Remove Clash and Sombra = ez profit (+how to)

I mean, it’s hardly a genius take, but somehow the devs would rather jump through a billion hoops than do what’s good for this game.

Clash is pure butt cheeks (and not the Widow kind)
Sombra is unanimously the most hated character in OW history and you’ve only managed to make her worse with each rework somehow…

Put both Clash and Sombra on the shelf, spend a good half year on figuring out HOW THEY CAN BENEFIT THE GAME, instead of being the most unhealthy content known to videogame history.

Here, I’ll even give you a freebie:
Divide the main game modes into 3:

  1. Ranked
  2. Unranked
  3. Quick play

For gamemodes:
Let Clash and Flashpoint and similar fast-paced death match like modes be core to Quick Play exclusively.

Let Unranked function with ranked match settings (aka both attacker and defender, harsh leaver penalties, but no rank association). Keep Escort, Hybrid, and Control as the main game modes.

Let Ranked only focus on the 3 core gamemodes Escort, Hybrid, and Control. This gives stability to matches and narrows the skill focus so players can more easily hone in on playstyles that are likely to synergize across whichever game mode you get.

For Sombra:
Motivation: Introduce more skill-based benefits and trade offs, more decision making and meaningful ability exchange.

Invis:
First of all, perma invis needs to go. Instead let it be a resource meter that fills up when she does damage (damage to hacked targets increase resource fill speed). However, her movement speed and jump height during invis is slightly increased.

Hack:
Hack is now an aim-based ability. Instead of locking people out of their abilities, it instead acts as a debuff so they deal a bit less damage, receive a bit less healing, and take a bit more damage (numbers can be tweaked accordingly).
Hack also does a bit of damage over time (increasingly effective vs armor).

Virus:
Halts cooldowns that are still counting down for 4 seconds, so you have to be aware when an enemy uses an ability before you get value from infecting them with Virus.
Virus now also actually acts like a virus, meaning it infects targets, and may spread to other nearby enemies within a given range (like a chain reaction). If you hack a target infected by Virus, the hack spreads to all enemies that are currently affected by Virus too, so it becomes a mass hack. This is similar to how Ashe’s dynamite can get immense value on grouped up enemies for example.

Translocator:
Translocator functions like current, but now it’s the only way to also initiate stealth -so there’s a choice of when/where you actually want to use it, as it may preemptively drain your invis before you’d like it to - so you can’t just hop in and out of invis or skip across the map any time you want. This leads to the player having to put more conscious effort into thinking about their pathing and positioning, as it will no longer just come for free with no drawback and no decisionmaking involved.

Primary weapon:
Her primary weapon also gets a small change, of a smaller mag size (45 instead of 60), and to compensate her spread is slightly reduced so she’s less spammy and can work from slightly longer range, which can help synergize better with the hack and virus rework that takes her further away from being an assassin type character, to having a bit more generalist value (this should help her with generic value and higher avg winrate too).

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The amount they would end up having buff DPS rate with all of these changes to get to anything like a normal win rate, would be utterly brutal.

Remember the last translocation change meant adding virus, and this is WAY bigger set of changes than this.

It is like, heading in the very same direction everyone has been complaining about.

They will come out of cloak, and absolutely turn the target into ash.

Seriously, everyone would hate this SO much. It would be decloak and turn any target to utter dust by the time Blizzard rebalances for win rate.

Same issue, but much much much worse.

The spread narrowing is exactly for this reason. More effective dps (when skill is applied).
Also since Hack is now the thing that does damage, if you virus a large group and hack, they all take damage (again damage when skill is applied).
Overall uptime would be more incentivized which naturally would increase the damage and pressure you would deal as Sombra without having to tweak anything.
You would be more incenticized to go for big hacks and skillful ability combination and positioning to do so, rather than spend highly finite invis resource to attempt some backline assassination once in a blue moon.

