That would be true if the hero existed in a vacuum and raw damage output was the only thing that mattered, but Sombra isn’t landing all of her pellets currently. Her biggest issue is consistency. I’m suggesting to cut her spread almost in half in exchange for a slight reduction in raw damage output.
It would be an overall buff to Sombra because her spread would be much lower. Do you know how small a 1.5 spread angle is? It’s roughly the size of what Orisa’s was before her recent buff. It’s just slightly smaller than Ashe’s maximum bloom with her primary fire. It is tiny, and would be one of the smallest spread angles in the game. She could land virtually all of her pellets when before, she’d be missing most of them.
Sombra is SUPPOSED to be trash at dueling. She has the best escape in the game and CC. These changes allow her to fight enemies on her own terms, at a range that they can’t effectively deal with her. Instead of passively farming, she’d be actively fighting her enemies.
Right now, if you try to duel a McCree, you will lose, because your peashooter of a gun can’t fight him at medium range and he’ll murder you point-blank with Flashbang or Fan the Hammer. With these changes, Sombra would deal comparable DPS to McCree at medium range, and would have a shot to beat him even without Hack.
There’s LESS of a focus on communication, as Sombra’s Hack is more selfish. The shorter duration lets her empty her clip and get out, but doesn’t shut enemies down for very long after that. Hack would be more about setting up her own fights and interrupting key abilities, not opening up the enemy team for an engage.
The entire purpose of these changes is to reduce her dependency on her team and allow her to be more self-sufficient, able to deal good damage and secure kills instead of just pestering enemies to farm ult and Hacking key targets.
These changes reduce the cooldown of Hack and lets Sombra deal good damage at medium range. The point isn’t to make her a super-speedy assassin, it’s to let her play at a safer range while having Hack available more often to disrupt the enemy.
Only changes I want to see are sugar skull over targets heads. And if an invisible sombra bumps into an enemy. You can see her for 2 seconds. It makes no sense that I cannot see her again instantly. She shouldn’t be walking into enemies invisible in the first place.
I thought she was supposed to be trash at dueling?
Again, you said it yourself. Sombra isn’t supposed to be good at dueling, and your changes only make her worse at it.
To get the most value out of hack, you’d need a ton of communication with your team. It doesn’t matter if you intend it to be used selfishly in a duel, because it’s always going to be more effective for hacking a key target and letting your team make the most of that advantage unless Sombra becomes amazing at dueling.
Then your changes wouldn’t be particularly successful in achieving your goals.
You’re just being obtuse. Dueling is not the same as dealing damage. These changes maintain Sombra’s inability to duel but allow her to be more effective at skirmishing.
A duelist is a hero that can walk around or stand with the team and win any 1v1 with somebody who gets in their range. McCree is a duelist. Sombra is not, and should not be.
An assassin is a hero who uses mobility to get enemies into their effective range and kill them before they or their teammates can react. Tracer is an assassin. Sombra is not, and should not be.
A skirmisher is a hero that would fight effectively from outside of a duelist’s range and deals effective damage, while simultaneously having the mobility to escape when an assassin tries to jump on them. They harass and threaten their enemies without their enemies being able to threaten them back, putting pressure on key targets and forcing the enemy to divide their focus. These changes put Sombra into that niche.
Cutting her spread nearly in half is a massive buff and effectively increases her DPS by a huge margin.
You know very well that isn’t something that I, or anybody that isn’t a dev, can test. It’s a fallacious argument to add an impossible contingency to being correct.
We do know that reduced spread increases damage output. Look at Bastion’s recent buff. Lowering his spread allows him to deal more consistent damage at range. That’s what reducing spread angle does; it makes pellets land more consistently because they are clumped in a smaller area.
If Sombra is looking directly at an object that fills half of her current spread, half of her pellets would miss on average. If her spread angle were to be cut nearly in half (so that object occupies 95% of her spread), then 95% of her pellets would hit. A smaller spread means more pellets land on the thing you are aiming at.
The only playstyle your changes encourage is farming EMP. It would force Sombra to play at longer ranges (and therefore less risky), since her damage at closer ranges would be worse, and so the farming tactics would just get more annoying to play as and against.
What I think you’re not getting is that it wouldn’t be farming. It would be fighting.
She wouldn’t be dealing poke, minuscule damage that could be easily healed through. She would be dealing consistent, threatening damage, anywhere from 80-120 DPS with just bodyshots.
She would be actively killing her enemies from medium range, not peppering them with damage in order to get her ult.
The smaller spread and less damage falloff make it so that the damage at that range DOES matter. Dealing 60 DPS to a tank 30m away is not a joke. Dealing 120 DPS to a squishy at 15m is deadly.
Sure, if her enemies literally just sat there and let themselves be killed by her. Otherwise, I’d say that it’s highly unlikely that that would be the case.
Actually, it is…
This will give the enemy team ult charge.
Suggesting every single shot will hit (something that doesn’t even happen with the no spread heroes)
And it would still leave them at enough health to easily get away.
Considering that they also stay at longer ranges, they have more options than when you are right on top of them dealing even more damage.
Lets not forget that If you fire bullets fast enough, you will land more bullets where you aim.
Reducing the hack duration on ult is a nerf that I’m not willing to accept so I’ll pass lol. 4 seconds is an incredibly short amount of time, especially for an ultimate.