Because this ability is almost useless most of the time as healers can 1-100 someone in 2 seconds max, meaning the only targets you can use this effectively is when a fight is ending and you won the fight, so you can maybe get the killshot on one dude that’s running that someone else would’ve killed anyways a second later.
This is the main problem that permeates every single part of sombra.
Every single thing boils down to her damage, they could’ve simply reduced spread a tad bit more and give an increased damage to hacked targets on the original sombra and she would’ve been perfect
Instead they avoided and KEEP avoiding it hoping random buffs would do the trick.
Now seems like they’re set on making everyone that plays her quit, apparently.
Geoff: I’mma tell them what we’re doing with sombra!
Dev team: Wait no!
forum explodes
We asked for some info before so I think by now they realized their change was wrong again and just threw it on the forums to soften the hit once people get to try it.
Moiras heal orb charges her ult when healing others, Zen heal orb charges ult when healing, Soldier biotic also charges ult when healing others.
All are abilities.
It is still easy to kill her. I always kill Sombras chasing me with Mercy. Sad that her pistol does more damage.
wrong? I mean… we haven’t even got to play it yet. Theory is always different from implementation.
If these are the only changes me and any sombra worth their salt will tell you these won’t do anything, in fact they could prove to be a straight nerf.
You don’t need to have the game when the change straight up nerfs her kit but at the same time adds nothing to it that people could effectively use.
My bad, I didn’t mean to sound like she should have burst damage. I should’ve said every other DPS has either a form of burst damage or an alternative damage source to help their DPS potential. Reaper has his primary and ultimate, Soldier has primary + Helix, Genji has deflect, swift strike, primary/alt, dragonblade. Pharah has primary + ult, Sym has primary, alt, + turrets, Torb has primary, alt, + turret, Bastion has primary, turret, + tank, Junk has mines, primary, trap, + ult, etc… I’m sure you know the rest.
Sombra doesn’t have that, she just has primary to deal damage, and it’s an RNG primary as well, so it’s not as reliable as others. I feel like she needs some sort of damage buff to help that out, and like I said earlier, nothing significant. Something like 20-30% damage buff on hacked targets or enemies below 50% health. It’s a minor damage increase per bullet, but it stacks up and would help her damage output a lot.
They need to stop taking parts of her kit and nerf/buffing. It doesn’t improve her at all, it just changes parts of her and the effect will overall be the same as where she’s at currently.
She’s a hero that just doesn’t need that treatment at all. There are heroes that have been getting outright buffs with no nerf compensation that didn’t really need it like Doomfist and Orisa, whereas Sombra has the worst pickrate and winrate in the game and they nerf/buffed her.
Do this in place of hints more often.
I don’t play sombra a lot. Pretty much ONLY in mystery heroes so there’s that. But I will comment that avoiding nearly all detection AND having a guaranteed escape no matter how long it takes to get around the enemy doesn’t sound useless. I’m of the opinion that this will change how she plays, that’s all. Good or bad is all gonna be theory craft till it drops. Also as they’ve now let the cat out of the bag you can be sure this is GOING to hit. Till it does it’s unlikely they’ll even read any criticism of it.
Let’s call a spade a spade. Proposed changes open up avenues while closing doors at the same time. Take a little scroll through the thread; it’s pretty clear that people are divided and it’s become a debate over whether the changes are a net buff or nerf.
Personally, the direction of recent changes (Ana’s pre-heal removal for shooting through allies and now Sombra’s) are worrying.
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Firstly, it feels as though they aren’t listening to us players - we have collectively proposed countless iterations of possible changes that can help with Sombra (and Ana), and while some are admittedly excessive, some are worth testing. For one, and for some time now, the most pressing issues facing Sombra players are the amount of bugs (as most vocally espoused by Fitzy). Most of us are callling for consistency, just let us do what we do a wee bit better in terms of damage/team fight presence.
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Second, the changes appear to allow ease of play for newer Sombras while punishing the veterans. We have learnt to manage invisibility and translocator uptimes and windows to do sufficiently enough with its finite duration (which renders perpetual stealth and translocator marginally useful), and while a niche circumstance we have also single-handedly stalled points in time for teammates to get around for a comeback, which may I add was flipping rewarding.
If there’s any possibility upcoming PTR Sombra will see changes before hitting live, please consider the following:
- Finite objective contestability. Let Sombra to still contest points while cloaked but only for the first 5/6 seconds while she enters stealth, which is the duration of her current stealth on live servers. She may choose to remain unseen if undamaged but loses the ability to contest after 5/6 seconds.
No pesky permanent objective contest on stealth, but retains a legitimate play option instead of a straight-up removal.
- Initial burst speed on stealth. Let Sombra retain 75% movement speed for the first 5/6 seconds on entering stealth, which decays to 50% (or even lower) for the remaining of the duration. Allows
Allows for Sombras to clear gaps like they did on live servers, but limits their mobility if they choose to remain in stealth for an extended period of time.
- Translocator removal on interact. If there is no other interact-able object at Sombra’s location (Symmetra’s teleporter), pressing the ‘interact’ key immediately destroys current translocator without you needing to line it up with the crosshair.
A permanent translocator uptime means a Sombra has to deliberately plan an aggressive translocator-emp/hack 4 seconds in advance if her translocator is already placed elsewhere. This is more of a QOL change to make it easier to cancel her translocator, instead of a clunky look-for-translocator-on-screen-shifts-mouse-interact-cancel-shifts-mouse-again-to-continue-what-she-was-doing.
