It’s not always 1 shot 1 kill. For the 1 shot 1 kill effect, you have to hit a headshot, and not all Widows are good at hitting headshots.
same, as I played her since Season 9 a bit more, It’s just the reward if you manage to hit those heads. Mostly playing her in 4v4 Team Deathmatch. But Also in normal matches. You can easily get dived by a winston, Cyborgninja, Tracer or Sombra. If you don’t react quickly enough, they burst you instantly down. But I can understand that it is frustrating to play against a Widow-God on Grandmaster level.
But as it’s her “Skill” that makes her viable, She’s verry fine where she is.
btw Thanks Blizzard for the “not-Blue-Skin-Skins”
It’s difficult. I think she is fine, and I don’t like the idea of aim basically being marginalized in this game. Widow is aim being rewarded the most directly in this game. I like that, even though I can’t get a hang on aiming with her.
I don’t think her grappling hook is all that problematic imo. I mean, in OWL she is in a highly coordinated team etc, etc. You can’t neglect that these teams commit a lot to enabling and making room for their Widow. And these are all top tier players. It’s hard to really compare that to the solo Q life even high up in the ladder.
Why would you base anything on solo Q though. can you actually with confidence say that Solo Q is a team based game like pro play is?
Don’t Blame her, Blame those crybabies who cried on the forums about Dive being meta for 5-7 seasons 
Dive was the only way to hard-counter her. So I believe you got what I’m saying.
I think a thing people are ashamed to admit is how bad they are at movement.
After you watch some pros laughing at a GM moving like a bot you realise how big and important and big factor in the game is pressing WASD in the correct way and that also is a big reason Why almost always a widow from a higher rank will be able to kill lower ranks at will.
The strafe patterns, where you are on the map, awereness it all counters widow to a great extent. You can see T500 players poking damage at widows while being right in front of her in LOS while someone who hasnt got his movement nailed down so well will probably get headshot in that situation faster than he could blink.
Tldr: Good movement is a great skill to improve on and counters widow to an extent but most people get irritated because they think game sense and aim are all the skills you have to have
Ladder is nothing like pro. Different level just in coordination, teamwork, communication, etc, etc.
But gotta keep ladder play in mind when it comes to balancing right? And in the ladder Widow is well balanced imo, in the sense she’s going to be more open and vulnerable in a sense compared to pro play.
But this is a team game is it not? Is it not then best to balance a team game based on teamplay? Sure you can ladder it in mind but if it’s unbalanced when the game is played as intended then it is unbalanced.
Pro play is the only place where skill floors become irrelevant. If you want to look at Ladder then almost all the high skill floor characters have been UP for most of the game because most of Ladder can’t do anything with them
Are you saying at pro level you believe Widow is unbalanced and needs nerfs? Totally ignoring the ladder? Hm… Possibly. I mean she’s been played with and into dive plenty. But you can see how it does depend on map design and sightlines etc.
Yes I am. The fact that she is played with and into dive plenty emphasises the fact that her only reliable counterplay is herself. People will try and make this a brig problem while ignoring the fact that she was second most played DPS last stage without Brig and is most played right now while Dive is still the most used composition.
People around here don’t know what they are talking about. As somebody else noted, for the longest time people thought Tracer was the inferior flanker because they were just bad at her and didn’t see what she did when you actually got good.
don’t forget that OWL are the best players in the world, ofc they don’t play Symmetra or other heroes that limit the “player-Skill” with a Cap on the hero. Widow doesn’t, She gives you free hand over your skill and pro’s will use this more. more than using a hero, limiting theyr skills
Mercy is played is she not? Genji and Tracer have similar applications yet they don’t see the same level of play. Tracer used to but not anymore. Widow did not always see this level of play.Ana is high skill and doesn’t see that play. Do you know why? Because the power level of the hero matters and Widows is too high. It’s not just about the skill cap of the hero
Are you implying that this isn’t already a thing in the game?
Start playing too well and watch your shots magically go through people…
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It’s real bad on Junkrat. Like, it’s mouse-throwing bad. It’s fist-through-monitor bad because his grenades are driven by the physics engine on the server rather than with any kind of trusted shooting data from your client because Junkrat does not get the benefit of ‘favor the shooter’.
Also, that was a sarcastic response to a completely different point because someone said you cannot nerf skill, which is demonstrably false.
“[S]arcastic response”…haha, yes, tis joke, comrade, why do you heff to be mad?
The game is called “Overwatch” for a reason. Big daddy Jeff is watching out for the players getting stomped and gives them a boost, while making the stompers miss some shots.
But this is not something I can prove, so I’m just a crazy person on the internet.
It’s probably also that I’m still bitter about the grenade nerf. But it is a good demonstration that you can directly nerf skill.
How would you nerf?
I mean. There’s a map design element to it, sightlines, etc. There’s her evasiveness. While dive does enable the ability to quickly close gap and jump her, it is also a lot of soft targets without any significant shield protection. There’s a lot of things to consider.
She’s the strong DPS choice rn, and when Hanzo rework hits OWL he’ll probably take over from there, and Widow will be a second. Tracer was first a little while ago too. Genji has been here and there.
Mercy, Zen, Dva, all still really well represented in pickrate.
I just don’t really see her being problematic even at pro level on lan settings and all that. Just symptomatic. And she will always be a strong pick at pro level LAN probably.
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is F tier, rare pick for almost a year
dive finally gets put into grave
nothing to hold down the spider
spider slaughters poor players
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Hook 8s to 10s. Make her more diveable. Make it so that the gap between her getting dive and her having her next hook isn’t only 2 seconds.
All those factors of map design apply to every hero. If she was not problematic she wouldn’t be the most picked DPS at the same time that DVa and Winston are still the most picked tanks by quite a bit. She gets picked more than Winston for f**k’s sake and is nearing DVa.
Source:https://www.winstonslab.com/customquery/pickrates/
Filter for this stage. A DPS getting picked more than all tanks bar one is extremely concerning. It means she is above each meta and fits int just fine with and against each.
Also about Genji, he hasn’t been higher than C tier for a very very long time.
And she will always be a strong pick at pro level LAN probably.
Being a strong pick is fine, nobody complained about Widow on Ruins for example. Being a pick where you are applicable 70% of the time and your best counter is yourself is not.
I found some more data about how concerning this is:
Team Compositions - Winston's Lab - Overwatch esports statistics for analysts, teams and all kinds of stats junkies
If you filter there you see that almost all the comps Widow is run in is dive and the most common is dive with Brig and Widow
Widowmaker wasn’t a rare pick in Dive though. Maybe early on, but when Mercy got reworked and Widow got her hook buff, she was plenty fine in Dive.
But she was balanced around Dive keeping her in check. Enter Brigitte, and she still has all the tools she needs to make herself work in Deathball, but with Brigitte doing her job in countering Dive, running Dive simply to counter the Widowmaker (or Hanzo) is no longer feasible, since the enemy can swap a single slot and bring in Brigitte to shut Dive down.
Without Dive heroes to keep Widowmaker in check, her only functional counter is another Widowmaker.
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