Let’s delete every hero except for Soldier.
We’re all Soldiers, now.
Wasn’t it that Widowmaker was considered a throw pick when her grapple was 12 seconds, and she’s OP with 8 seconds?
They should just make it 10 and see what happens.
D.Va boosters start at timecode 0:00, meaning it literally starts adding forward vector impulses on frame one. D.Va can also carry most of that momentum forward by flying upwards at an angle and user-canceling it, letting gravity kick in and keeping that forward momentum.
Monkey and D.Va both have frame 1 forward impulses. Monkey doesn’t channel the forward impulses so he gets a cooldown immediately after pressing the button.
Widow has two windup periods, of which aren’t guaranteed to give you forward movement, and aren’t even guaranteed to give you movement period.
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And what about the times where the auto-targeting teases you into believing that you were within range (and sometimes you actually were within range) before saying “nope jk”, forcing you to recast?
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And what about the times when the hook pulls you to a wall and then hangs you there for a second instead of dropping you immediately?
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Or the times when the hook literally pulls you to a ledge that it auto-targeted to, but doesn’t swing you up-and-over the way it’s supposed to and just drops you? Leaving you stranded below your ledge, as an easy target?
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Or the times when the hook literally just gives up when you’re trying to traverse a bottomless pit and then you just die?
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And the casts where you get booped into a wall that sets your hook on cooldown because your collision is literally inside of a wall that it can’t pull you anywhere?
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Or the times you get pulled to the wrong location entirely? Delaying your intended movement by the full cooldown period?
Look, the ability is meant to be used as an escape, if and when you have it off cooldown. And it frequently doesn’t even work as an escape, to the point where the cooldown itself gets extended up to the full respawn timer because it led you to your death.
That more than averages itself out to +2 seconds of the actual cooldown timer. Just saying it is a +2 second cooldown is being generous.
You don’t play Widow, but you’re so sure of yourself that you know how Widow’s hook works that you fancy yourself an expert.
You’re so selfishly hellbent on removing Widow from your own ranked play that you’re willing to shove every Widow player below GM under a bus.
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At 12 seconds, in practice it was ~14 seconds.
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At 8 seconds, in practice it already was ~10 seconds.
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At 10 seconds, in practice it’s ~12 seconds.
That’s what people aren’t understanding. When you have such a bias against Widowmaker, you start theorycrafting a bunch of hypotheticals based on the listed cooldown, instead of the actual practical cooldowns, in an effort to construct a watertight argument that Widow needs a nerf.
The fact that the cooldown is actually much longer than the listed number immediately discards half of the arguments against her. No longer is 8 seconds too short that D.Va and Monkey can’t dive her… because it’s not actually 8 seconds.
D.Va moves at 12.5m/s. Widowmaker moves at 16m/s. Widowmaker can also use her momentum better because u like D.Va, she doesn’t lose it when the ability ends.
D.Va doesn’t keep her momentum at all. When her boosters cancel, she immediately reverts to 5.5m/s.
You’re remember negative experiences because that’s how humans work. These occurrences are rare. Most grapples work the first time.
If you’re Platinum, that doesn’t mean Widowmaker is balanced. All it means is that you’re not good enough to use her. She’s still OP.
Heroes like Widowmaker with extremely high skill caps aren’t balanced around bad players who can’t play them.
Sorry.
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It’s a speed ramp. It doesn’t immediately revert, the game has to apply a negative impulse.
Bulls###. These routinely happen every game.
If you aren’t aware of bell curves, Platinum is the top of the bell curve where her viability starts appearing.
In every Competitive eSport, just ahead of the top of the bell curve where something starts getting viable is the balancing point. Not the very left or right. Balance at the right most and you run into issues of screwing the entire playerbase below it. Balance it at the left, and the game is unplayable otherwise.
You’re so smug at your GM spot that you want the game to be how you want it. The game shouldn’t be catered to your top 1%, otherwise only the top 1% of the game will play the game and no one else.
Players in lower ranks can always improve, but you can’t ask higher rank players to play worse.
Besides, the deciding factor in most lower ranked games is individual errors, not hero choice.
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Sure, but by choosing to balance at the top 1%, everything is catered to them.
If the top 1% had their way, Mercy would be deleted, Doomfist would lose his one-hit-kill, Roadhog would have his old hook and damage back, D.Va would lose Defense Matrix altogether, and Sombra’s hack would be utterly useless.
The top 1% is only looking out for the top 1%, to make their experience more enjoyable and they don’t give a damn for anyone else below them.
Furthermore, the game’s “skill” requirements go way up.
Suddenly all of the heroes are forced to require more nuanced skill that the entire balancing scale is dependent on aim, or animation cancel tricks, or odd tricks that can’t be reproduced without some odd 50-100+ hours of practice.
