It’s unfortunate but it’s true IMO. She is too hard to balance. She is a utility character that gets insane value with teamwork or is god awful without it. That concept alone makes her a balance nightmare.
Also, the ability to shut out all the abilities of a character ever what? 6 to 8 seconds? is a very powerful ability. However, that ability is tied to the teamwork aspect. It can be insanely powerful or completely useless depending on your teamwork. It also is an incredibly oppressive ability.
If you are putting out good hacks/EMPs and your team isn’t following up and/or communicating then you are doing very little. Her damage isn’t strong enough to really be a threat in most situations.
I understand team work is an important aspect of Overwatch but you have to design characters to be able to get value out of their kits at the average rank with zero communication.
That’s what I think anyway. I’m sure many of you disagree.
Before they attempt a rework they need to give her a fair shot at being viable first. She is not hard to balance, some vocal people just dont want her to be balanced. Thats the issue.
I personally think changing her abilities to be too easy - infinite invisibility, infinite translocator - made players a bit too mindless when playing her. Now they no longer have to look at their team and force themselves to slow down or pace themselves properly. Half the time when I have a Sombra on my team I see her engaging alone, 1 v 4 - 6, as if that’s going to do anything. It’s because there’s no pressure on her to time her invisibility anymore - back before those buffs, I had spent a lot of time on her, and I learned ‘I can run from here to here and stay unseen, but NOT here to here’ - there were active choices and things you had to do that now? You can just… Stand there. Invisibly. And wait.
And you’d think this would make it easier for players to only engage at the right time - and I’m sure for some advanced players it’s true - but for most people it seems to have just created a window of “Welp, you’re down a player because your Sombra is mediocre and can’t time themselves with the team at all. So enjoy that!”
If she was FORCED to time herself, with her abilities having cooldowns or limitations, that would automatically make her more likely to engage with her team - because those engagements are harder for her to set up in the first place.
The only “rework” she needs is removing infinite stealth and change it to a recourse meter. Then she can go back from security cam to being an engaging hero which focuses more on contributing. You can speed her up, let her contest again an maybe even allow it to be fast enough to make it an escape option to allow her to get value mid fight with it.
I got the impression that he was simply saying that the damage effect impacted deployables too, not that it didn’t hack anyone. I feel like EMP would be utter garbage if all it did was destroy barriers shields and deployables, since it’s possible to play games where said things don’t even exist.
Reminds me a bit of Moira… certain “Vocal” people complain about here when she isn’t a viable pick in higher ranks… even in Plat Ana in the support category is picked 45% more than Moira lol.
When certain famous/popular people do not like a hero they will advocate together to make the hero look OP and use their communities to help them.
Before the armour revert they were already trying to claim Brigitte was OP after her nerfs.
the only reason Brigitte became good again was much later when armour got reverted back to -5 instead of -3.
And they hate Sombra because if she was balanced, then she would be in more games and will be able to use her hack to prevent them from “PlAyInG tHe GaMe”
Sombra as is can’t be good at dueling right now because of her stealth. With stealth, it makes it too easy for her to find isolated targets, and if she was better at dueling would make her too good at assassinating opponents.
While other flankers do have sneaky ways to get to the back line, they can be tracked and you can try to spot them out, track them, and preemptively adjust your positioning. Sombra’s stealth makes it so that you can’t really track her position.
The problem you’re overlooking is that as metas shift and certain heroes become more popular it can expose large flaws in their design that weren’t possible to use/exploit when other heroes are meta. A hero can be considered trash one day and OP the next. It just means their kit is unbalanced and they need a redistribution of power.
I disagree, Moira was only meta in double shield because she was only healer that was good against the high HP of old shields.
But now that shields are much lower health her and Doom aren’t even used in double shield meta anymore. Though her ultimate & orb still go through shields and neither had their damage/healing nerfed.
So why are Moira, Lucio and Doom not meta again in GM for Double shield?
All 3 of them were meta for the OG double shield, the problem was never doom, moira or lucio, it was Sigma, who is meta again for the same thing but this time with Reinhardt
It wouldnt be garbage but as it is EMP gives her the most value while she still remains garbage overall. If you nerf EMP in any fashion, normal buffs to her regular kit arent gonna cut it. You would have to overcompensate with ridicilous buffs which would make her look OP in a different way. Therefore leaving EMP as is and giving her moderate buffs to her kit is the more reasonable way to go.
Im not sure I understand the point of that clip. If all it did was destroy barriers and shields there would be very little threat here. It wouldnt destroy undeployed barriers and deployables so they’d just wait till she EMP’d and then pull it all out. Rein could literally counter EMP by releasing right click for like 1 second, which many Rein’s already do naturally to reduce the total shield damage. It would make EMP even more inconsistent because you might just accidentally time it poorly (outside of your control due to the existence of cast times).
Sorry to be clear, I wasn’t saying I agreed they should do it, I was simply suggesting it would open her up to other buffs. I don’t think they should remove hack from EMP cause i think it would be terrible unless it had some other really impactful debuff besides a silence. Simply destroying shields barriers and deployables would not be enough.
Open her up to buffs is kind of a misrepresentation of the situation. She needs buffs as she is. If you nerf EMP, then you would have to give her pretty OP looking compensation buffs to make up for it. And I’m not talking about qol like timer skulls on hacked targets anymore.
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