Hey Blizz. It’s been TEN WEEKS since you introduced changes to Sombra that sent her pick and win rates plummeting. Those who play her, casuals and pros alike, have provided feedback that unanimously disagree with these changes.
Sombra is already battling in a meta that’s not suited to her, and that’s okay: not every hero can be meta all the time. But no one’s saying she must be a top 3 must-pick: we just want her to not be purposely crippled with janky hack mechanics or be punished for trying to use her abilities in a fight.
I think I speak for all Sombra players when I say that we’re not asking for an immediate revert (though that wouldn’t suck): we’re simply asking for our feedback to be acknowledged and for even a vague idea of what you’re planning for her. It’s immensely frustrating to pour dozens of hours into a mechanically-demanding hero only to have them be purposely made unnecessarily difficult to derive value from.
Also, aside from the fact that a component of your game has sat broken for almost three months, giving Sombra some viability can only be good for the meta: fewer Brig bash combos/double snipers/shield attrition wars/Pharmercys/bunker cheese comps would benefit everyone.
Some community suggestions on how to proceed:
- Revert the obnoxious LoS changes. Hack feels like Hook 1.0 right now
- Start dealing with her extensive bug list (translocator glitches, etc.)
- Increase damage threshold for cancelling hack (otherwise even trash damage punishes her harshly for trying to use her most important ability)
So PLEASE, from the bottom of our sneaky little hearts, can we get a blue post here?
39 Likes
Friendly tip: “to deride” means to ridicule or laugh at. The word you were looking for is “to derive”
Agree with mostly everything you said, although I don’t mind the hack LoS changes - if they worked as intended, that is, and hack really only broke when it’s supposed to.
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Imagine if they broke Mercy, D.va or Tracers main ability and then just left it broken in F-tire. People would be outraged.
There’s just not enough Sombra players to cause an outrage on the scale required for Blizzard to care 
11 Likes
It’s a lose/lose situation for us: they won’t buff her because no one’s playing her, but no one will play her until she gets buffed.
And that wouldn’t be enough, because they would call such “rework” a “success” xd
But really, hacks should be MORE VISIBLE to our team.
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we’re simply asking for our feedback to be acknowledged and for even a vague idea of what you’re planning for her.
That’s exactly the issue, blizz has no idea what to do with her.
I’ve been following sombra since the first tease into the arg and release and everything that came afterwards and I was one of the first initial people that asked for buffs a month in when it was clear she was in a horrible spot.
Every single thread we either had no oficial answer or we got a “it’s coming”, just to get a janky minor translocator buff.
It took them 6 months to finally do that and another like 6 months to finally admit her spread was horribly tuned and killed her potential.
More importantly, she’s a design mess, her planned mines in development got scrapped and she has an assassin kit in a hero with support stats, the spread buff helped but they can’t seem to understand there needs to be a balance between hacking/movement and damage and this results in sombra being completely irrelevant for the 99.99% of her existence since release.
They’re simply lost in what they should do with her so they have a constant back and forth of buffs and changes in random points of the hero when all she needs is to be able to deal constant damage (spread buff was enormous but she still needs a tad bit more, just barely) but at the same time, keeping her mobility and hacking under control.
Her entire design is supposed to be AN OPPORTUNIST, much like an assassin but her kit is super flawed here, almost no point in being able to see people through walls and denying them health packs when they’re able to go back to full health in a split second due to healers, even MORE flawed now after the health pack change towards ult charge.
I fully expect them to keep ignoring sombra until push comes to shove in like 2 months and they throw the usual corporate talk and compensation 0.5 buff to translocator or something.
3 Likes
I would disagree. I mean they did buff her oncd, and they are working on torb and sym right now. I think they will touch her soon.
I hope.
I love sombra.
I’ve been hoping that since december 2016 and they keep letting me down, it’s clear they just don’t care/don’t like sombra at this point, specially when the solution has been so blatant all this time.
Excellent post and a good summary of the problem.
I just don’t understand why they aren’t TRYING to fix her; she’s not going to improve by herself, even if the meta shifts massively in her favour.
It wouldn’t be difficult to experiment to figure out what could possibly work. Why not try out minor buffs one at a time just to nudger her in the right direction, Blizzard?
They already tried those small buffs a year ago and they did nothing until they finally touched the one thing that’s been her problem all along, her reliable damage.
Small tweaks and buffs to test and try to find a sweet spot are great but they’re nothing but small ineffective band aids unless you’re actively attacking the problem.
Until her reliable damage is up to par with what is expected she will forever be relegated at the bottom, simply put why waste 15 seconds setting up just to TRY to go in just to maybe annoy a couple players or worse, get instantly one shot/revealed by a hanzo or stunned/killed by brigitte.
Why go through all this when I can simply pick hanzo/junk/whatever must have hero at the moment, throw this planning out of the window and simply do so much more than what sombra can do that there’s no reason to pick her.
Until that damage issue is resolved in a way that her hacking and mobility aren’t overtuned but work in tandem with her damage without feeling too oppressive, until then she will be nothing but a hacking bot that relies on teammates to do anything and will only see niche play when abusing certain part of an aimless kit.
They removed the 0.1s leniency of it. It was this leniency that made her hack reliable and consistent, because it didn’t matter if the LoS was interrupted by a pole, the hack would continue as soon of the enemy was back in Sombra’s LoS.
However, this leniency had to be removed because it caused inconsistency with other heroes. Heroes with invulnerability abilities and shields got hacked even if Sombra’s LoS was broken. The developers did day that they would inprove Sombra’s LoS so it wouldn’t get interrupted by objects, an km certain they did, but it still can easily be interrupted by objects. It is currently very unreliable.
How can they fix this without bringing back the leniency?
Well what about a second LoS? One on the left of Sombra and one on the right of Sombra. As long if both LoS isn’t lost, then her hack will continue. If one of the two LoS’s is broken by a object or pole, will the hack continue as well.
Bugfixes in gereal are slow in this game.
Take Reinhardt as an example. His ultimate was promised to get fixed in April and it’s still not fixed.
Or what about Mei?
The developers said they would fix Mei’s Cryo-Freeze soon so she wouldn’t get hooked out of it. It’s still in the game.
Yes. She definitely need this.
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Exactly - unlike Mercy, Dva or Tracer Sombra was never a huge pick. Her pick rate is trash now, but it was just as bad before the rework ever since her release. Objectively she simply has never been popular enough to receive attention from the community. Regrettably it makes no difference if she is fixed now or left in the dumpster for another year.
has it only been 10 weeks? feels like it’s been like 4 months
not really unanimously, i’ve had no trouble using her, in fact it’s gone great in the countless games i’ve used her, and i don’t even main her.
its only been 2.3 months, in fact. Not so far off. 
To be fair, we’ve had ~252 weeks (63 months) of broken Bastion. I don’t want to derail this post, there are quite a few other posts for him. And I’m not saying she shouldn’t be looked at, just throwing that out there…
I don’t play her, and thus I’m not really qualified to say what she needs, but she does seem somewhat kinda useless at the moment. The OWL seems to have some use for her, but I haven’t really seen her outside of that too much.
2 Likes
At least Bastion has his pirate ship niche, where Sombra’s niche is non-existent.
(Not disagreeing with Bastion needing work also, but at least he’s got something, however small it may be 
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