This is gonna be a long winded rant so unless you got 5-10 minutes to spare either jump to the bottom to put in to your unchangeable thoughts, or get a drink and read all of what I write cause skimming is gonna leave you confuzzled.
Back in 2018 OWL was just starting it’s Inaugural season after years of development. Lotta characters were different then and balance needs more different, torbjorn still had his awesome turret for one thing! One thing that almost hasnt changed was Sombra being bottom of the barrel tier. Only the holiest of Sombra Gods could make her work consistently. Like were talking Sombra was on your team, people would quit out of the game to save their time. Her spread was awful, hack took a long time to channel/cast, translocator was on a timer (but the speed was way worth it, I miss Parkour Sombra 
) and this was about the same time or shortly after Medkits no longer gave sombra EMP and she really had no effect at all in the game.
So Blizzard wants all their heroes to shine, during OWL’s big debut, and Sombra is a community favorite character (maybe not in game to fight, but lore wise people love her). So they make this huge effort to overhaul her in february 2018
- EMP
- No longer blocked by small objects (e.g. sign posts)
- Hack
- No longer gains ultimate charge from health pack healing
- Cast time reduced from 0.8 seconds to 0.65 seconds
- Now disables the following abilities:
- Genji—Cyber-agility
- Hanzo—Wall Climb
- Pharah—Hover Jets
- Lúcio—Healing Boost and Speed Boost (turns off current song entirely), Wall Ride
- Mercy—Angelic Descent
- Machine Pistol
- Machine Pistol spread reduced from 3 to 2.7
- Opportunist
- Enemy health bars are now visible when health drops below 100% (formerly 50%)
- Her ability to detect enemies through walls at 50% or less remains unchanged
- Enemy health bars are now visible when health drops below 100% (formerly 50%)
- Translocator
- Duration increased from 15 seconds to 20 seconds
Case and point she had low value in a teamfight without her EMP medkits. So they tried to increase her effectiveness in fights by mainly reducing channeling time and making her more accurate and back then translocator more time to set up before a fight. Thing is OWL was on the horizon, there was very little effort put into testing these patches properly and there was MASSIVE bugs. When then reduced channel time they made a bug where it would stay connected to the target even when they went behind walls and broke LOS.
Now Sombra has this super medicore ability to take away other heroes abilites. Sombra ONLY has a Primary Fire and Melee to deal damage. Her whole gimmick is to force people into a gunfight. People incorrectly label Hack as a CC ability when technically it’s a debuff, It only hinders movement if your using a movement ability. You are still perfectly able to fight back against a Sombra if you are hacked. Maybe not at 100% power, but you can still duck, dodge, shoot, FIGHT BACK. Only thing Sombra is trying to do is even the playing field for her. If you think relying on Primary fire for 6 seconds is bad, try playing Sombra and using it for ALL of your seconds. It’s hard to find a fair fight as Sombra when the enemy has Helix Missles, Healing, etc in the arsenal and your only equipped to run away.
Anyways back on track here, NEW Sombra is bugged OP and broken, everybody and their brother can see this, thing is Blizzard cant quite fix the bug just yet and streamers hate fighting sombra. Why? Because Sombra makes them feel stupid in front of 1000’s of people. Their God like skills is often not related to the greatest aim and Sombra spanks em a couple times and they rage. AND OH BOY DID THEY RAGE!!! So much in fact even though people knew it was a bug, they still used it to push an “unfun sombra” campaign and with the hacking behind walls as their main weapon they were massively successful. Even though the devs couldnt fix the bug in a matter of 3 weeks they had a solution. A hot-fix.
Hack
- Now goes on a 2-second cooldown when interrupted by damage
she had 21 days of viable use from feb 27, to march 20… all because of a bug. Once this hot-fix came in the fun was over for people exploiting the bug and sombra mains finally having time in the sun shine. Once this was implemented so was any hope of Sombra ever being viable in the future. The WHOLE point of the Feb 27 patch was to make her more valuable in team fights without EMP and they essentially removed Hack from being used in team fights entirely. Her whole hero strengths/weaknesses flipped over night. Most notably to Tracer who was spearheading the Anti-Sombra campaign.