Or you know, cancel all these upcoming changes and take a closer look at what Sombras have been calling out for since she was launched.
Why are you still talking when you have refused to provide any evidence of your profile and rank, while constantly bagging on others?
You don’t know how to play Sombra, so it is best you keep your mouth shut.
The developers are making a mistake but NOT adressing Sombra’s problem. They really just can’t balance this game at all. She needs to do DAMAGE.
That’s the problem, she could ALREADY do this.
With time to spare, even, anyone that played sombra a fair amount rarely, if ever, used the full 5 seconds on invis, even less translocating on 19 seconds of translocator, why? Because for translocator it’s dangerous and for invis, the more time you spent stealth the less you’re doing, you’re not gaining ult, not doing damage, not hacking anyone, you’re doing NOTHING.
Recon? You could do that before.
That’s the issue, it adds nothing to her kit while nerfing extras or core things she needed.
And it’s not gonna change any gameplay, the changes are minor and the only change this could facilitate would be to be perma stealthed doing nothing, it already almost felt like a 5v6 BEFORE this, now imagine it when you don’t see your sombra teammate at all because he’s standing there stealthed for 20 seconds.
She has the current play style because THAT’S HER ONLY PLAYSTYLE, she has nothing else going for her, attempting to heal with packs only is terrible, being a hack dispenser is buggy, unreliable and doesn’t do enough, in damage she’s outclassed by 90% of the roster as a damage hero.
Yeah, I see your point. I personally wondered why not play with her ability to enter any area undetected and get a pick by making her more focused on doing high short range damage (which is what I initially thought her submachine gun would be for). So narrowing down her spread and range to be most effective when you’re close. And since you have stealth and translocator, it’s easy to actually get in close to someone without being noticed. But I often found that Sombras mostly stand a bit away, just inside of hack range and then spam damage that can’t one-clip or even half-clip.
Though I personally dislike one-clipping, I don’t understand why Tracer is allowed to do it, but Sombra isn’t. Also, Genji is sort of allowed to do it because quick spam of all three shurikens followed by dash into a low mobility 200 HP hero is an instakill.
Ah, I understand now. Yes, that’s true. It’s kinda what they did with Hanzo. A lot of people just demanded scatter removal, but everybody, including the devs, said it would impact his damage output as he would only rely on his primary. Which is true. I always kinda compare to Tracer, because other people also do (it’s always “Why pick Sombra if you can be Tracer?”) and Tracer can one-clip 200 hp targets as well as use her quickly charging ultimate pretty often.
I guess they’re trying to compensate for hack and stealth, but statistics-wise, they’re clearly not doing it well. As much as I hate being a hacked tank, Sombra really isn’t played or played successfully in most cases.
I will say that right now if I see a sombra every so many seconds I know EXACTLY where her healthpack base is. She only has so many seconds to retreat and even if I’m doing cruddy damage she’ll likely have to retreat simply from escape button deadline. This removes that inference. Maybe her retreat goes back to enemy spawn… maybe it goes closer to mine, gonna be hard to pin down her retreats. But I’m content with waiting to see.
Most Sombras usually stay at hack distance because getting too close gives your enemies a better chance at retaliating. Getting too close to characters like Ana, Zenyatta, Genji, Orisa, etc… makes it a LOT easier for them to land abilities or primary fire on you, and you can make out where she is a lot faster because her decloak line is louder the closer she is.
Getting as close as possible would be the ideal tactic if there were no delays in/out of stealth or audio cues that disrupts you.(Ironic considering she’s the one supposed to disrupt others)
Tracer and Sombra perform their roles very similarly. They both harass the backline, but Tracer is and will always be more effective unless they make actual buffs to Sombra simply because it’s more effective to outright kill your target than it is to disable them briefly.
Honestly, the stealth buff she needed was either less of a delay or no delay at all. Even that would increase her damage potential because the brief delay allows enemies to retaliate in time. Translocator just needed the cancel imo, it’s probably her best ability in terms of balance.
But yeah, statistically it’s not her stealth/infiltrating that’s the problem. It’s her damage potential and her hack. The nerfs to hack really hinder her a lot and her damage just doesn’t compensate for it at all.
The targets sombra focuses on are usually not the problem, that is why she focuses them on the first place.
It’s the rest of the team, sombra is forced to avoid most targets unless there’s a perfect one of a kind situation and if you’re focusing healers you’re 99% of the time not killing them due to their team, which turns back to see a lone mexican girl 1v6.
That is why you relocate before the timer is even close to expiring in the first place and why, most of the time, you get behind them only to farm ult on bigger targets.
Please take this as a casual observation, cause I’m relatively sure you play a lot more sombra than I do, but shouldn’t you be harassing the back line right as your team messes with the front line? I don’t feel it should ever be just you against the whole team, if they do all turn around your team should be grinding their butts into hamburger yes? Your concerns sound more like someone who’s not coordinating with the rest of their team. Coherent team communication and synergy should be getting more common with LFG I’d think?
Yep, can confirm. The stealth delay is really noticeable, especially once you’re trained enough to notice those little things (I find it easy to notice, while my tunnel-vision friend for example can’t tell). I can interrupt her hack easily or force her out of stealth if she tries to run.
Though, personally, I’d keep her hack as is now. As in, if she’s interrupted, there’s a 2 second delay. It’s only to prevent spam hacking by simply holding the button at all times. However, if her stealth is fixed, then hack would also be easier to land while not feeling spammy. You could still interrupt, but Sombra could outplay you.
…but are the hack bugs fixed?