So, the enemy team is attempting to hold an objective and the Widowmaker’s at a range where counterplay is severely limited and creating space for her team and that’s an example you’re going to give in an attempt to convince me she’s not inherently too powerful? This is like one of the most oppressive Widowmaker situations you could cite.
So teams need an A in geometry and teamwork, and are expected to play a specific comp to shut down 1 hero that can OHK at ranges that 90% of heroes can’t even interact at. Good point.
No hero with pinpoint accurate hitscan’s first contribution to a fight should be a OHK from 50m away, while you’re having to contend with a south american DJ wall skating 10m above your head. It’s a disgusting and absurd addition to this game.
So, we could continue or I’ll just say that I’m against what this hero can do, in contrast to other heroes in principle. I’m principally against inf range OHK hitscan in this game.
That’s not inherently powerful. That’s wholly contingent on her teammates not being potatoes. Which is the case on the ladder up until about Diamond.
The space that she creates is still within the enemy’s line of sight, and she’s wide open to countersniping/countersnipers from an enemy that’s in completely safety until her team decides to engages them.
This community just got used to the idea of Attack Widow, they’re barely acquainted with the idea of Widow creating space. If it’s powerful and oppressive, then every single game with a Widow should be a win… and they aren’t.
I don’t think she is. IMO if a hero is broken it’s because their kit is broken, and if their kit is broken it would be felt across the board. Mercy 2.0 for example. Didn’t matter whether you were bronze or T500 or OWL, the first iteration of Mercy post Mass Rez was objectively broken.
Widow on the other hand only feels broken when facing off against a highly skilled Widow player. An average Widow player isn’t oppressive. A poor Widow player is 100% a liability to her team. A broken hero with a broken kit would never be a liability to their team at any rank IMO.
I guess I’ve just never felt the urge to have a hero nerfed solely as a consequence of highly skilled players who have mastered that hero.
So the heroes capabilities don’t make her inherently too powerful because Timmy and Laurie in Bronze aren’t very good at the game, but as players become competent enough to play the hero to its full capabilities it’s a different story? I see, good reasoning.
For better or worse this is a game where you can stomp on your opponents head and still lose. But most importantly it’s a game, Overwatch… not Widowmaker’s point and click adventure… and it’s counterplay that makes this game fun.
She’s not inherently powerful. She’s bad if you can’t aim, she’s useless if you don’t have a good team to capitalize on her picks, and she’s equally useless if the enemy team has half a brain cell.
Gameplay at the top of ladder is different, but for the remaining 99% of players, competence IS her balancing point. And people aren’t competent in general, but everyone is always an expert at heroes they don’t play and they’re completely faultless, and every loss is someone else’s fault.
For the record I don’t even play Widowmaker anymore, so I don’t see what sort of bias you’re pushing about “point and click adventures”. She’s in a bad spot, has always been in a bad spot, gets finally enabled by a meta team comp, and everyone’s screaming for nerfs for no apparent reason because she hasn’t changed.
I keep track of her bugs and challenge bad arguments when I see it. That’s all the attachment I have to her now.
It’s not hard to counter her, yet people keep saying it is. She’s going to become even more useless in the coming months, except from the 1% that just wants to complain about anything good.
What makes Widow so broken is the lack of answers to Widow, rather than Widow herself.
I myself love playing tanks and healers (until the recent meta, where I have to quit after a few games out of frustration). But particularly early on and its recently come back, I’ve had to pick Widow. You see I grew up with FPS games and sniping is one of my strong suits, which makes me a competent Widow and I excel at counter-sniping.
I don’t like playing Widow, I find her to be really boring to play and she lacks engagement with me as a player in a game where lots of crazy stuff happens. But yet she is my most played hero, by a factor of several hours. This is because for me, the answer to reliably shut down an enemy Widow is to play Widow myself. Other anti-widow characters are too easily shutdown or dissuaded from pursuing her. Winstons try to dive me frequently, and I give em a good shot as they dive, and hook away. If they pursue, I get another shot and can finish him with some MG fire. Genji’s are my biggest threat, but he has to spend such a long time flanking out of sight of myself and my team so that he isn’t intercepted that the entire fight is a 5v6, or 4v6 if I manage to take their Widow down (which happens most of the time) and his team loses the team fight in the end so it works out for me as Widow.
