PTR Sombra: Why we think she's bad EXPLAINED

General Discussion
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So there seems to be a big disconnect between the Sombra community and the devs, but these PTR changes have also showed me there’s a HUGE disconnect between the Sombra community and the general playerbase who don’t really play Sombra or fully understand the intricacies of her kit.

With that in mind, I wanted to go through each of the PTR changes, and explain why these changes are bad one by one. I imagine if this thread gains traction, a lot of people will have questions, to which I ask my fellow Sombra mains to be welcoming, to not be condecending to anyone who may not understand, and I ask my fellow players who don’t play Sombra to try and keep an open mind.

As for myself, I have my profile set to public, so feel free to scruitinise me. I’m not some GM/T500 player. I’m diamond. However I have plenty of experience running Sombra in organised scrims and intermediate tournament settings, so I have a lot of knowledge on how she plays with an organised team.

Note that I’m going to be using the hide detail function to make things look a little tidier. I encourage people to expand and read through everything.

An Abridged Guide of How Sombra Mains Use Her Kit Effectively

I could sit here for hours and write a full on guide as to how Sombra’s kit is most effective, but for the sake of simplicity, I can summerise it here. There are plenty of guides written by pro Sombra players if you’re interested in learning more about her, and a lot of them are really good.

To put it simply, Sombra is a flanker. She needs to be able to quickly get to where she needs to be and be able to quickly disrupt the enemy to be effective. Taking too long to set up makes you dead weight. Leaving your team waiting around or forcing them to 5v6 because you’ve taken too long to set up is a huge detriment to your team, so you NEED to be able to work fast.

Sombra’s advantage comes from the fact she doesn’t necessarily need to get a pick like other flankers in order to effectively set up. She also has the option of hacking a key enemy (such as a support or an anchor tank) to let her team initiate a fight with an advantage.

Her disadvantage, beyond the player needing to be quick, is that while she’s setting up, it’s very easy to disrupt her should you be able to notice her. If she loses her element of surprise, she’s at a disadvantage, wheras other flankers such as Tracer and Genji can more easily compensate should they lose their element of suprise.

Why the New Stealth is Bad

As mentioned in the abridged guide, a Sombra player has to be able to work quickly in order to be effective. The new stealth gives her an infinite duration, which, should you be playing Sombra effectively, you’d find wasn’t necessary. The stealth timer isn’t a limiting factor. It’s the span of time in which you’re expected to get things done if you want to perform as Sombra.

The fact that the ability is infinite on it’s own isn’t the worst part. It’s what we gave up for it. I’ll start off with the easy one. Detection range has increased from 2 metres to 4 metres. One of the best applications of Sombra’s stealth was being able to flank directly through a main path undetected. The extended range not only limits the amount of applications it has on main paths but also certain side paths. For example, take the stairs in the Lumerico building on the final point of Dorado. These are closed quarters and because of the healthpacks in the area, it’s very likely that by taking this route you will need to get past an enemy player without being detected. The extended range not only makes this more difficult but in certain cases impossible. If a player detects you, ammo is infinite. There’s nothing to prevent them spamming for you.

In a similar application, the extended range also limits your ability to pick your battles. Let’s say for example you come across a Zenyatta who is healing a Genji who is in front of you. You’d want to pass the Genji to prioritise the Zenyatta, as Discord Orb on you and Harmony Orb on Genji will put you at a distinct disadvantage. Engaging the Zenyatta first makes the most sense, as you can disrupt and kill him more easily without a hack, then followup by hacking the Genji and being able to engage him without any healing buffs to him or sustainability debuffs to yourself. New cloak makes it far more likely that the Genji will detect you as you sneak past him to go to the Zenyatta, meaning that you’ll likely lose your element of surprise, and be forced to take on both enemies at once.

The other change to stealth is the movement speed. There are three major things we’ve lost with the reduction of movement speed:

  1. Certain routes, like the Hanamura gap or the Volskaya point A sniper deck to small healthpack house have become either incredibly inconsistent or flat out impossible, limiting the routes we can take safely and consistently without putting our translocator on cooldown significantly
  2. As said before, you need to be fast as Sombra, and minimise your time spent in stealth. This change forces you to take longer in stealth.
  3. Sometimes it’s going to make it flat out impossible for us to reach an objective to stall it into overtime which we COULD reach with the stealth we currently have on live. On the subject of objectives…

The third nerf to stealth comes in the form of not being able to contest anymore. 6 seconds of undetected contesting is HUGE, as it can be the difference between your team being able to re-engage and get one more push or losing. Good Sombra players could also juggle their stealth and translocator to be able to contest a point even longer, or could use the stealth to initiate a back cap without being detected. All of these options are now gone.

In total, stealth recieved three incredibly significant nerfs for a utility that most Sombra players won’t make any use of.

Why the New Translocator is Bad

Ok, I’ll say this straight up. Having an unlimited translocator ISN’T a bad thing, neither is the ability to destroy the translocator. But to a good Sombra player, these are again “take it or leave it” buffs. They’re not significant enough to her playstyle to warrant what we’ve lost.