It didn’t mean anything. Virus was added because they wanted more skill-aspects to her kit and more buttons to press now that Invis became a passive.
The implementation however has been pretty lackluster in terms of creativity.

How? I literally removed 90% of ability lock-out, and removed the hard incentive to play as some sneak assassin character from perma invis. Did you even read what I wrote or you just like to complain? I’m genuinely asking cus I honest to god don’t know.

Not more than they do currently. And the uptime for invis and freedom of penalty-free movement has been severely minimized, so it has to rely much more on skill now and not just braindead “walk into backline, get value”.

I haven’t seen a single point that would indicate this being the case. Rather the contrary.
Be my guest and argue the holistic changes and synergy between the changes I made, vs how she is currently.

Possibly still issues, but far far far better.

Or take your own advice and make your own suggestions/alternatives so we can at least have a meaningful discussion? Cus I’m not buying into your baseless “this wouldn’t work, this would be worse, this would yap yap” without you forming some sort of baseline for your approach to the changes I made, and the changes you’d like to see.
I too could criticize everything and just say “wouldn’t work” without ever giving my definition of what would actually work.

I’m no Sombra main by any stretch of the imagination, but I certainly understand the knock-on effect removing her from the game wholesale would have on other heroes. For starters, Doom, Ball, and Widow would all need significant nerfs to keep them reasonable. Nothing quite as unfun as dealing with an immortal orb or a hero with an uncontestable zone of control.

Game modes help keep the game fresh, even if they aren’t bangers.

Virus was more of a replacement for her old “extra damage to hacked targets” passive. More consistent, but doesn’t scale with headshots.

Yes, she used to have a LOT of ability lock-out.

They removed most of it, and in doing so, they made her more DPS, and created Assassin Sombra, and people didn’t enjoy that.

People thought she should have to commit to fights more, so, they nerfed her translocation, and buffed her damage straight out.

Making her MORE assassin Sombra.

And people have REALLY not enjoyed that.

And you are going EVEN further down that path, by removing a bunch of power from invis, and hack, and virus.

ALL of that power would end up in DPS. You have no idea how much they would have to buff that to get her back to a reasonable win rate.

She REALLY would be instant death to anything she appeared next to.

My Sombra build has been repeated on the forums many many many times.

But here it is again.

Because Sombra’s power is in these buckets…
Hack
Translocation
Dps/Virus
Stealth

Moving stuff from one bucket to another is never going to make her work in a way which doesn’t drive people crazy.

So my solution is take her back to her roots, before her release, and build from the old abandoned branch. Which is a support Sombra (yes, she was a support though most of the development, and hacking health packs, getting ult charge from that, etc was all from that heritage.)

So you add a new bucket.
Support.

This means you can move some power from
Hack
Translocation
Dps/Virus
Stealth
And balance it by putting power into her support bucket.

So…

Give her two beacons, a home beacon and an away one.

The home beacon acts like a healing version of a Protoss shield generator (think a healing pack, but it has a “current amount of health charge” and when you go near it, it uses that to top you back up (quite quickly)

It recharges itself slower.

This gives her a way to get a bunch of value from supporting, BUT doesn’t force her to stay near her team to support, letting her go away to do “sombra things”

Which is, hack to disrupt (and do information warfare, wall hacks etc.) , use stealth, and shoot things.

But she doesn’t need to have an overly long lockout timer on hack, nor a crazy amount of damage on DPS, because it isn’t her only form of value creation.

Basically, acts like old sombra as far a gunplay / stealth / translocation (but with two beacons but timer on the away beacon), like new Sombra as far as hacks go.

All of these things are basically copies from times where her kit wasn’t that strong in each particular area, BUT the lack of value from there is made up in support.

Thus, something which is still Sombra, but doesn’t have anything like the frustration of Sombra to face.

sombra needs rework proper one with care and make her a proper viable dps or support.

clash ya certainly needs to be moved to arcade atleast reduce its rate in qp.

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