What this game could use is a hero that prevents long-range damage. I’ve always sat on a hero idea that has a special shield that is massive, nigh indestructible, but blocks every attack, including his own teams forcing close engagements.
What makes Widow so broken is the lack of answers to Widow, rather than Widow herself.
Exactly. What’s she’s capable of is inherently powerful due to so many other heroes being completely incapable at those ranges. I’m glad someone gets it. The falloff damage change was presumably because of this.
Its a lot more complicated than that alone, as Overwatch as a game is extremely dynamic with very non-standard abilities and ideas not seen in FPS games. Even the more crazy ones like Unreal Tournament can’t really keep up (though that game is much more fast paced)
Shields are a good measure to reduce a Widows effectiveness, and a coordinated team can give a Widow a hard time locating a pick with strategic positioning.
What she is capable of isn’t as powerful as you’d suggest, and as someone who has sunk countless hours in to Widow, I can give long explanations on how one can go about minimizing the risk of an enemy Widow.
So I will reiterate, its not that she is powerful, its that the power she does have is very hard to get rid of, and she is a constant threat that requires eyes on the back of your head.
Yes, if you’re good at her.
If you’re not good at her then she is useless.
Basically she is a skillful hero who is balanced and it is the players ability that decides how good she is.
She’s about as OP as Tracer was before Brigitte/Sombra/Moira… Which is to say a bit, but mostly because she has an infinite skill ceiling and barely any counters. They need to introduce counters that don’t have to suicide dive her to be effective for those times where she’s single-handedly dominating game.
Also being one-shot from miles outside of your effective range SUUUCKS.
Oh so they randomly decided to make these changes completely unaffected by concerns from players on the forums and pros on stream/twitter making fair points regarding the lack of counterplay that existed vs a Widowmaker? You know, like how Widowmaker requires ‘so much skill’ to land 1 headshot when 4 headshots from McCree at the same range wasn’t enough to kill her?
Of all the things they could have nerfed that actually do respond to players and forum/pro feedback, the SMG is not one of them.
The SMG spread is so poor that the only way to reliably deal damage is to one-tap it every third-second. At that rate, it’s dealing 39 damage per second, at a range and FOV that isn’t ideal for shooting long range.
The niche it served (before the nerf) was for cleaning up a kill. It was faster (0.33s to descope) and more damaging (13 damage) to descope and fire an SMG burst than it was to fire a 0% shot (0.5s wait time, 12 damage), making the SMG’s only purpose at any sort of mid-range or father to clean up a character at ~ 10 HP.
That niche was already rarely seen by itself, and not one person in Competitive or on the forums had any sort of had an issue with it. Given that the spread makes it functionally useless at any long range, and the one-tap rate is abysmal, and the 0% shot is also equally abysmal, the nerf exists only because a developer just wanted code simplification. It’s easier just to add Widow to the list of characters affected by the falloff function and never have to remember any special exceptions, than it is to remember “oh right, Widow is a special exception.”
Not because it placated any particular population of players. Because, who in their right mind would have wanted to see a nerf to a seldom-seen niche thing so that it no longer serves its niche?
Yeah no one cares about the SMG. The relevant changes are to McCree and Mei, and to a lesser extent Soldier. If you wanna tell me the SMG change specifically, which was a ‘nerf’ for Widowmaker, was for consistency then I’ll agree with you.
But it is still functionally a nerf. Something that had a niche no longer fulfills its niche.
Here was a thing that was only knowingly used in the event that you mistimed the headshot scope charge to clean up a kill. Now it’s gone, you now have to spam 0% shots instead (which costs 2 more ammo than a one-tap from the SMG).
Comical. Do you even know at what range the falloff kicks in?
The real ‘nerf’ is that she will take more damage from these heroes at ranges she was otherwise nearly immune. Almost as if they’ve considered what Widow is capable of at 40m+ and how some heroes have been artificially gimped at those ranges. And now there’s more counterplay.