Look, I know she has been reworked 3-4ish times now, but the bans should speak for themselves: she needs another soft rework.
Make virus her new passive; make it so virus procs whenever she deals enough damage to a target. That way she retains her damage, but isn’t able to instantly kill someone coming out of stealth like she does right now.
Make stealth an ability again; add a resource meter to it like Hazards shield. That way she can go in and out of stealth, but isn’t in perma stealth. Make it a movement tool again.
These changes alone would make her significantly less frustrating while making her more skillful in certain hands. Could even add interactions like hacked targets spread a damaging AoE upon having virus proc’d on them.
Eh, no. I think that every single time she’s been reworked it’s never ever made the people asking for the rework happy. They’re happy for a hot minute and then once they realize that there will still be Sombra in their games they aren’t happy anymore.
IMO the only part of her kit that has been consistently frustrating is hack. It’s the only thing that needs to go really. Everything else in her kit, including the stealth, should be fine. But removing someone’s ability to fight back isn’t. If we do another rework and don’t remove hack, it will have been pointless.
Halfway reasonable, but how do you plan to address the hack problem?
Hack — meaning the silence effect — is way too short, so it doesn’t really benefit Sombra.
Her time to kill is already higher than the duration of hack, meaning hack is useless and just acts as a pure damage boost.
Hack also can’t really be used in combat because it’s too slow and too easy to interrupt.
But if you fix that, people will start whining again because Sombra would then have a silence effect that actually triggers when needed and becomes useful — and the little crying kids don’t want that!
So do you have a solution for that?
Also, if you make the damage passive so you can’t burst people down anymore, Sombra would need a compensation buff.
If invisibility and damage don’t work, then only invisibility and CC are left. Silence is a soft CC. You can still defend yourself, and since Sombra wouldn’t be dealing damage in that case, you’d actually have an advantage with many heroes.
It absolutely works, and OW1 even proved that.
Don’t confuse “annoying” with “problematic.”
Invisibility and damage are problematic, while CC is only annoying — because all CC is automatically annoying!
You can still fight back when you’re hacked. You can still shoot people, and even do some other abilities depending on your character.
So, I am a Sombra Main. I’m not great at shooting games but I’m good at objectives and going for the right targets to help my team. That’s why I like the hack. I said this years ago, the only way to truly make the annoyed people happy is to get rid of Sombra. Kill her off in the story or something, replace her with another character and let the voice actor play her instead. It will be very heartbreaking for me and I’ll probably quit the game, but I am one person whose opinion doesn’t matter much. The hack isn’t even that deadly as long as long as you can deal damage back though.
You literally cannot use your abilities at all, including hook, for 1 second. At one point it used to be 6. They have shortened it a lot from earlier version. But even 1 second of silence is too much.
How are you a Sombra main and not even familiar with how hack works?
The fact that its duration has been reduced so much that it doesn’t even last long enough to match her time to kill is ridiculous — especially considering the delay and how easily it can be interrupted.
Second, you don’t lose the ability to defend yourself; it’s just limited.
Unlike the CC from tanks or some supports — yes, I’m looking at you, Ana — where you get stunned and have no way to defend yourself.
So your argument is just whining, like 90% of all complaints about Sombra.
You can’t expect to remove the core of a hero, especially not with such a weak argument.
Otherwise, why not remove all CC from tanks too? Or take away Cassidy’s grenade?
Especially the latter turned out really well in OW2, didn’t it?
And you should also be aware that removing hack would massively buff Sombra’s damage even further.
She would actually be able to blow up anyone out of nowhere — which would only make the real problem with Sombra even worse!
That much is proven? How so? Even in OW1 she was the most despised hero, and looking beyond community perception, she had one of, if not the worst pick rate and win rate in the game.
If it’s annoying to the point of her ban rate being near 100% (which speaks for itself, really), and caused her to be reworked more times than I have fingers to count on —
then yes, it is problematic!
if she never got babied with heavy compensation buffs within less than a month after the last rework i betcha shed be banned alot less.
Her last rework gave her clear windows of vulnerability and made her skillfull in exchange for that damage. Then sombra mains whined and they nerfed all the new downsides that were supposed to balance out her new damage in less than a month, because blizzard knows Sombra is the only dps mercy/moira mains can flex too and they spend the most on skins, shes basically the training wheels hero for dps.
Sure, if you ignore all the additional information, all of that would make sense!
There is always some hero who is the most hated — that doesn’t mean it’s actually a problem.
A real problem is always objective, not subjective.
The fact that someone here is getting upset over a ridiculously short soft CC already shows that the hate is purely subjective!
Second, are you even aware why Sombra was reworked?
Supposedly, OW1’s hack with a 5-second duration would have been too powerful in 5v5 — but that mainly applied only to tanks.
So they wanted to reduce the duration, but by doing so, they broke the rule that hack must last slightly longer than Sombra’s time to kill, which created a major power gap.
The compensation buff for that was a reduced cooldown, but that led to chain-hacking, which was later removed again.
At that point, Sombra still had the power gap and needed a rework — and that’s when they added Virus!
But that sent her in exactly the wrong direction, because damage and invisibility absolutely do not work together.
The latest rework just continued down the same failed path.
It’s not Sombra’s fault — it’s the developers’, who can’t seem to do anything but give everything and everyone more damage!
The attempt to “fix” Sombra by nerfing ability X just ends up buffing ability Y.
And when you nerf her core ability, those buffs end up being even stronger.
I really don’t understand what’s so hard to grasp about that.
Or is it simply because I have over 10 years of professional experience in balancing and game design, and so I see it as common sense?
That doesn’t make anything I said wrong. It’s frustrating and will always be frustrating. She will be hated as long as it exists. If you aren’t getting rid of hack, don’t even bother with a rework. There’s no point.
No, it’s because of what I said. The devs are too scared to remove it, but they see the problem so they’ve gutted it. And rightfully so.
Depends on the hero. Heroes who rely heavily on their abilities are severely compromised during hack. And it can completely negate some ultimates with no real counterplay other than preemptive spy checking.
I’ll take Ana’s CC over Sombra’s any day. As a tank main btw.
It’s not. And Sombra is in my top 3 most played. I kinda see this from both sides. And hack is the core issue with her kit. Everything else is just whining. Stealth is fine. Virus is fine. Her damage is fine. Translocate is fine. Basically hack is the only thing that I think has been a problem since day 1.
And none of those heroes are banned as often as Sombra, nor have they been reworked as many times as she has.
Games are supposed to be fun - an experience that is always subjective by nature. Disliking Sombra is subjective, but that dislike is prevalent enough to warrant change, because objectively, it turns people away from the game.
Yes, I understand that, but everyone has been taking an issue with her having stealth + hack + translocator on one character the whole time! It’s not even a matter of her being strong or bad! It’s that combination of abilities that feels toxic and unfun – more so than any character according to ban data – that no one has enjoyed playing against, EVER! But they stubbornly keep trying to make it work!
It disables all abilities for 1 second. And if you are an ability dependent hero, that second might as well be an eternity. But it’s a lot better than it used to be.
Look, I don’t want Sombra reworked again. My point is that if people think that the problem is stealth or virus, they’re wrong. It’s always been hack. And hack is only 1 second. So unless people are prepared to remove hack or at least the silence on it, then a rework is pointless.
Yes, but those things are not issues. I also play a lot of support and they just need to get good. I don’t have any problem against Sombra as a support player. I do get frustrated with her as a tank though.