Sombra can still win fights with one ult, so she’ll be more useful on attack than defense. Usually, attack needs to win one big fight and she can do that.
Defense loves dragged out fights as they need to burn the timer.
actually no, i think they made the right move. What people don’t seem to see is that sombra doesn’t need to always hack. That could make her balacning between hack and using the gun and transloacator together todo acutal dmg. I think thats the part where sombra struggles in ladder. She does no dmg cause she always hacks and that hack is costing the team dmg if it gets like no value.
Sombra is already in a negative winrate because her Ult farm playstyle is too slow.
EMP farming will be slower, EMP will be less reliable and EMP will have less reward when pulled off correctly.
Sombra wont be viable next patch, like at all.
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DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD
god i hope so
Hack is the point of playing Sombra. If you play her without it, youre better of playing someone like Tracer instead, always. And even Tracer isnt really that great right now.
Just for anyone intrested in the results this is absolutly depressing.
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You never existed. How does realizing that feel? Do you even feel?
you don’t understand. The real casttime of EMP is no where close to 0.5s right now. It’s more like 0.15s i don’t know exact time, that you got hacked by emp. The rest is just her getting out of animation. SO yes this 0.65s change nothing if nothing else is changed about it.-
Hack still completely deletes almost all tanks and half of the supports from the game. I don’t think it’ll be that bad. You forget that everyone else got their ultimates nerfed, too.
It does because it means the hero is imbalanced.
I’ll use an example I told someone a number of weeks back. Imagine we theory craft a new hero named “The Gambler,” and in his kit he has a single move on a 2 minute cooldown than when used simply has a 10-20% chance of instantly killing a few enemies on the other team with almost no counter play. But, the rest of his kit is utterly useless and does nothing.
When that ability works, you suddenly have a huge upper hand in teamfight winrate, but since he’s otherwise worthless, you end up losing a lot because every fight that doesn’t take advantage of that ability puts your team at a disadvantage. When it does work, the enemy team will curse their brains out becaus eit’s such a disgustingly stupid ability with no counterplay and is really strong, even if 90% of the match they have the upperhand for most of the fights. such a hero might have a very low winrate, but would be incredibly imbalanced.
This is how most people see Sombra, and I agree (although to a less severe state than the hero concept above). Too much of her power is in two abilities, but in most cases she lacks the strength in the rest of her kit to compete with most other damage heroes. This needs to be balanced. A nerf to hack and EMP I think is perfectly fine, but she would need adjustments elsewhere to remain viable. With straight up nerfs and 2-2-2 role lock, she will almost no doubt she an even further decrease in winrate on ladder.
I listed all the changes which impact Sombra. The casttime increase is just one of many.
My friend SchWiniX here also did some testing where the nerf might even be worse than anticipated.
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Yea, and after months of everyone saying Sombra is too weak… she ends up being great in pro play after 0 changes.
We’ve seen this time and time again. Hell, Orisa’s going through it now with the rise of Bunker.
Maybe, just maybe, the devs have an idea of what they’re doing?
and I know what you’ll say, “pro play doesn’t equal ladder play” but my point still stands, if she’s a top pick in pro play, they can’t exactly buff her for the ladder without breaking her elsewhere
Don’t forget that it’s still 0.65 seconds on live. That was literally never changed, they just took off the grace period.
I completely agree OP
It’s really funny how the people calling Sombra OP always have very few hours on her, but often MANY hours on characters that hack shuts down… hmm… makes you think.
Her EMP was good, but literally her entire kit outside of that is garbage unless the whole enemy team picks characters that she counters like hammond and doomfist.
Anyone who thinks that base hack is good has no idea what they’re talking about. Most of the cast are completely unaffected by the lack of abilities for a few seconds, but the mains for the ones that are whine all the time about her being “op” and now we’re here with Sombra getting nerfed despite already being one of the lesser useful heroes.
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Her real casttime is pretty much 0.65s now so it gone up from 0.2s to 0.65s.
I can’t say that all to accuratly because they don’t have workshop in the PTR I needed to do my testing visually which makes it inaccruate.
You can still see the diffrence clearly tho.
Im glad, she needed this 
That’s quite disappointing…
nope. i still say your calcs are wrong, i’ll do it with 2 players when ptr is downloaded. It’s looking much more then a 0.4s then a 0.65s. Which would double it, which is totally fine, cuase the emp is casting even before the audio que right now or before the visuall que with a ping of 70ms. Which is ridicoulus.
I made a whole post about it tho it instandly got burried under the hundrets of other posts -w-
The changes didnt happen to her, but to her surroundings. Sombra didnt become great based on her own changes. She became great (for pro play only mind you) because goats became meta and Sombra happened to be filling a niche where she is the only dps hero with an Ult which can contest that.
But as mentioned before, goats is gone after the 2-2-2 introduction. There is automatically even without any balance changes no Sombra meta anymore.
Taking the grace period away is still a nerf. No matter how you try to spin it. That nerf in particular left her even broken buggy for months to come.
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Hopefully if this makes her too weak they’ll buff her right up. Not that she was very strong outside of pro play though…