She can’t shoot,hack and now can’t contest objectives. What can she do now to help while in stealth besides tell what the enemy has?
Hacking while invisible wouldn’t be op!
Reasons: hack has a loud sound. You’ll see floating red lines.
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Hack is already quick enough that you don’t ever need to be invisible to get your hacks off. All it takes is timing and positioning, and she has the abilities to do this; an invis to get into the position she wants, and an instant teleport as back-up. Getting your abilities removed/deactivated by an enemy you literally can’t see, also, just doesn’t sound like a fun party.
With the changes to her invis, she’ll be more able to get those vital hacks off simply by waiting behind enemy lines until the flow of the battle is ready for her to take over. Alternatively, her ability to be invisible infinitely allows her to linger around important allies and come in for surprise protection/hacks if those allies get dived.
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She’d be nerfed super hard with the phrase no counterplay coming up so let’s not
If blizzard is intent on her taking the scout route, they might as well fully embrace it and remove the six second cooldown. Decloak, hack, re-cloak. Otherwise, she’ll be spending no more time than usual in cloak but slower.
So rather than be a disruptor and creating opportunities for her team, she now passively waits for it.
Tell me, has this actually worked on the PTR?
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It is true for most part untill people learn to spy check. Doesnt matter if you are invisable when characters can spin and spray to reveal your position. Then again it is OW we talking about… Adaptability isn’t that common.
She still disrupts the enemy, and she creates opportunities, but now she can be more patient and creative with her angles, whereas before she was constantly restricted by her own cooldowns and time limits on her abilities. In fact, she’ll arguably spend a lot less time “waiting,” because now instead of waiting for that golden opportunity where she can miraculously poke her head out without being noticed and get that vital hack, she can instead be waiting under the enemy’s nose and decide for herself when to come out from hiding, while also giving out info of the enemy to her team.
And PTR is far from a good testing environment for anyone, so, there’s that. More people have been playing Sombra solely because she shuts down the rage of Wrecking Balls being toyed with on PTR, so it’s not like she has a great chance to be played more as intended.
Can you post a game of yourself doing this? Just to show how you think it’s supposed to work?
Hack should only be possible while invisible if there is some kind of cue that your hero gets on their HUD that they are being hacked. That might even things out without totally giving Sombra away. However, then it’s up to them to find the Sombra and that might be really frustrating.
There’s a reason she’s not invisible when she hacks.
I don’t play Sombra a lot so you’re asking the wrong gamer. And, as I said, PTR is not a good test environment – it’s why Blizz doesn’t take a lot of feedback too critically from PTR – so I would need 11 other engaged players to form a competent game where it can be experimented. Any other requests? I usually take writing requests, not gaming ones.
it’s gonna be a yes from me.
either let her have a 75% speed boost in stealth like she used to, or let her actually do something in stealth like hack.
devs, choose one.
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No, we can’t hit what we cannot see, her hack has slight lock-on so by the time we find her location she will have already got the hack off.
Alright then. This is live.
Just tell me where what you said will fit in that.
I don’t know where to start, really, the fact that you gave me your gameplay from the live servers – where Sombra is unchanged – or that you gave you me… YOUR gameplay, where you will be playing the way you normally play Sombra… which, again, is a Sombra very different from the one we’re talking about. You might as well have recorded some Tracer gameplay and asked me where the new Sombra is supposed to fit in. There’s nothing I can really respond here with that means anything, so, thanks for the video at least.
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Anything to show that you have an actual idea to show that what you claim will work. The pace of the game is very fast with constant back and forth between the two sides. The video i showed is the same pace whether it’s on Sombra, Orisa, Zenyatta, Mercy, Moira, Tracer or Bastion. When will you have time to actually make use of infinite stealth?
Again, show us how you think Sombra will work. Make her work the way you described in an actual game where you have real players interacting. You think you know her enough to insist on a playstyle, then show us.
I don’t need to be a Sombra main to be able to breakdown where the designers are pushing Sombra, and the logical outcome of where these changes will take her. You also don’t need legs to tell a bad sprint from a good one, if you’re learned in how running works. So, sorry, you’re not gonna get the Sombra gameplay that miraculously proves my point. But you can get an essay! Like I said, that’s much more up my alley.
Again, I suggest looking into how Sombra is now and how she can move more freely and independently after these changes, and then once taking those freedoms and independence into account, we can figure out where that works best in what situations. Sombra no longer has to fight against her own arbitrary timers, which limited where she could be and for how long, and it often made Sombra have to abandon a position just because she didn’t perfectly math out her timers. All those times you have a healer down to just a slither of health, but you have to tele out because Translocator is about to expire? Those days are gone, because Sombra can just play in the backlines as long as she personally needs, and will teleport out when she wants. All those times you think you’re about to reach safety to uncloak, but you’re forced out of it and the enemy hears you? Gone too are those days, because she can just stay in stealth until it’s comfy enough to get out.
