodman explains. “None of that is the fun of being invisible and shooting people and hacking people.”

Only bad Sombra players lose the game of timers. Sombra is unique in having to manage twice as my clocks as anyone else, not just the cooldown timer but a duration on all of her abilities. Yeah sure everyone makes a mistake sometimes, but you get good at it.

I want to know how “being invisible” is considered fun. You can’t shoot people, you can’t hack people, on the PTR you can’t even contest an objective. What’s “fun” about being invisible when your hands are literally tied until you leave invisibility?


“The way it originally started, I was like, ‘How far can we actually push this invisibility?’,” Goodman remembers. “So we doubled it and tried that, but we was like, ‘Is this really much different to being infinite?’"

“So we tried infinite on both the translocator and the stealth… and it was just so game-changing for her – the ability to stealth, get where you want and be in position.”

Just because something doubled makes it feel infinite doesn’t mean push it to infinite. Stealth with 10 seconds of duration wouldn’t need the nerfs given to infinite stealth out of fear of it being “too powerful.”

Sombra’s entire kit is built around getting into position. It’s something she’s NEVER had an issue with. Buffing (well, not really a buff since she moves slower) her ability to get into position while nerfing her ability to reposition is frankly stupid. As I mentioned earlier, this can all be done on Live. Sombra can already easily get into whatever position she wants using Stealth and she can hold that positionn with Crouch.

“Because she’s so much about timing – you get that hack just as your team are coming in or you get that damage on an enemy Zenyatta just after he takes a sniper body shot. You can pop out because you’re right there, not waiting for your stealth to recharge. It’s so much more fun to play her this way.”
Waiting for stealth to recharge? It’s cooldown? You’re always going to be waiting for stealth to go off cooldown; this doesn’t change that.


All in all, there seems to be a huge disconnect between what we say and why it’s being said, and what the devs hear. I think this article goes to show how deeply that Disconnect runs.

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Don’t worry, it will take just another half year for another change, but it won’t be a revert of changes. And no, not really, they do internal, but internal is not the same as external. RIP Sombra.

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I agree. I love the fact that they said this

“Sombra is one of the most difficult Overwatch characters to master”

Which is so true, and many people don’t relaze this. I proposed several changes that will make Sombra more engaging while keeping contain to avoid frustration of any sort when playing against her.

I will link it here. Improvements to Sombra2.0 (Click Me)


I am just frustrated as when I am reading this article, it just appears more and more that Blizzard just simply do not know what and how to balance a hero as such of our favorite notorious hacker Sombra.

There is definitely some serious irony in trying to make her “more flexible” with a set of changes that causes her translocator to die if you try to do anything flexible with it.

I’m okay with the stealth changes, since one of the biggest problems for Sombra in public matches is those times when you plan everything out perfectly, and then your team just walks away at your moment of action, making it unproductive. Extended stealth will at least allow you to stand there and wait until your team wakes up for a better time to engage. In organized teams where that doesn’t matter, it at least might help a little for scouting purposes with voice chat, so… sure.

The ability to destroy the translocator on demand is great. Having it last forever is basically irrelevant, especially if we can destroy it (because we can replace/move it whenever anyway). Having opponents destroy it in one hit is just removing useful options from Sombra, a negative that significantly outweighs the benefit of infinite duration. It probably shouldn’t have infinite duration without making it destructible by enemies, so please, just don’t give it infinite duration, and don’t make it destructible by enemies.

As I said in another thread week or two ago, I like the intent of the changes; they just need to execute it without nerfing her.

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I could get behind that.

They probably don’t.

The changes give her nothing she couldn’t already do before and weaken her already niche strengths. Infinite stealth is a fake buff, because that move was effectively infinite anyway. It was a move on a 6s cooldown that Sombra nearly always used while behind cover, out of sight, or out of combat. Which is…still exactly how it’s used now that it’s infinite. Except she’s also slower now. LOL.

Unless you were bad at managing her stealth timing, you could do anything you wanted to accomplish stealth-wise with her old stealth.

On the other hand, the nerf to translocator is absolutely brutal. So is the nerf to her point contesting ability – which yes, WAS a very strong part of Sombra’s kit, especially on maps like Volskaya.

I’m beginning to suspect that many of the people who think these changes are “good” don’t play Sombra very much at all.

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My favorite part is when he says “all of the sombra players, many of which have hundreds of hours of playtime on her are wrong with their opinions, I’m right. They’ll realize how wrong they are when she goes live” /smug

This guy kind of sounds like the Donald trump of game developers

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I missed this part before. That’s a really odd example, since you want to be already out of stealth when the sniper hits the body shot. The time it takes to decloak is just extra time for their Brigitte/Zarya/whatever to react and save the target.

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If you only think of the game as being played by people who learn every hero, are at top 500, and plays on pc, then you won’t understand the changes.

Uhhg why do they want to make Sombra easier to play?, the part that made her enjoyable for me was the fact that she is difficult to play!

At least she will be fun in custom skirmish lobbies.

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