Lets talk about Widowmaker

I have a similar experience.

https://imgur.com/a/m0Y5joE

Don’t worry WarGoat I got you.

So because normal folk aren’t good enough and are selfish and don’t want to play as a team, you should not balance this team based game off people who play as a team and are good enough?

Her hook cooldown. Start there and again

The biggest reason why Widowmaker is a nuisance is due to her counters being blasted across the map by Brigitte

This is not true, because again she was thriving in Dive at pro play. You know where Dive was strongest and s/he was thriving. The most played composition now is Winston, DVa, Zen, Mercy, Brig and Widow

The Overwatch League has a completely different meta from ladder.

Before Brigitte was in full swing, Widowmaker wasn’t even in the Top 10 hero picks across all ranks.

Compare this list to what we have now and we can clearly see that adding Brigitte into the meta has had a WILD effect onto everything.

Also, as soon as the OWL gets Hanzo 2.0, if nothing is changed, he will most likely be dominating the league.

It has an effect but to claim that it is the fault of Brig that Widow is as strong as she is now is completely wrong. As I said, Widow was still second most played DPS during Stage 3 without Brig. I am not talking about ladder because I sincerely do not believe Ladder is a team game. This is a team game and must be balanced as such and in a team environment Widow has been extremely powerful for a while now

Ladder is not a team game. It is filled with extremely selfish people and trolls and griefers etc. even during Dive, it was only at about 40% usage rate in GM. It was used the most to be sure but not to an extreme extent because it needs communication and a willingness to work together and ladder is lacking that at all levels

You should count yourself lucky tbh, you’re getting the opportunity to train effectively with players above your rank. Once you can deal with these higher level widow players in QP you’ll be well set to rise in comp.

Not even joking here, if every QP match had at least one person who was just that bit better mechanically than me, I’d be forced to get better then take those skills into ranked.

Well I’m currently learning Doomfist on a smurf. With the buffs on the PTR, I’m gonna move into the KILL THE SNIPERS mentality.

Mobility onto snipers is the best way to dispatch them outside of countersniping… good luck! :smiley:

Then by that logic, D.Va & Winston deserve to be nerfed into oblivion considering that they’re still in the Top 5 of the highest picked heroes in the Overwatch League, despite their off-meta status on ladder.

The Overwatch League plays on different patches and on a LAN connection. As a result, Widowmaker is clearly going to perform much better than she is on ladder.

This is a little earlier than now but it still applies, considering how different the Overwatch League meta is in comparison to our current one.

Yes, it’s smart to balance around the highest-tiers of play but all that goes out the window when the highest-tiers aren’t even playing on the same patch as you are on live.

Oh noes, you’ve said it out loud…we’re doomed :sob:

I can’t tell if this thread is serious.

Dive tanks have shorter cooldowns than Widow, and Monkey’s TTK sync ups perfectly with a 3 second buffer (2 seconds between your jump cooldown and her Grappling Hook, plus the 1 second it takes to reel the grappling hook).

D.Va herself has a 5 second cooldown and Micro Missiles and her primary fire, making her TTK faster and her buffer longer.

Add in their facecheck damage and melee, and they have time to spare.

Dive tanks can do their jobs just fine. Stop exaggerating about the hook cooldown because they have more than enough ample time to delete Widow unless she’s pocketed.

The rise in pocketing is due to how often Grav Dragonstrike is used – healers are focusing on staying back away from the team in those situations, and around where Widow is.

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And who said I am against having DVa and Winston nerfed? Are you trying to catch me out or something? I am extremely for reverting the bubble buff so don’t act like saying they should be nerfed will stop me. They should have been nerfed a while ago and Roadhog should not have been nerfed and we wouldn’t be in this mess.

LAN Clients haven’t always made widow this powerful though. She was not this powerful in other tournaments. Stop bringing up many excuses that try to divert away from her.

Yes, it’s smart to balance around the highest-tiers of play but all that goes out the window when the highest-tiers aren’t even playing on the same patch as you are on live.

Yet their patch is no different in terms of Widow’s power level as a hero is it? You nerf that because it clearly shows that in the absence of extremely OP Hanzo, the OP Widow is what takes over. Her personal power is not different between the two patches. If one were to balance like that then most of the DPS heroes would have needed a buff during triple tank and that would have been asinine. Similarly not nerfing Widow who is clearly overperforming just because we are on a different patch only means that something even more powerful than her currently exists. Nerf that as well, but just because something more powerful than her currently exists does not mean she is not too powerful as evidenced by OWL who are playing the same exact Widow

She’s not balanced. She can eliminate an entire team with one clip.

But because of user error (which is what they balanced her around), she is balanced.