Whether these changes work out in practice is something neither of us can prove. Not consistently, anyway. This is because these changes are only up on PTR, and PTR makes for a bad testing environment since everyone plays erratically. We’ll only be able to tell if it works when it goes on live and sits for awhile, because that’s where people play seriously (most of the time). And even then, there might still be an issue that the meta simply doesn’t compliment Sombra, and while her abilities might be better overall for her health, she might happen to not have a solid place to actually make those abilities stand out. Not a fault of her balance specifically, but the result of MANY outside factors that are in the rest of the game that control her course.
All we can do is talk and theorize. Even if I got onto PTR, found the miracle game where I can show you how these changes ideally work, it doesn’t matter. That’s just my one game and you could just call it a fluke or dismiss it some other way. Again, I don’t need to be a pro Sombra to figure out what the designers’ intents are and how they expect her to be used post-changes, I can just read their commentary, do the math, and apply the changes mentally to see what’s going on and where she’s expected to be.
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it would be op … it’s basicly impossible to react fast enough.
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If she starts hacking from behind you, maybe, but in that case, she would’ve outplayed you.
Well, here’s what they told us:
Her speed is lower
Her translocator is destructible.
She can’t contest points anymore
Now, you might be right and these might be buffs. We actually don’t know the value of stealth. But we DO know the value of movement in this game(it’s a fast game) and sombra players do know the value of their translocator. You don’t have to be a sombra main but if the buff is to take away the timers, and she is among the least picked hero in the game(she is) then don’t take away her capabilities. Just buff her straight up.
And also, say what your intentions are blizzard for god sakes. You can’t be like “shes too hard, so we made her easier and less good” and not expect people to be upset.
Edit: formatting mistakes
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Sombra’s movement, I’d argue, isn’t really the part about her that you play her for. After all, her movement isn’t good because it’s fast, it’s because she’s invisible. The boost she gets helps her get around, but because invisibility forces her to be inactive, that speed isn’t that great in practice. It’s just for the sake of positioning, and doesn’t have impact in and of itself, other than perhaps a few particularly lucky getaways, in scenarios where Translocator wasn’t up for whatever reason.
What I see these changes as are ways to increase what Sombra should be doing, which isn’t sprinting to positions, but remaining hidden and discretely getting into those positions ideal to her. Without being pressured by her own timers, Sombra can more comfortably be in the opportunities that she wants.
And that doesn’t require a raw buff. Yes it would objectively increase her pickrates if she got raw buffs, yes it would objectively make her a better hero than her current position, but that isn’t healthy for the rest of the game. It would not be healthy if Sombra only got buffs here; she can be invisible infinitely, she can Translocate infinitely and with security that her Translocator isn’t compromised, she can contest points, and she still has that amazing speed while invisible. The goal of balance changes isn’t to make weak heroes stronger or vice-versa, it’s to balance the hero, and that’s almost always going to mean taking some stuff away in favor of stuff that’s much more important. Raw buffs don’t tend to do well with the game unless it’s something genuinely minor, or if it’s a change meant to go hand-in-hand with previous changes.
Also, we do have some Blizzard comments that direct us to what their goal is for Sombra through these changes. In the June 28th patch for PTR, for Sombra’s dev comments we had, “These changes allow Sombra to more easily play as an infiltrator and scout for her team, as well as give her time to pick and choose when to reveal herself to ambush her enemies.” We also have this post from Geoff, where he says, “These changes are really interesting for her as now she is in complete control over when she reveals herself, allow her to time her hacks better for her team, or go for a back line ambush during a critical moment in a team fight.” Then there’s this other post by Geoff, which sounds a little familiar: “The goal of these changes is to make her stronger overall, even if it means being slightly weaker in some areas.”
So from here it seems fairly clear what their intention is. They want Sombra to ambush and get those surprise hacks while navigating the battle field with less detection, but in doing so, they have to clean up the areas where this wouldn’t feel fair, namely in how she could contest objectives or move incredibly fast for an extreme amount of time while also being unseen. Admittedly, I’d still love for some more comments from the dev team to get an idea of what they’re thinking, but game devs usually have their hands-tied on these matters for a number of reasons (namely that their userbase is unstable and sometimes more information is just more fuel for the fire).
DIdn’t we rework Mercy cuz people were abusing this playstyle?
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