These changes seem to want to indulge the “set and forget” playstyle of using the translocator even more. Where you put a translocator down, engage, then when you’re about to die, you instead translocate in order to have a soft respawn. While this has some application, good Sombra players don’t actually tend to do this too often, and once again, having a timer rarely ever limits a good Sombra player, since they’re expected to be able to do their job within those sorts of constraints, otherwise they’re dead weight.

A lot of Sombra players tend to use the translocator for mobility. Taking vantage points and high ground. And I myself like to use it aggressively to confuse the enemy in battle, or do what I like to call “trick hacking” (displacing myself with the translocator mid battle in order to hack my enemy from an unorthadox angle at an unexpected moment).

While set and forget DOES have it’s uses, these changes aren’t really significant buffs more than just quality of life choices that we didn’t necessarily need. I almost never found myself wanting to cancel a translocator, and I never even found the 15 second timer to be a constraint, let alone the 20 second timer. I’d quite happily have it back at 15 seconds as it’s uncommon for my translocator to be out for more than 5 seconds.

The trade off we had for this was having it possible for our translocator to be destroyed by the enemy. Previously, to disrupt a set and forget translocator, the enemy would have to try and catch a Sombra player off guard by camping the translocator. By making the translocator destroyable, this has eliminated the need for the enemy to camp and stay out of the team fight, as instead of catching Sombra while she disengages, they can prevent her from disengaging altogether. It makes it so the enemy can deal with the Sombra without the Sombra even being there and lets the enemy get more done more efficiently.

A minor quality of life change that can hardly be called a buff has a trade off that gives the enemy a distinct advantage.

Simple Changes That Would Actually Benefit Sombra

While there’s a bit of a debate as to what changes specifically WOULD be good for Sombra, most of the changes can be simplified into two points:

  1. A lot of her bugs currently restrict her effectiveness and need to be fixed
  2. Her buffs should compliment her in getting things done faster. Her kit should flow better with less arbitrary delays.

While I want to keep this as objective as possible, these are a couple of changes I feel would help Sombra a lot, which I’m going to leave here for the sake of example.

Note: I am not saying these suggestions have to be what we get. I just feel that they’re a good foundation to put her in the right direction. I do not represent the Sombra community as a whole.

My suggestions:

  • Reduce the time taken to enter and exit stealth from 0.7 seconds to 0.4 seconds

(This would allow Sombra to get back into the action faster and be able to cloak in more aggressive positioning, giving our existing cloak far more application for aggressive repositioning)

  • Increase translocator travel speed by 15%

(This lets the translocator travel slightly further, slightly faster. While on paper this might sound small, in practice it’s very significant (you can actually try this one out in a custom game should you be curious) and let’s you travel further in a shorter space of time, opening up a lot of flexible options which were previously inconsistent or not possible to do. It encourages aggressive translocator use and makes this playstyle more accessable to newer players)

  • Bug fixes

(Simple but significant. If you don’t already, try playing Sombra for a decent amount of time on live servers and see how many bugs you encounter that actively limit you. You may be surprised. Even if we kept what was on live, fixing her bugs would raise her pickrates and winrates significantly)

I hope that this post has been informal for some people and that it’s clear now why a lot of us consider what we’ve ended up with on PTR to be a huge nerf. To summarise, the buffs we’ve been given are very insignificant, especially given the four significant nerfs we’ve traded off to have these “buffs”.

I hope this encourages discussion, and I do encourage it. Sombra players and non Sombra player alike. I ask that people be respectful, I will do my best to answer any questions and I’m sure other Sombra players who frequent this forum would be happy to as well.

EDIT: An update on Sombra with regards to the PTR changes announced July 3rd 2018:

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My 2 cents. Broadly agree with you.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/my-thoughts-on-sombra/145070

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Just delete her and put the spy from TF2 in at this point

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Honestly her hack just needs to be better at doing its job ESPECIALLY while under pressure. Thats the reason you want a sombra for HACK!

Not so you can play a bad tracer, not infiltration, not health packs… HACKING PLAYERS (and not just with ultimate).

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wow you really put a lot of effort on this, let’s hope devs see this.

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Even if they see it, they are not likely to care. They didn’t care when they slapped the hack nerf right out on live without even testing it on ptr, they didn’t when they riddled Sombra with bugs due to the LOS checks that literally nobody wanted to be implemented the way they did it. And by the looks of it, they didn’t care about Sombra’s issues either when they made this huge “buff” to her.

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While I don’t doubt we might get developers reading this thread, I made this more for the benefit of players who don’t fully understand why a lot of us do not like PTR Sombra and feel it’s a nerf. If we are to get the attention of the developers, I feel as though it’s going to be better for the community as a whole to be able to more unanimously agree on what’s best for her.

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I’m as well desperate as you but I’m just appreciated how this thread put so much love and effort on sombra.

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yes, so annoying some players just think infinite is impossible to be a nerf while completely not contributing and unnecessary.

