Sombra’s a tough case to crack. She causes a TON of frustration for her opponents and its evident in her ban rates. Even though she is by no means meta, banning her is still worth it for a lot of players because of the serious frustrations that come with playing against her.
I think asking for a Sombra rework is fair. Her invisibility and her silence are both very frustrating features to play against. The problem, though, is that those features are Sombra. Taking them away means that you need to put something in its place.
So here’s tge discussion, open to Sombra players and non-Sombra players alike at all elos (because this is less a discussion on competitive balance and more on personal enjoyment playing with and against the hero): How would you change Sombra to cut down on what makes her so frustrating to play against? Would you keep her kit mostly the same? If you take away major features, what are you giving back? How does that work with the identity that Sombra has built throughout the years?
At this point I’m kind of leaning towards deleting her. She is my most played hero and I love sombra. But I stopped playing her with the last rework. She’s kept her abilities that is her identity but every single one has been reduced to a pathetic state except killing which has gotten stronger. So if I had my way either delete or start over and revert her to before the virus. But sadly every aspect of her kit annoys people. Whether it’s virus, hack, invisibiiity, or emp. The only thing that doesn’t annoy people is the smg. So they could full rework her from the ground up and just keep the smg. But since sombra players want the “hacker” fantasy it’s a tough conversation. But as a sombra main I’ve hit the point of I do not care I’m just tired of my hero constantly being changed so if we’re doing another rework it needs to be the last one. Because this is all getting so damn old.
Honestly, no Sombra main values my opinion and at this point, I wouldn’t either. I do not play her anymore. That’s the most boring non-committal answer, so I will leave you with something… I feel her decloak should come with a new and improved sound effect so that I can play without a headset. That alone would get me to step down from my honorable title as the AKJ of Sombra.
Her stealth and hack (1 second) are only frustrating when she pops out of nowhere and deletes you under a second.
If she took a bit longer, either tone down the hack dmg boost, or virus impact dmg. People would have more time to react to her before they possibly die to her.
It’d be less frustrating.
The fact that her translocate is on a shorter cooldown than the average time needed to gun her down is annoying to me. Like yeah, that’s a “me” issue, but really whom amongst us is lading perfect headshots on her fast enough to actually take her out before she zips away to healthpack and annoy you again?
That’s the main problem, she’s annoying. She doesn’t feel good to play against, not because she’s OP or game-warping; but just because she’s obnoxious. Which I suppose is in character, 10/10 great concept-to-mechanic translation there… but still. Bleh.
You could buff the utility of hack on teammates to compensate for removing the silence on enemies. Like if hacked teammates got a mov speed buff and enemies instead of a silence got a slow. She could still counter mobile heroes but she’d be less frustrating. However the buff on teammates could more than make up for it as we see how powerful speed and overhealth is especially on tanks.
The slow can do things like cancel balls momentum but keep him in ball form. Reduce the blink and dash distance of Tracer/Genji. Maybe they can keep the silence on virus and have that be the skill shot hack people ask for. Combined with the other buffs she gets via healing/utility you could justify giving it a longer cooldown so it functions similar to an Ana sleep.
TL;DR: Simply make her harder to play by increasing the amount of effort needed to receive value.
I say severely reduce the size of the virus and allow it to do critical damage. The critical damage would remain the same as it is now, but when you miss your “virus” and don’t land a crit, it just does half the damage it normally would do.
Disclaimer: This was way before the season 9 changes. Where the TTK overall was way faster. With that being said, her virus damage would probably have to be compensated appropriately for the present.
They should do what I recommended like two years ago. I mean, it’s not rocket science.
Instead of reworking her kit in its entirety or introducing trade-offs that otherwise make her kit feel clunky, they should instead implement a “skill shot” mechanic directly into her kit that allows her to be greatly rewarded but at the cost of needing to have great accuracy.
If they do “this”—“this” being what I stated above—for the majority of players, Sombra will fall into the same category as Tracer, where she won’t be played as much in the majority of elos because of how mechanically demanding she is; however, on the contrary, raising her skill ceiling should allow her potential to rise in the higher elos. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, though, given that coordination and communication are far more frequent in the higher ranks, but should they ever do something like this, we’d just have to wait and see.
Ball is annoying, should we ban him? He zips in does some damage and zips out.
Tracer is annoying, should we ban her? She zips in does some damage, recalls or zips out.
Give her the state she was right before they gave her the virus rework and we’re fine.
Now mind you, I didn’t say remove virus. I really want her reverted to that Sombra version.
I could deal with the perma invis. But at least you could spy check to reveal her and she didn’t have a get out of jail free card with her tp.
I hardly play Sombra, honestly I think everyone kicking and screaming how annoying Sombra is compared to every other character in the game is embelleshing a fair bit, knowingly or not…
I think we reached the point that it no longer matters how weak Sombra might get, people will lose their mind for Sombra just existing on the same map as them and having any interaction with an enemy when coming out of stealth.
Her received hate borders on hysteria, no offense.
But to extend an olive branch, I could see Virus lose the doubled tick speed for some sort of utility, maybe 2s of damage dealt reduction of say like 20%, when applied to a hacked target. For translocator, could see maybe half a second longer CD, or two charges of it with a longer CD so you could use them back to back but have downtime on stealth after.
Would slow down the TTK a bit without removing the Hack-Virus interaction and would give more flexible Translocator usage without increasing her uptime to the moon.
I’m really amused that people still entrust the support rework to the same very developers which caused this whole situation, rolling out rework after rework after rework. It’s like it has to work this time for sure!