I can see the permanent invis adding a lot of versatility, since it lets you pick your spot to attack. Sombra is best used when the rest of your team is fighting and your enemies are distracted. That’s hard to time correctly when your cloak and translocator are on such short timers.
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The infinite duration just gives sombra mains more time to set up plays. Sometimes plays are initiated with Sombra, so this buff will help teams initiate a fight without feeling rushed.
I think its a nice change that doesn’t break the balance while giving lesser players/teams time to make plays.
Whether its needed or not isn’t something I can contribute, as I don’t main the latin hacker.
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In low elos you don’t have coordination and in high elos everyone knows what to do and when anyway …. here is just a small number of games where this is useful.
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I still think they should have given her something like an extra translocator, which would make her able to use it both for engaging and disengaging.
As someone who has played this hero for over 200+ hours and reached 4091 with the Spanish Hacker, I mostly agree.
I do want to point out for people who haven’t been informed about it that the Sombra bugs have been fixed for the most part.
- This takes the skill and discipline of being a flanker and throws it to the wayside. With any hero, especially flankers, there’s a certain level of punishment for making bad plays. Completely robbing that from the player drops the skill ceiling of said hero and also robs them of any sense of improvement, due to never giving the enemies a window to punish these kinds of players.
(We see this with current Hanzo and Brigitte, who seem to never have a weak spot to exploit and never be able to get punished in the current patch. Adding more of this would only add to the number of OW people moving over to --insert battle royale game here-- due to how unpleasant and “not fun” playing against these types of heroes is). - My personal comparison would be adding infinite blinks for Tracer. You have more blinks to work with, but any decent Tracer players won’t need it to do the jobs that they can do already. It’s almost completely unnecessary. If you have to change an ability to have an infinite capacity, to do part of a job you were more than capable of doing already, then it’s probably a “buff” that isn’t going to change much in the grand scheme of things.
- The reduction in speed for stealth completely restricts certain flanking routes any good Sombra players use to get in the enemy back-line safely (without getting detected and/or using other abilities).
What I like about this patch is the ability to cancel the translocator, using the new interact function. In my honest opinion, having this ability be the only Sombra change for the July patch along with currently fixed bugs would be HUGE. “Less is more”, as people tend to say.
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They realised the limitations weren’t time related, but ‘health pool’ and ‘doing stuff’ related.
Of course permanent Stealth is balanced when functionally her team is a player down while she’s using it.
Of course permanent Translocation is balanced when literally from the day she was put in the game players have demanded the capacity to destroy it and move it around.
They both have more than enough self limitations put in them already to worry about adding more; which in the case of Stealth they just added more anyway.
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If you go to the forums tab, theres a sub-tab calld ‘Dev Tracker.’ It’s a comment by Geoff Goodman on a post asking for hints about the sombra rework.
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This. We’ve been asking to be able to cancel translocator if it’s in a bad spot or we know it’s probably being camped for so long now.
For me, the changes are a net buff to sniper meta, assuming sombra sees any increase in pick rate at all. I just hope the bug fixes are enough; we’ll see later today, though. Fingers crossed.
I could not agree more. It was not often when i did not have enough time on my translocator. The bigger problem i have had has been the slow invis engage/disengage and how far away sombra can be heard coming out. Most of the time you will be attacking a target that is grouped. If you are not seen by your target, you are seen by their team. giving infinite time really doesn’t provide any usefulness to your team outside of scouting, which i do not want to spend all my time doing. If that becomes her biggest value i won’t be able to play her sadly.
I do love that widow is basically F*&#ed now. and poor old Zen
widow maybe…hanzo is buffed by this change though! and since she’s so reliant on stealth with this change…is it really going to eb that scary for a widow?
We shall see.
Thanks, and to the others that pointed me to it.
Is it sad that I didn’t go there first? I assumed new information would be somewhere other than here, since they almost always use other platforms to communicate before using the actual Overwatch website.
Changes 3 and 5 could be nice, but not the 1 or 2.
Stealth doesnt give us value outside of momentary repositioning, which is what the current state of her stealth provided because it caused the player to seek value when they became visible.
Now we can invis indefinitely, so at what point did they think that stealth loses its value during this “infinite” invis?
Unless they make a change where being invis does something of value outside of positioning yourself it will be proven completely useless. Take for example the standard sombra plays of stealth in and trans out, now she takes even LONGER to stealth in…but oh wait, at least she can remain in her invis (no value gained) state indefinately to slow down the cycle of her attempting to charge her ult.
Anyone seeing this as a buff is beyond help, and this clearly catered to silver players who had hard times positioning and picking targets in the 1st place, of which those players never gained value anyways because how often were they able to even secure their kills?
<====== this is the direction that Sombra needed to go in, just a couple steps ==============================================================================================================================================>this is the direction Blizz is taking her.
I cant take these people seriously anymore if this comes out without some major MAJOR reworks to how her stealth interacts with enemies and her team8s to provide value while invis.
Infinite translocator is needless, agree 100%
I’m waiting to see exactly how infinite stealth plays out - we’ll be able to use it not just to get to backlines, but to move around there a bit and choose a target - but my feeling is also that it won’t make much difference.
Sombra has gotten buffs and buffs and buffs to help her position and hack people. At this point, she can already do it if played decently. I don’t understand why they think yet one more buff to help her position and hack will make the difference, it isn’t what’s holding her back and it hasn’t been for months.
I wish she was better in firefights and that she got a buff for after an enemy is hacked. I also think the medkit hacking should be rethought.
With every one of those buffs has come at least one nerf to ‘compensate’. The accumulation of these nerfs has actually led down a path of being made worse rather than better.
It should be clear by now that she needs actual buffs, not just ‘reworks’ and ‘rebalancing’ within herself.
No more giving (at best) a neutral QoL change with the one hand, and taking away capabilities with the other.
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I don’t see how this is any kind of buff to Hanzo. Nothing about stealth has changed outside of the timer going away.
No longer able to contest.
Speed boost reduced from 75% to 50% (this means you can’t make certain jumps for flanking, and well, are just slower).
Buffs Hanzo because it gives him more for Sonic Arrow to look for.
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And yet, Sombra has the lowest win rate of all hero’s. I am seeing how these constant “buffs” have helped her.
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