Back in sombra’s launch 2016 - jan 2018 Sombra was probably one of Tracers strongest counters. Even though killing her still proved a challenge at least you could stop the blinking and have a even fight though she could still one-clip you very easily. Once the hot-fix happened thought Tracer became one of Sombra’s strongest counters. Now instead of hunting tracer she’s hunting you, you can be trying to hack orisa from behind and tracer can spray from 30 meters away and peg you once and stop you. This… is a game breaking nerf for sombra. Combine this hotfix with the previous month’s buffs and this didnt buff her strengths in teamfights, it exploited her weakness to shotguns needing to be bursted down before hack can finish and kicked it up by 700% by making shotguns effective against her mid/long range.
EVENTUALLY they fixed the LOS problem behind wall hacking… but the damage was done, the anti-sombra campaign was successful, they broke her now at the time and forever forward. Even thought he bug was fixed the hot-fixed stayed and has never been reworked, buffed/nerfed since. AND THIS HOT_FIX WAS NEVER EVER EVER TESTED it was surprise rushed to live on the first available patch. Years pass Sombra still struggle and this hotfix is why. No amount slight buffs will fix this debilitating problem. She cant fight the enemy on even terms and making them drop down to hers is very very VERY hard to do when it really shouldnt be. She should be able to find an opportunity target in a fight and attempt to hack then and there! Not disengage from the fight entirely and let your team try to 5 vs 6 while you look for a angle to hack from…
Imagine this hot-fix on multiple other heroes and you can see how game breaking it is to them. Now think about sombra who can only pew pew and run.
Zenyatta- image if you couldnt cast discord or harmony orb (pick either dont matter) if you took 1 point of damage and got forced into a cooldown. Trying to apply damage in a fight would be all but impossible besides volleys or trying to heal your genji be a struggle because you would have to try to keep an orb on him and avoid damage every 2 or 3 seconds
Pharah - imagine trying to use jump jets and you got shot mid jump by reaper walking out of spawn and your jump jet shuts down, no more “fly forever pharah” you would fall non stop trying to fly and be forced to used nothing but fuel to move around for more then just ledge positioning
Mei - What if mei couldnt freeze if she was taking damage, yeah sure she could still be hurting them but the freeze wouldnt take full effect until 2 seconds after her last 1 point of damage. She would lose so much value
Mercy - what if trying to use Guardian angel or any beams was broken when taking damage
Soldier - Lets stop mid sprint cause you were shot in butt
Mccree - Fan the Hammer stops midfire, you stop mid roll and get no ammo
This 2 second getting shot in a SHOOTING GAME is one of if not the worst nerf I ever seen applied to a single unit a game. It rips away her combat effectivness and in a team shooter you need your team to be combat effective. Cool moves are nice but not if you cant apply them whn you need them.
Now a lot of people will make up fake excuses for why the interruption is good, here’s my favorite and for some reason one of the widely ACCEPTED facepalm debates:
- “Sombra players would just hold out their hand trying to hack and die and do nothing in a fight the interruption forces them to be useful always”
This is just moronic for many reason yet it is still today one of the widely accepted reasons. 1. No one want to just get shot int he face until they die. 2. Sombra is at her most useful HACKING a target and duel/picking them off in a fight, not hanging from the rafters avoiding damage trying to hack every target that jumps up too high in her range. 3. The interruption forces and “interruption” the thing she was trying to hack cant be hacked and she is in full retreat or fight for life now and without it being a fair/unfair gunfight she will lose most of these fights and die/run away.
There’s many more thinktanks like this that agree this an accceptable nerf for a hero with one excuse or another but this is the popular one that still blow my mind.
MY whole gripe is she is a DPS hero with no DPS abilities, in fact her whole kit besides primary fire could be suited to support, not a single damaging ability in her kit. If she cant at least challenge people to a gunfight what good is she in DPS? The whole reason she cant be support is because she’s not exactly a healer. However support doesnt have to mean heal, and this game needs more supports and less medkits in fancy coats decked in bells and whistles.
I’m fully ready to embrace a Sombra rework into support focusing on disabling and med pack sharing again because Sombra is all but dead to me. My favorite hero i can no longer play because even though i wasnt the best with her and least she was useful to me and fun. Im so sick of security camera sombra Im ready for a full blown hacker or assassin this hybrid crap is not working…
TLDR - This a not a tldr, your lazy I said at start read the whole thing and you failed, shame on you. Since well written thoughts and words arnt your thing you can find memes related to the issue here.
PS. If you did read the whole thing thanx a lot took a bit of effort to remake it and it’s pretty much a rework of a popular topic i had in 2018 which still gets me like notifications to this day which is why I felt compelled to bring this issue back into the light. You can see the original here:
Here’s hoping Sombra can be DPS assassin Lady once again, or at least a Decent Hacker again. 
Boop