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I’m as well desperate as you but I’m just appreciated how this thread put so much love and effort on sombra.

Don’t get me wrong, I apprechiate Siniter’s effort as well. The more popularity the issue gets, the greater the chances are that we finally get the dev team to listen to Sombra mains. Just after 2+ years of neglect I’ve became quite pessimistic about them.

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There are a lot of times I feel pessamism as well, but then I see changes like LFG and it gives me hope that some channels are getting attention and our voices CAN be heard.

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I will not talk about nerfs (destructible TL, loud sound of TL, stealth detection range, speed bonus decrease), because they are obviously terrible. I will talk about actual buffs (infinite durations) and why they are terrible.

First of all, these buffs provides almost nothing for good Sombra players. Good players already has no problem with timing her abilities.
Infinite durations just make it easier for low skilled players because they will no longer bother about timing. But there is a very bad side effect - infinite duration encourages Sombra player to stay out of combat for longer. And when Sombra is out of combat it means that her team fight 5v6 which is always bad.

So in the end good Sombra players get nothing from these buff but will suffer from nerfs, while bad Sombra players will waste time sitting in stealth and waiting for low HP targets to finish, while their team struggles in 5v6 fights.

The main problem of these changes is that Devs say that they want to push her more into scout/infiltrator playstyle, but they did changes only for “scout” part. You can’t make hero a good infiltrator without giving him more power to infiltrate enemies.
Currently Sombra has much less raw firepower to even compete with all other DPS heroes. Yes, theoretically her DPS os kinda fine and even higher that McCree, but huge spread and fall-off nullifies it completely.

To become decent infiltrator she needs one of this:

  1. Raw damage increase (the worst variant)
  2. Less spread (kinda okay variant)
  3. Her Opportunist passive also increases her damage against targets with <50%HP (the best variant)
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That’s not true at all. Sombra has extreme vertical mobility that tracer doesn’t have. A decent Sombra knows that hack isn’t 100% the go-to option. I’d much rather get some 20% ult charge instead of MAYBE hacking someone in the backling.

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Solid post, OP. Even as a fellow Sombra main, I didn’t fully get all the backlash about these changes, but I definitely understand that perspective now.

I kinda wish Blizzard would just give her the buffs her mains have been asking for: the simple stuff that would make her outright better. Like, faster reload, and fixing all her bugs asap, and maybe slightly increasing her damage: that stuff would please Sombra players, and I don’t think it’d even make her oppressive like Blizzard seems worried about.

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So heres your first problem, you think all the changes should cater to what sombra mains want. they shouldn’t. they should make the character better. which she is, if you embrace her new playstyle instead of crying it wasn’t what you wanted.

again, not meant to please sombra mains, nor keep the playstyle they want. Sym mains were upset she couldn’t have nest anymore and said she would ruin the game, but now shes an actual viable dps.

so tell me how being able to be where she needs to be at all times, and not having to constantly translocate out makes her worse? Maybe you just aren’t good at playing new sombra? I played her in master level scrims with my team, and shut down 6 ults in one push because I was always where I needed to be. not to mention I got 32 elims from catching people out of position because I was always in the back lines with no time limit.

that’s your opinion, I think its way better. as did my team, and the team we played against. that’s a 12 to 1 ratio right now.

no when you rush things as a flanker, you tend to die a lot, this is why genjis tracers and sombras tend to have reputations as feeders, they rush things. a good flanker waits for the right opportunity, instead of trying to force one. go talk to anyone above diamond, youll see that’s the case. Infinite stealth allows her to do this much more effectively, because her flank isn’t on a time limit. her mobility and escape route is always available, like genji and tracer, now.

this I’m not sure about. maybe this was a bit too much, but its one bad thing in a sea of good. even still, like I said earlier, patience. all you have to do is stop rushing your flanks, and you will have a path.

So you are just looking for things to complain about confirmed them.

no they are meant to make your mobility/escape ready at all times, just like tracer and genji.

Just because something can do something, doesn’t mean you should use it like that. Genji can use his swift strike to get to high ground, but youd be a fool to do that instead of just climbing up there. tracer can use her blinks to jump into a fight, but youd be a fool to do that because you have no blinks to use in the fight. Sombra can use her translocator to get to high ground, but youd be a fool to do that instead of using it to escape a bad situation.

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I think one of the other big misconceptions is people thinking Sombra mains want her buffed into a must pick when we give criticism against her changes. That’s something else I really want to clear up with these posts. Most of us just want minimal changes.

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These can be one and the same thing. Indeed, they usually are.

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I 100% agree with this post. I would love to see the changes you’ve suggested implemented instead of this new kit. Even if they just bugfix her! I’ve stopped playing her because I get so tilted with all the bugs.

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Yeah. …To clarify, what I mentioned there I’d consider minor but effective buffs. I genuinely don’t want to see Sombra, like, meta: I just want her to be more viable and powerful than she is currently.

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I fundamentally disagree. Her overall map speed is going to be faster and more consistent, and less of her gameplay will revolve around managing timers, which is a dull experience.

This is a change in the right direction.

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