Grandmaster players would establish arbitrarily high barriers-for-entry just so that they can feel like gatekeepers. Like the operators of the NY Stock Exchange video boards, who have a pride in knowing that they’re the only ones that can do that job, the Grandmaster players have a sense of security knowing that they’re the only population that can reasonably play the game.
The game falls apart in the lower ranks, to the point where the game is unsalvageable. It becomes a rotten experience for everyone that they never decide to pick up the game.
And we know that’s what will happen, just look at what happened to SC2.
Good, healthy QoL ideas that also have minor balancing implications, if they ever upset the top 1%'s experience, they’ll never see the light of day. Any mechanics that would be new and groundbreaking end up being discarded in favor of older mechanics that are more of the same.
We know that’ll happen because of League of Legends… every single character (new or rework) ends up getting a mini-game.
Well, everything you said doesn’t really matter to what I said. At one point, she wasn’t considered useful. She got buffed, and is now considered OP. So split the difference on the original buff and see if that just makes her “in a good spot.”
But she wasn’t considered OP until recently, and the buff almost a YEAR ago. Any latent power that buff could have possibly had didn’t come from Widow being inherently overpowered. It wasn’t because of the buff. It was because of outside factors not native to Widow.
Furthermore, this “OP” state truly only exists in Grandmaster.
Nerfing it directly impacts the entire bell curve, whilst having so little impact on the extreme ends of the left or right side – Bronze players won’t even see any impact because they’re not good enough to properly use the ability, and GM players are still not going to be affected because they have pocket Mercy’s and literally grapple the ground to completely skip over all of its problems instead of using the ability the way it was meant to be used.
After the nerf rolls out, the split difference is going to hurt Widow way more in the lower/middle ranks than in the higher ones. She’s still going to be the same exact pressuring character that she was in Grandmaster, but with absolutely abysmal usage below GM.
OP’s irrational bias against Widow lets him celebrate any and all nerfs to Widowmaker, without even realizing that it’s not going to impact him at all. He’s just getting a sense of accomplishment because his complaints directly coincided with the nerf.
No it isn’t. When D.Va uses boosters, her move speed is set to 12.5. When D.Va cancels them, her move speed is set to 5.5.
Even if it happens once a game, that is still not even close to a significant amount.
Widowmaker has the 10th lowest winrate in Platinum. She is not a hero balanced around people who can’t aim, which is most people.
That isn’t true at all. Overwatch is generally balanced around top level play with few exceptions. Widowmaker is not one of those exceptions. Her grapple cooldown has been nerfed because she is OP when people can play the game properly.
No, you aren’t.
Any Platinum player can play Widowmaker viably in the current meta even if she is statistically a bad pick in that rank. Why? Because if you are good at Widowmaker, you can win games. The problem is that people who are good at Widowmaker on Live have a disproportionate impact on the game compared to playing a hero of the same role. That is why she is being nerfed.
The game is balanced around players who can play characters to their potential. Widowmaker isn’t bad in Platinum because Widowmaker is bad, Widowmaker is bad in Platinum because Widowmakers in Platinum are bad.
3 Likes
“At Bronze, she is the worst character in the game, hands down. There is not even a close second. At OWL, she is the best character in the game, hands down”
I honestly wish all the heros in the game functioned in this regard. Then skill would really determine rank, and you wouldn’t find your self in situations where the enemy team could just counter pick you with something mindless to stop you from being able to do anything.
Skill does determine rank.
So Widowmaker is always overpowered because her potential impact is too good, regardless of her actual impact.
No, there are zero humans who can hit every single shot. You can balance around a realistic amount of error.
Do I really need to explain this?
Doesn’t really matter, according to your argument if the best Widow player improves at all, Widow needs to get nerfed to adjust for that.
Widowmaker and Hanzo don’t belong in this game. One shot kills are stupid and allow for no counter play or reaction.
I didn’t say that at all. Taimou and Pine played Widowmaker before her buffs (back when she was still off meta) because they were good enough at her to make her work. The same thing happens with Genji mains right now - they play Genji even if he isn’t optimal because Genji is their best hero.
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Now with those words anyway.
People can improve with Widow more than other heroes, and that’s why you want her nerfed.
Meanwhile the vast majority of the heroes suffer because of heroes whom are too easy to perform on.
Did you not read me showing the phenomenon is not specific to Widowmaker?
This occurs with Lucio, Mercy, Zenyatta, Ana, Roadhog, Zarya…
Or in other words, every single hero in the game.
For example, NYXL played more Zenyatta in the playoffs than the other teams because Jjonak was better at Zenyatta compared to Roadhog.