Sombra 101 for Non Sombra players. Help Us

We need your help. There’s not enough of us to actually make a difference.

WHY THE BUFF IS NOT WANTED

Sombra now has “Infinite” stealth on a cooldown ofcourse and Infinite Translocator time, also on a cooldown.

This sounds fun in theory, promising to realise an infiltrator class fantasy but in practice is a very bad idea. You do NOT want this kind of Sombra in your team.

Why “Infinite” not only means nothing but is actually bad

  • Ask yourslelf. You want a Sombra in your team that does Nothing for 45 seconds “waiting for the best moment to strike”? In stealth you’re as good as dead for your team. Part of learning Sombra is learning how to do what you want to do as fast as possible

  • The “best moment to strike” logic has any value if your strike is that of a deadly scorpion. Spy in tf2 can one shot. Sombra is one of the weakest DPS. She doesn’t have that kind of power and frankly she shouldn’t have it.

  • Translocator time running out is a non issue. 20 seconds were almost always enough. You translocated back because your health ran out, not your trans timer.

WHAT THE BUFFS WILL ACHIEVE

  • They will serve only to irritate players in QP and in cheesy comp matches. They make spawn camping easier.

  • You will find it annoying getting flanked by a sombra in your spawn, while she faces no risk.

  • Spawn camping is a cheesy tactic that fortunately is almost always not worth it.

  • This buff will encourage players who never played Sombra give her a go for one week. It won’t take longer to realise how bad this patch will make her.

WHAT ARE THE NERFS

  • DETECTION RANGE IS DOUBLED. Keep in mind that 1 point (and in some cases 0 points) of dmg get you out of stealth. You will not be able to go through chokes. You will not be able to close the distance as much, on single target when you flank. Making the “infinite” stealth even more pointless

  • TRANSLOCATOR CAN BE DESTROYED, 5HP. This is pretty terrible. It makes the one escape Sombra has, totally unreliable. It takes a long time to go in stealth. Your only practical way out of a fight is the translocator.

You may say, “well it would be unfair to get an infinite translocator without me being able to destroy it?”

I AGREE. Do NOT make the trans timer infinite then.

  • MOVEMENT SPEED NERF -25%. This means that I can’t follow my targets as effectively, it’s a direct nerf to Sombra’s Opportunist passive ability and most importantly it denies Sombra many of her parkour and jumps vital to get on the backline

  • SHE CAN NO LONGER CONTEST WHILE IN STEALTH. While it seems minor it was a pretty huge part of her kit. Stalling 2 times the playload for 3 to 4 seconds each time, is a whole deathspawn time. It meant your team could take the fight before the payload went pass the defensible choke or whatever. And in 2cp even a 3 second contest is huge. Actually game changing.

Would infinite stealth and contesting be OP? ABSOLUTELY OP. A Sombra could force the enemy team onto the point without any risk for her. What should we do then?

DO NOT GIVE HER INFINITE STEALTH, AS EASY AS THAT Stop trying to fix what is NOT broken.

WHAT DO SOMBRA MAINS WANT INSTEAD OF THIS “BUFF”?

Fix her bugs

That alone would have a huge impact.

More suggestions that are commonly seen in Sombra threads are

  • Auto reload when translocating

  • Have stealth (the old stealth) have a 3-5 points of dmg threshold.

  • Make hack more reliable

  • Some say a dmg buff, I do not agree but it is commonly seen.

EVEN ONE OF THESE THINGS WOULD HELP IMMENSELY

As you can see we’re not asking for crazy stuff. We do not want her to be neither OP nor oppressive. We just don’t want her anymore on that 0.45% pickrate

Please help us save Sombra.

8 Likes

Hello,
as a sombra main (not the best one for sure, but I have got some hours with her), I wanted to respond your thread. First, thank you to explain your points in a detailed and calm way. I am fed up of all sombra mains who are litteraly exploding.

I want to deal point by point my personal feelings about what your said :

Ask yourslelf. You want a Sombra in your team that does Nothing for 45 seconds “waiting for the best moment to strike”? In stealth you’re as good as dead for your team. Part of learning Sombra is learning how to do what you want to do as fast as possible

I agree with the “as fast of possible”, but not with the “dead for your team”. Communicating the enemy positionning could be very interesting.

Agree with it for the most, but maybe we should add that it comes with the hacking, which gives you some advantage for confirming the kills. I often hack two types of characters (It is my playstyle, you may disagree) :

  • Isolated target

  • Tanks like Rein, so my team can engage

Of course, there is some RNG in what I say, and it depends on a lot a factors. But Overwatch should be played as a team, and the hack can be a great advantage. But I mostly agree with you.

I tried the new translocator on the PTR, and I agree that I don’t need it more than 20 sec.

I am not afraid as you seem to be by an increase in spawn camping. A lonely sombra is still pretty weak against a team. Only bad sombras would do that, and they are going to realize it pretty fast.

Agree. Can’t say nothing. Maybe if they make her stop shouting that she is here, it would be ok. Honestly, I don’t know.

Same. I completely agree. It’s a huge nerf. Maybe if you place it well, it will not be that much a problem. But it seems that you hear it from 20m which is big. So yeah, it’s a nerf.

You are pointing out what is the real issue here. There are making nerfs coherent with the buffs involved with these changes.

Same idea. It is coherent with the fact sombra has now infinite stealth. I use more parkour when I want to position, not when I chase an enemy (in general). And in that case, I can use the translocator, as I hadn’t placed it as a backdoor yet. So, I don’t know how to feel with that change.

Personnally, I don’t know how to feel with that one. I feel that they don’t designed sombra for this. And I have seen some posts saying that she can be picked only for that. It is subjective, but in my opinion, it is nice to not contest point with stealth. It is more like a last chance option, extremely random than a viable strategy.

Same idea. Coherence.

Nothing to say more about the conclusion.

To sum up, I just want to say that I understand what the developpers want to do with these buffs, and I feel it could be a nice way to deal with sombra, but it will change our way to play her. I pretty agree with all what you said, and my counter-examples are more for openning the debate than for criticize. I had pretty good plays with her in the PTR todays, and I had bad games too.
So yeah, let’s talk and save sombra together !

1 Like

Hey, thanks for responding.

What you said, I agree with for the most part, except the information providing etc. I don’t see any practical scenario in which one can’t already do that with the Live Sombra. And in all honesty, I don’t think most information could really change much provided how bad sombra is in midfight.

“They coming from the left, they run 3ple tank”.

Well I mean that’s kinda useful but I already can do that with current sombra, my team could probably do it without a sombra as well and that doesn’t change the fact that it won’t matter that much at the end of the day.

That’s what I don’t get with this patch. They’re buffing timers that already worked as intended and they’re nerfing vital parts of her kit.

Also: After some more PTR experimenting I can safely say that the detection range increase (and the translocator sound as well) are far worse than I expected.

The devs need to make a statement about Sombra. No one who’s played Sombra for more than 10 hours wants these “buffs”

2 Likes

TL:DR version: Don’t reinvent the wheel, we just want her bugs fixed, and maybe, MAYBE up her speed to match the other Flanker characters (Genji and Tracer), that’s it. That’s ALL we want. Nothing more.

3 Likes

You summed it up pretty nicely.

I just had to do a non TL:DR version. Sad thing is that forum doesn’t like long posts, a bit ironic considering it is a forum and not twitter