It’s really strange to me that this could be considered anything other than a huge buff. I’d argue that it’s the biggest buff any hero has ever received in this game (maybe Pharah’s lift increase). It gives her so many more options and eliminates the time she has to spend to set up engagements.
The only reason I can think of is that some Sombra players want her to be an uncounterable hack machine, which we’ve already seen is far too powerful.
Game sense and positioning should be rewarded, not adherence to short cooldowns. Now we’ll see who’s a good Sombra and who stays in stealth too long and doesn’t help the team.
Honestly I love being complimented on my Sombra. When other players genuinely can tell the amount of effort I put into her. I was in a game recently and I had several people tell me my Sombra was one of the best they’d seen. It was really flattering.
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Yeah on paper yes. But good Sombra should be agressive.
How can she be agressive when all her abilities can be canceled by a fart in her direction? Especially in the game where the spam is so huge? There is always a d.va, reaper, splash damage doing that 1dmg canceling your play. And staying behind means you do nothing really useful. At maximum making the fight 5v5.
Her abilities are better of use midfight to reposition and confuse. Not for setting up a perfect assassination.
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in other games i very commonly handycap myself by playing more difficult weapons and hunting the most challenging enemies (tanks vs infantry in BF for example). so when i started playing overwatch a year maybe after its launch i very early on became a Symmetra main and a few month later on a Sombra main aswell. Just because these two heroes had such a bad reputation. Im currently also working on my Zarya, but she hasnt that stigma of a trollpick as the other two do.
I do that because i enjoy the challenge and how satisfactory it is to actually manage to git gud with those handycaps.
What i do not enjoy however is when those characters repeatly get the short end of the stick. (at least symmetra will get a buff on her now useless primary fire)… I feel so sorry for all other Sombra player out there, who enjoyed making our little hacker work.
I hope that she becomes at least a mid level competitive grade of playable and useful again.
We’re not asking for hacking buffs though. We don’t want an uncounterable hack. Most of us were fine with 0.8 second hack. The post explains why these changes are bad. It doesn’t eliminate set up time. It forces Sombra to take longer to do anything, and in a game where time is finite, changing a hero to be slower will almost always be a net nerf. Nevermind the fact we recieved four nerfs.
Literally all we really want are bug fixes and less arbitrary things slowing us down, or said things not slowing us down as much. The timers on stealth and translocator never slowed us down. What slowed us down were things like uninteruptable reload, stealth entry/exit animations, 2 second hack penalties for getting blown on from the other side of the map, translocator travel time. These are the sorts of things we want addressed
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I don’t see how the changes affect how her abilities are use in combat. She couldn’t reliably stealth away from combat before and it’s not like they’re going to shoot her translocator out of the air.
Infinite +50% is worse than six-second +75%? I don’t see how this could make her take longer to do anything. If anything, she’ll be in position quicker and more often where she needs to be than she was when she only had a small attack window before her abilities dropped off.
I can’t tell you how many GM Sombras in my games weren’t able to help the team often enough because we weren’t engaging in the few second window she had to be able to help. This can only open up her options and make her more helpful. It’s objectively a giant buff.
shes a lot slower now and she cant effectively relocate by going stealth as she is easily found out.
her teleporter is loud af now, so leaving it lying around is a problem.
and it doesnt need to be shot out of the air. when you arent entirely focused on timing your teleport right it will happen that the damn teleporter actually lands… and when theres a Harambe or similar around its very likely that the teleporter is toast by the time you want to use it. it just takes a second.
It doesn’t do anything to change how she plays, other than to slow her down by literally slowing her down, and increasing her set up time by needing to take more care with both moving around and placing TL beacon.
The stealth was never ment to ‘run away’
It’s more a tool to get around. Or across the open. In that manners six seconds were enough because the most important was to be fast.
With the changes it’s not reliable for that use.
But I’m not gonna argue with you. It’s my opinion against yours. And I respect your right to have own opinion.
They can’t shoot it out of the air that’s true. What she can’t do anymore is baiting with the Translocator. These sort of mind games like throwing it into the enemy and watch them try to focus it and hopefully paying less attention to your teammates, or if they realize it’s only a bait and start to ignore it, then Sombra telepors in to EMP.
Or another method is to place your translocator into an obvious place so that an enemy might ignore the objective in the hopes of ganking you when you get back, not knowing that it’s a trap set up by Sombra.
While these are not meta things, these are just tactics that adds flavour and a bit of extra oomph to the hero.
It’s somewhat like helix jumping as Soldier, it won’t make him any stringer it just gives a little strategy to the hero.
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Good post, nice and thorough. I would add that on top of everything the new sombra just feels worse to play, it’s as if they were taking steps to make her abilities feel less cohesive.
50% is only marginally faster over long distances. In short distances, 75% is HUGELY more effective, and you’re only ever going to be traveling short distances in stealth. Sombra has no issue positioning in live and in PTR I’ve found positioning takes me FAR longer, because the kit doesn’t allow for aggression anymore.
Sombra is a very team oriented hero. She needs communication to be able to do well. My last tourney was an intermediate high with average SR sitting around 3100~, our grand final game was against a team with a 4000~ average. I played Sombra, I took shotcaller. We won.
The power of Sombra comes from coordination. She enables the team to work faster in her current state. On PTR though, the team has to wait for her a lot more.
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Yup I agree. What happened with the world if we can’t play fetch with Genji anymore…
I am surprise they didn’t move your thread to PTR FEEDBACK like they did with my thread Improvements to Sombra2.0. 
But I agree with you buddy!
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It may well be in the future, but ultimately as I stated, while dev comments would be nice, the purpose of this thread is to inform the playerbase rather than the developers. I want to help close that disconnect so that more people can understand what they’re doing to Sombra and more people can feel confident enough to speak up.
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she doesnt need much more than those 6 seconds.
6 second run up plus a teleporter gets you on point A on Eichenwalde in ~8 seconds (no joke, at least in custom matches we managed to do it)
but it needs a far jump to achieve it. that is now impossible.
usually you use your invis only to either traverse large open spaces or to pass right through enemies… both is now mostly impossible, as your detection range is HUGE and the teleporter makes for a much quicker map speed, without the drawback of having to announce yourself once youre there.
i for one decloak myself behind enemy lines purposefully far away from any enemy to actually remain undetected. AND NO i do not want to remain in stealth for ever, being unable to quickly react to an ulting Moira or similar.
it turns her into a very passiv spectator.
think of her stealth as a Moira shadowstep or however it is called, than actually invisibility.
In theory the lower speed over a larger timespan gives her a higher map traverse.,… yes… what good is it if you can cross the fighting area in 4 seconds… on 75% speedboost. how often do you plan on running back from spawn?
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Understandable, I know post my thread in General Discussion because that is where the majority of the playerbase spend his or her time… and plus for more exposure! But this might be a good thing, because the dev locked my thread from being edit.
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Well unless the game is developed by the Suicide squad they for sure see what everyone thinks and I hope they are smart enough to adapt to actual players. After all they made the game for us. Why should we adapt to their terms?
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that summarizes her new feel very well
taking steps to make her abilities feel less cohesive.
she feels like her abilites dont belong together.
hmmm idea: let her hack and shoot while invisible. then shes unfun, unfair and maybe OP. Thats what blizzard is going for anyway, right?
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