One-shots always felt a little cheap in Overwatch, but it’s just becoming even more of a frustration now that there are fewer things we can do about it. New maps with long sight lines and multiple levels of elevation, fewer players in a lobby so kills matter more, and one less tank to harass them are making snipers incredibly problematic.
I’m of the camp that one-shot kills have never truly belonged in Overwatch, but I’d settle for some substantial nerfs to all the heroes that can single-handedly carry a match.
1shot methods were fine in many other games because you had options to overhealth to break the 1shot or had the ability to have incredibly fast respawns.
OW just suffers more because it doesn’t have many direct 1shot counters beyond hope this person misses anytime you get LoS to them. Getting killed is a huge disadvantage because it means like 10-30sec out of the fight as you regroup or walk back to a far off fight.
Swap to one of the many characters that hard counter.
For widow specifically, Winston, moira, reaper, gengi, kiriko, Dva ect, all difficult to deal with.
Or counter snipe.
GOATS and Double Shield were all in response to snipers. Maybe if we toned them down, then OW wouldn’t have needed all those crazy changes? Just a thought.
I think nerfing sniper type characters to avoid a 1shot means their base kit has to improve to compensate. Which I think means they become more fun over all as having more tools is always enjoyable.
Ana is a sniper, but she has several other tools to stay relevant.
Widowmaker has a pretty poor kit because of how amazing hitscan sniping has become.
Hanzo requires a bloated kit because an arc projectile is quite hard to headshot with.
Top widow players land ~25% hs. Top Hanzo players land like 10% headshots from what I recall.
Many games you actually can because many aren’t a threat. For every good sniper we remember there are like 4-5 others we forget existed and just mop up after their team is dead.
I don’t mind Ana because new there is counterplay to her kit (cleanse)
I don’t mind Hanzo because he doesn’t delete tanks like he used to (5v5 changes)
Ashe is the perfect sniper who does a lot of damage without 1-shots.
The problem is Widow because her entire kit revolves around 1 hit kills and any changes would ruin that.
Explains why the devs went the direction they did. I still don’t like it, but I understand why.
I don’t mind a Widowmaker landing headshots because she is a high skill character that requires positing and Highground.
Hanzo arrows are pure bs, he shouldn’t be able to 1 shot by just spamming in to a chokepoint.
Imagine if Junkrat grenades could headshot? the complaints about a Junkrat Player spamming them from respawn or behind a wall pointing at the air getting 1 shot kills because one of the grenades landed in to an enemy head dealing 240 hp damage.
If they nerf sniper head shot damage to the point they can’t OHK characters like Reaper, not only would that basically destroy any incentive to aim for the head, but they’d have to buff that hero accordingly. One of the following would need to happen:
Either body shot damage would have to be raised.
Their rate of fire would have to increase.
In cases like Hanzo, they’d have to increase projectile speed.
Or they’d have to buff the entire kit.
The only other alternatives are to make more characters capable of countering snipers like Rein and Genji, or to make the game 6v6 again for either an extra tank or an extra counter.
So, of the four above that Blizzard would choose from because they’re simple compared to the other alternatives, which would you rather have:
Hanzo and Widow shooting you in the body for 140 damage and head shotting for 180. Basically meaning if you’ve been shot by anything, they will kill you.
Hanzo and Widow firing fully charged shots 30-50% faster.
Hanzo’s Storm arrow to do 100 body and 150 head, or his Storm Arrow to fire 2X faster, and Sonar Arrow (or whatever it’s called) to have 4 extra meters of range. Widow’s poison to do 50% more damage and have an extra meter of range, and her hook to have more range with a shorter cooldown.
Or for Hanzo’s arrows to become hitscan up to 10-15 meters and Widow to have a larger hitbox and enable collateral kills.
I’d rather have what we do now than kill the purpose of these characters because the only reasonable buffs would turn them into monsters.
I hate snipers when i first played Team Fortress 2 since it was my first online game. They are no shields and it still annoying to play against them. In OW they added mobility to already oppressive heroes.
Who in the heck thought they should have mobility for this characters?.
Overwatch 1 had that at launch - Torbjorn and Symmetra both had options to overheal their team. Brigitte was latter added and had a similar function at launch.
Not really. From what I recall it was 50hp and given its permanence it affected everything beyond 1shots as well which are much more prevalent in the game.
Its like the issue Brig + stun caused. Stun works on mobile heroes, but punishes every other hero just as equally.
The method I prefer is what a game like back 4 blood introduced. They have armor where if you take a hit >25hp points all damage is blocked and the unit of armor removed. Any other dmg below 25hp went through unphased.
Honestly, armor of old used to function as an inverse 1shot armor. It was 50% dmg reduction to anything under 10dmg and only -5 for anything above it. Another factor into why burst damage was so good in OW1 as a whole.
Armor now is a flat 30% reduction. Armor was bugged in beta 1 was amazing for low applications of armor. If you had a single point of armor and took say a 70dmg move the entire hit was reduced by 30%.
If Brigitte got hit by a hanzo headshot the 250hp dmg was reduced by 30% and Brig lived with 25hp. After the bug fix Brig now dies to Hanzo headshot even with 30% dmg reduced on her 25hp armor. They honestly should have kept the bug in the game and gave particular units small applications of armor that could resist 1shots to the noggin.
Without that in the game we now don’t really have many 1shot resistances.
It’s funny you never really noticed how annoying snipers are until OW… for me it’s nothing new I played Battlefield before it became horrible and I use to play CoD back as a kid.
In BF you have tanks and jets so you’d never really care for them but for CoD~! Oh dear lord I hated Quickscoping and in Mw2 it was just cancer so be thankful Widowmaker isn’t running around MLG style Quickscoping.
