There are less, but they still exist. The gold standard is Echo/Phara. Because they fly there are hero’s that simply can’t do anything about them, at all. It would take something like two or three miricle shots with Junkrat hitting Phara mid air to get kill, some like Brig or Rein can’t do much of anything.
Same can be said for sniper hero’s, a lot of hero’s really can’t do anything but try and not be seen. There is zero real counter play against Widow if your weapon doesn’t go beyond a few meters.
I did mention junkrat pharah, others say your genji, you can still deal with pharah, its more of a soft counter than hard counter except in junkrat vs pharah case.
Snipers can be extremely frustrating to deal with especially a good widow or hanzo, but its still not hard counter territory for me.
It goes beyond the ranged dmg, it’s also the mobility. Widow can just grapple away to the high ground. Mean while many hero’s have to take long flanking walks up steps to just approach them, assuming their perch has steps you can use.
But just saying it goes against the “no hard counters” if you ignore the flying hero’s, which counter pretty hard a lot of hero’s in the game.
The widow mobility has always bugged me a lot its not that she can get high ground its just it has 20 mtr range its huge mobility that at once is greater than two tracer blinks.
that said i dont think it can be considered hard counter, cause at the end of the day genji tracer can dive her. its just mercy pocket and brig peels change it in a real match with a good widow.
“Hard counter” isn’t really a formal term. The idea is that a character is a hard counter if their mere existence forces you to swap (or in other games, forces you to lose). Unless you take that to mean even if the character is literally AFK (which AFAIK no game has counters that hard) then it’s pretty subjective since it depends on things like skill and playstyle.
What I can say is that someone who plays Widowmaker as well as I play Pharah will force me to swap off Pharah, so Widowmaker is a hard counter in that context.
The difference that makes Echo more counterable though is that she can’t stay in air indefinitely whereas Pharah can.
You have windows where you can take a shot at Echo even if playing a short range hero, as she has to come back down eventually. Whereas with Pharah she just sits in the skybox and you’re forced to run a hitscan to kill her or Sombra to hack her and drop her from the sky.
Well unless the CD were nerfed since I last bothered to play Echo she can stay in the air pretty indefinitely, depending on the max skybox of the map. You can fly up and fall down slow enough you can fly again before you touch the ground, or even get close if you start from high ground.
Though I will admit Echo’s strongest ability is her beam, which you have to get close to use. If you always stay far away with Echo, you might as well be Phara.
Right now the biggest hard counters involves pharah and heroes that don’t have really the kit to be able to deal with her counterplay wise. That would be brig, rein, reaper, junkrat (some say soft counter, but his damage nerf made her back into a hard counter), symmetra, and junkerqueen (match up is rare but range and abilities means she can rare even touch her). Theres still quite a few soft counters (think every non-hitscan mid range hero and many of the long range ones). Add a mercy pocket to the pharah after the healing changes and its a pretty bad nightmare for those soft counters.
Ok this is a comp that hard counter doomfist : tank : Orisa/Hog, dps : Cass, Sombra, support : Ana, Zen, Kiriko, Brig can be annoying, and the funny part of this? You can play all these heros, at the same time to prevent a doom player to play
Nah no hard counter you so right, play the game please