Because getting 100% Scoped Accuracy 100% of the time is impossible.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/owl-announcers-just-said-it-widowmaker-is-deciding-games/124877/38?u=darkstar-2811

Yes, but with a longer grappling hook cooldown, like 10 seconds for instance (still 2 seconds shorter than the original 12), at least she can be dove more easily and dealt with by your Genji or your Winston, or whatever. With the current 8 seconds, this is how it goes:

You jump up to her perch, so she grapples away. You wait 6 seconds for Leap to come off cooldown, and by the time you land on the widow, she has about 0.5-1 second before her grappling hook comes off cooldown. So she ducks to the low ground, and you chase in an attempt to finish the kill, then she goes back up to the high ground with grappling hook. By that time, the enemy team has healed widow and collapses on you.

Now imagine if, when she dropped to the low ground, you had another 2 second window, it would be much easier to punish a widow who perches too far away from her team.

Credit to Fragehardt

The rise in pocketing is due to how often Grav Dragonstrike is used – healers are focusing on staying back away from the team in those situations, and around where Widow is.

This is completely false by the way. Grav Dragonstrike is far from prevalent in OWL and the pocketing is happening all the same

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Grappling hook is the most unreliable skill in the game. Lucio boops you, you press hook to come back but “oops” it grapples nothing. You try to hook up to the Ruins spawn temple, but “oops”, you grapple from the lamp 90 degrees lower than your crosshair. You want to hook to the Bank rooftop in holywood, but sorry, you will not… not today… today you will die in vein by Roadhog belly hits…

This is has nothing to do with coordination itself. Casters asked SBB about their Volskaya win over Spitfire two seasons ago. He just said “Our job was to protect Pine, until he carries”. Give to a decent widow a 5 stack that is dedicated to protect her and eventually she will carry. In ladder, nobody will trust a random widowmaker to play around her. In fact, why to play around widowmaker and not around hanzo?

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Hey! Let’s not talk about Widowmaker.

A character who most of the player-base can’t even use. A character who will become useless and the target for all toxicity in the game to be thrown toward whosoever has the sack to play her if she’s altered in the slightest negative way. She’s in a good place for the most part. She should be dangerous at a range. She’s useless everywhere else. Have we not had enough of Sniper’s killing us from 3m away since the Hanzo update? Most Hanzo’s don’t even snipe anymore. They run into Reaper Range and storm arrow. It’s a travesty.

Dive her. Use lot’s of barriers. Widow v Widow. Genji/Tracer. Even Pharah’s can give her issues if the Widow isn’t that great.

If your post is based on the OWL…it’s time for a cold shower. No one plays like those people. They’re the best in the world.

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I never mentioned OWL gameplay. I was talking about the ladder.

This is laughable. It’s complete theory, and it’s a shoddy one at that because it omits a bunch of key details.

Widow’s grapplehook is 8 seconds. But the cooldown doesn’t start until after the reel has ended. Reels in general can be anywhere from a quartersecond to a full second, and the majority of players use the auto aim which typically procs it at the full second.

That’s a 9 second cooldown.

Then there’s the reel time, which also takes anywhere from a quartersecond to a full second. Double or even triple that, if the auto aim procs to a spot that’s actually completely out of range (yes, it does that).

Already, we’re at 10+ seconds of downtime. Not 8.

Meanwhile, Winston and D.Va, and 6 and 5 seconds respectively on their abilities with absolutely no startup lag. Both of their facechecking abilities deal damage (Winston landing, D.Va face-boop). Both characters are capable of chaining melee with their facechecking abilities, in less than fractions of a second.

Those damages end up shortening the actual TTK.

  • Winston’s TTK is 3.33 seconds for just Tesla alone – with landing and melee damage, it shrinks to just 1.8-2.2 seconds, depending on how much damage you deal with the leap.
  • D.Va is variable due to her falloff and spread, but a D.Va worth her salt will be able to get that 2 second TTK with Micro Missiles to soften them up before the face-boop and melee damage.

If you dive on Widow, with Winston or D.Va, while she’s looking at someone else and didn’t see you dive her because of her scope FOV, she dies.

  • Unless she has a pocket healer, or a mega healthpack, she’s dead.
    • If she’s on the mega healthpack, most mega healthpacks near common sniping perches are able to be bodyblocked.

If you dive her while she’s looking straight at you and watching you come at her, she either uses her grappling hook to run to the nearest healer or health pack, or drops down from her perch and then uses her grappling hook to run to the nearest healer or health pack.

  • During that whole time she’s vulnerable to damage. If she jumps down, the entire time that she’s in free-fall can be spent chasing her and getting free damage.
  • If a healer manages to get to her in time, you should have already noticed this and transitioned to the healer. You have protection abilities and you can kite them to take minimal damage from Widow whilst still putting damage on their healer.
    • By this point, her grappling hook will be off cooldown, your movement is off cooldown, and you rinse repeat until there are no more healing options, or until you get focus fired from her teammates peeling for her.

This is how it goes. Every time. You cannot prove me wrong. I’m literally the tank main that dives her, and I’ve been on the receiving end more times than I can count.

"BUT IN OWL-"

No. This isn’t about OWL. OWL does things that you don’t see in the ladder, for safety. Widow gets pocketed to an absurd degree in OWL, she doesn’t get that same frequency of pockets in the ladder, full stop.

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