No Reliably Countering Widow Without Outnumbering or Sniping

General Discussion
1

Flanking doesn’t work, not even for Winston and Ball. You have to abandon frontlining to risk a 1v5 against a hero that can get picks from her respawn point.

Her design is INFURIATING. No matter how balanced she is, she is absolutely vexing to play against. I’d rather NEVER WIN another match in my life if it meant I don’t have to get picked on hit-scan from across the map in a game where everyone has up to 1/3rd the effective range and hit-boxes twice as large as COD.

She oppresses everyone like a Classic Bastion with headshots and no fall-off. “Fall-off” is such an adorable formality for Widow’s kit when her fire rate is 1.2s…

10 Likes
2

Inb4 “but muh skill-based sniper takes skill and is sooooo terrible, why would you even consider nerfing her. Why does she take skill? BECAUSE SHE TAKES SKILL THAT’S WHY DON’T ASK ME TO PRESENT A LEGITIMATE ARGUMENT BAD MOVEMENT BRONZE PLAYER LOLOLOLOL get g00d skrub”

6 Likes
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If hit-scans take so much skill: let’s halve their base damage and double their crit damage. Same damage output if you’re good. :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Why in the world are you frontlining with dive tanks?

4 Likes
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She does take skill! How do I know? Because I like Widow. If I like a character or play them, they’re skillful, difficult to play, can’t ever be overtuned, and you’re just salty. If I don’t like them, they’re nobrain ez, need nerfed, and you only play them because you can’t play pre-stated skilled characters. Which are which are subject to my whims and arbitrary opinions.

3 Likes
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Frontline is anywhere the dive tank goes.

7

Then move the frontline to their backline where the Widow is. If you can’t do that, then get some help because 1v2’s shouldn’t come easy to even tanks.

1 Like
8

so without outnumbering, you lose the 1v1 to widow?

or you mean usually 3v3 or even 5v5?
as the second scenario is much more likely, and means to me we should tone down peels.

9

I agree with everything this person said. Because it’s exactly what I wanted to hear.

1 Like
10

This is so extremely arrogant to say
“I play them, so they are are chars that need skill”

2 Likes
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Yes, but if I played an unskilled character, my ego gets shaken. So any character I play MUST be peak skill requirements. And I couldn’t possibly lose without someone cheating or having an OP character. So obviously anyone who beats me or has an edge against me is playing an unskilled character who needs nerfed.

2 Likes
12

So 5v1 to take out 1 sniper? This doesn’t sound like balance…

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And the thing is, she really doesn’t take that much skill to be oppressive. I got potg the other month from just clicking on 3 heads. It was easy, and i’m a pretty mid hitscan player. Only reason I went widow is because my teammate took my preferred dps from me between rounds, I wasn’t even playing her seriously or anything.

1 Like
14

Because the world is not a perfect place where you see cohesive comps. In 95% of the game people arent going to swap to make a Dva main’s dream of onetricking work.

Yet another flaw of solo tanking.

Hitscan abusers defending Tutorial 76, basically.

15

If a hit-scan with infinite range deserves insta-kills, let’s bring back 250DPS Rocket Punch or Hook Combo. They take much bigger risks going up closer!

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luckily Widow does not have infinite range.
The only Hero in the Game with an infinite range as a hitscan is Ana.

While having 525 or 750 hp and having incredible mobility or selfheal.

17

Which totally makes up for losing half the frontline stability with 5v5. :confused:

“Fall-off” is quoted sarcastically because it doesn’t count if you’re STILL insta-killing from across an entire battlefield every 1.2s. That’s like fixing Brig by nerfing her 17 times instead of fixing the Rally bug that made Goats meta for a year or two.

18

I want to see footage if this widow who is so good she can just beat the whole team herself and the ONLY answer is outnumbering her. Do it. Show the replay code. None of you can ever do that because you’re wrong about her. She doesn’t require outnumbering to beat, she’s getting pocketed and you’re going into a 1v2 or more and complaining because you’re bad faith and don’t actually like the game.

She takes skill because aiming is hard. You don’t want to hear that so instead you throw a tantrum like a toddler. I don’t blame you though; people have been doing that in this community for years and successfully made the game worse because blizzard was stupid enough to listen.

1 Like
19

Are you dense? You’re ignoring the fact that there are 4 teammates protecting the widow. That objectively is not a 5v1

20

Aiming a single perfectly accurate hitscan headshot with an overinflate hurtbox against overinflated hurtboxes is hard with the least range restriction in the game is hard? Well that’s news to me because every other hero has to work infinitely harder for their kills because they actually have strict aim and positioning requirements unlike Oneshot-from-any-range BS sniper heroes. Let’s go down the list, shall we…

Cassidy requires more than double the skill of widow because he has to hit 2 headshots to kill, and his TTK isn’t 0, so you have 0.5s to try to save yourself even in the worst case scenario, not to mention that since the falloff changes he actually has to be putting himself somewhat at risk to do so.

Soldier requires even more skill than them both, as he doesn’t get to rely on cheap no-skill flick mechanics where you only have to have good aim for a split second. He actually has to track enemies in a game with 0 movement acceleration to get kills, which is infinitely harder than both Widow and Cass’s flick aim.

Hanzo requires you to aim a small projectile that has drop and significant travel time, which takes far more skill than the elementary point-and-shoot gameplay of Widow. If only one of them would be allowed to one-shot, it should be Hanzo, not Widow.

While those are just a few examples, every other dps/support hero has a higher TTK and skill requirement than Widow does, (yes even moira, mei, and symmetra), and none of those other heroes really have a whole lot of counterplay to widow’s “i kill u for free with no effort, resource expenditure, or counterplay unless you have 600hp and hypermobility” BS, which is why she has been broken since the beta.

Widowmaker (and other mid-to-long-ranged hitscans) caused GOATS, Double Shield, and were gigabuffed in OW2 due to the removal of the Off-Tank, and have still not recieved the giganerfs they deserve because the community still labors under the false impression that they “take more skill” relative to the rest of the cast.

Additionally, due to the rise of better hardware, more and more people have been abusing hitscan weapons and showing how broken snipers like Widow truly are. Sniper in TF2 may have felt balanced in Valve’s internal playtests before the game released because everyone wasn’t very experienced with that style of character and everyone was playing at 60fps on a 720p display, but years and years later hardware and player skill has improved drastically to the point where it is common to find snipers in community servers (who are not bots or cheaters) that consistenly quickscope you at point-blank, killing you for free.