Sombra rework from an OG Sombra main

Sombra

Health: 225

Passive: Opportunist - Sombra detects enemies below half health through walls.

Primary Fire - Spread decreased by 10%.

Secondary Fire: Hack - After a brief delay Sombra hacks the target, locking them out of abilities for 1.5 seconds, revealing them, and dealing 25% increased damage to them for 6 seconds. 6 second cooldown. Sombra can not hack the same target twice. Hack is cancelled upon taking damage.

Secondary Alt Fire: Upgrade - After a brief delay Sombra hacks her ally, increasing their rate of fire by 20% for the next 6 seconds. 6 second cooldown.

Shift - Stealth: On a resource, Sombra becomes invisible and gains 60% movement speed for up to 10 seconds. Takes 20 seconds to fully refill. Getting hit in stealth reveals Sombra for 1 second. There is a slight delay before the resource begins to fill once coming out of stealth.

E - Translocator: After throwing, Sombra teleports to the translocator’s position and gains 25 overhealth and 10% of her Stealth resource. 5 second cooldown.

Ult: EMP - Exactly the same.

What do these changes do?

These changes mix both of Sombra’s previous playstyles together to create a hybrid that doesn’t lean into either extreme, but finds a balance between the two. Depending on her invisibility resource, she goes between looking for flanks on the enemy backline and sitting back and providing damage/utility alongside her teammates. Now that her invisibility is on a resource she has to manage, Sombra can not stay constantly invisible throughout a match, giving her more decision making and her opponents clear windows where she is no longer a threat.

By combining Hack with Virus’s damage, her burst/lethality is lowered while being more consistent, making her less of a feast or famine assassin. Her flanks success are no longer contingent on landing virus, but aiming her gun. By decoupling her stealth and translocator from each other, she has much more freedom in how she navigates the battlefield. This allows her to reposition behind enemy lines or back with her team through good resource management to ensure she can continue to provide value when she is low on stealth and can no longer continue flanking.

While Sombra’s burst damage is lower, her consistent output is higher through reduced spread, Hack’s damage amplification, Translocator’s overhealth, and especially her new alt fire Upgrade. This gives her more flexibility outside of flanking, and allows her to contribute more mid-fight pressure or play with her team when she is deterred from flanking.

Overall this rework aims to be a middle-ground between both Overwatch 1 and Overwatch 2 Sombra, and incentivizes her to shift between both playstyles while providing more counterplay and less points of frustration for her opponents.

She no longer is permanently invis. She doesn’t have an egregiously long ability lockout and can not spam it on one player. She has clear windows of downtime where she will no longer be a threat to the backline. Her overall burst when flanking is lower. She has more mid-fight value. She has more utility to offer to her teammates. She has the tools for creative playmaking. She is punishable when she overextends and makes mistakes. She finds the most value when combining both previous Sombra playstyles.

Please keep in mind, numbers are always subject to change. I believe this rework would give us plenty of knobs to tweak to create a fun and fair Sombra. Please share your thoughts and feelings!

Changing fire rate will likely cause inconsistent feeling for many heroes, espeically if it’s depending on a teammate’s ability that you can’t control. I think there is a reason there are many damage boost type abilities while only kitsune has fire rate buff. Improving fire rate can cause some unexpected interactions, e.g. the knockback of wholehog and recoil of soldier. Also, 6 sec of 20% fire rate buff can be problemtic on some heroes. Esepically for bastion, it’s basically a 20% damage boost for his minigun mode.

I understand you try to reduce the burst of the hack + virus combo by remove virus and add some damage to hack. But I have to say that as long as hack is autoaim ability, many people won’t like it. Just look at Juno, even her torpedo requires much longer time to charge and can be dodged. Many people still don’t like it because it’s “autoaim free damage”. In comparison, hack has a much shorter cast time compared to the charge time for juno torpedo.

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I totally understand this, however, after playing her Mirrorwatch version it wasn’t nearly as jarring as one might think. I believe it’s something players would easily adjust to and account for when having a Sombra on their team.

“Oh, we have a Sombra and she’s coming back from her flank? I’ll probably be getting a rate of fire boost soon.”

Not to mention the hack kind of prepping them for the change in fire rate. Overall, Mirrorwatch Hack was received extremely positively, so I think those minor pain points would eventually be adjusted to by the majority of the playerbase.

Again, totally understandable. This one is easily solved. If it turned out that the damage over time was too upsetting and “low skill” for most people, we could just revert it to her previous version of hack where it increases her overall damage output on the target to further reward aim. Actually that would probably be even better for this version of Sombra considering she’d be going back and forth between flanking and sticking with her team fight front to back. I just thought it would be nice to keep some element of Virus in there.

Thank you for the feedback! Very well thought out and didn’t get hung up on random numbers I spitballed out. I appreciate it!