how can you stop it? sombra hack is too short to really hinder him, damage from all the team is not a constant, a lot of hp and shield, hyper speed
what is the REAL counterplay against him? the one it makes it really stop
Go for the rest of his team who most likely have no idea to play with a tank that doesnt sit infront of them and holding their hand
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Sombra or Brig is really the only options apart from Roadhog.
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Sombra’s hack is actually really effective if you have a team with more than 1 IQ at focusing targets.
Otherwise, CC will prevent Ball in most cases from existing. On the tank side, you could play Orisa and spear spam him, spin him into places while he slams. You could also play Hog to essentially displace trap him into specific locations. Doomfist also works, but might require to be funny at it.
On the DPS side, there isn’t much really. Cass with his nade if Ball is nearby, Junkrat with trap zoning, Pharah with boop on maps that it could matter, Mei with primary fire slow/wall cutting his paths. Otherwise the rest of the cast either has to damage Ball beyond belief to matter.
On the support side, Brig def slaps Ball hard (nice), Ana sleep can open up a team play against Ball. Lucio in specific maps with boops.
There’s also different Ball playstyles, there’s the diver ones, they play like Winston and they usually are pretty punishable. There’s the roaming ones, those that just slams and roll back and forth for attention, those are usually where most of the community gets stuck at countering. It essentially either requires your team to kill the 4 others (viable so long you’re not in higher ranks) or requires a full team attention to hard focus the Ball. There’s also the ‘frontline’ Balls that generally are clueless on how to play the game, those are whatever. And there’s the tech Balls, the ones that just do whatever and get away with like literally anything via usage of techs, those are a gamble.
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Sombra is still the best counter, you just have to time your hacks correctly.
You should not be hacking ball whenever he appears, you hack him during piledrive or when he’s going to roll away, doing so will throw him off and should get you the opportunity to kill him if your team can follow up.
Mindlessly hacking him is useless.
all of those sounds pretty situational, like one in a lifetime
I mean REAL counterplay, a playstyle that can prevent ball from doing something to your team everytime, because if you do any of the things you said won’t prevent him from killing one or two teammates. I mean like playing high ground to prevent a reinhardt, beam heros for dva and so on, ball seems like the only tank that can keep doing his plays while not fearing to be stopped
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Brigitte is built primarily for that. She has a 4sec whipshot up to 20m which absolutely kills his grapple and momentum. If you combine it with a well time shield bash you can stop his mometum built again.
Whipshot works at denying pile driver attempts. There is a shield built into her kit making her a hard target to kill. The inspire keeps allies up and the repair pack slows his kill on them. Inspire clears up a bunch of the trash damage he tries. Repair pack covers whomever he tries to go after.
You won’t kill him, but from the support perspective your goal is to deny his plays. If you can deny his plays on top of another player offering damage, you can effectively keep him out of the game.
I’ve had balls rage quit on my Brig several times because of denying them plays.
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Mei is pretty decent at slowing him down. And Rammatra can beat up lil Hampter.
What reshi said does feel like the only counterplays against him.
It’s either situational countering, or the whole team needs to play heroes that ball can’t reach at all.
Fliers and such.
Junkrat trap, and focused fire.
I can only really speak from my support experience, but yeah Brig is the best bet against him in my opinion. Both his slam
and roll are pretty telegraphed, and you can easily save whipshot to knock him away from his target.
I also think Ana does fine if you don’t panic when you see him. I usually let him just get the slam off on me unless I think he has ult, because nade afterward can scare him off, and it’s easy to land sleep once he’s in your face. If he’s going for a slam from up particularly high, you can also easily sleep him out of the air too.
Lifeweaver CAN be good against him too but I think that is more map dependent, and LW isn’t great let’s be honest. But on places like well you can position in places that will make him use cooldowns in places he’s easy to see coming from if he wants to dive you. Pull can be great both at keeping people out of the well, and to destroy a lot of his mines quickly. But LW is better as a way of defending other characters than against rat himself, and brig still does that better.
Hog sombra mei brig & ana.
I used to think ball was fine, cause in most my games its manageable , then i saw chazm play.
Ball is broken, u need a lot of skill but god damn, ball is busted. top500 players couldnt do anything to his ball, he was diffing them like they were silver players one after another
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You usually have 2 options: focus their team or focus WB. If you focus their team, choose whoever heroes work best, but if you want to focus WB, all your team should swap to counters like Orisa (cc), Roadhog (damage and cc), Mei (cc), Cassidy (cc), Reaper (damage), Sombra (cc), Torbjörn (damage), Ana (cc), Brigitte (cc) and Zenyatta (damage). Have at least one cc hero each role. I tried playing a WB counter (mainly Mei or Ana) when my team doesn’t, and it doesn’t work so good, in fact, I had to swap because I fell so worthless 
This advice is based on my experience against good WB players, bad WB players can be countered with just a cc hero 
you need more than one form of CC and you need to chain it
writing this down for later
really good ball players will know the map and know it well and will be able to use cover, grapple, and shields appropriately to counterplay cc or break sightlines more easily to force enemies to have to move if they want to fight him off. he will also consistently deny space and shoot enemies in a way that forces them to have to 180 and choose between which angle to shoot at; the one facing his teammates, or the one facing him
chain cc is a common gimmick but that will only account for the wrecking ball and not the rest of his team, which may be an issue if he used mines or his team has ults. good kiriko and LW players can also try to save ball if he has sight to the healers. he is also very fast, and can come back to contest an objective relatively quickly making ball elims a lot less meaningful relative to other tanks
most of the time when ball is fighting the enemy tank, by that time they are almost guarunteed to be dead, or they are overextending, otherwise ball will likely be pressuring someone else instead
you can also go full in on dive, or play with lots of boop heroes like lucio and brig to mess with ball when he commits to piledriver or tries to roll through with boops
ball is one of the most versatile and the highest mobility / skill check tank in the game overall so it really comes down to out-skilling the ball player and thinking a couple steps ahead, but that is a lot harder to do when wrecking ball isnt the only enemy, and surprisingly isnt quite as affected by counterswap
honestly biggest reason why he is so hard to play against will probably be because the ball player has thousands of hours worth of experience playing ball, and most will only encounter him for a couple hundred if they are lucky, so if he was a way more popular tank pick, you would probably learn how to out-play him more quickly
Junker queen Shout when he drops in and then go kill his supports while they have no tank.
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sombra is good, paired with ana can destroy ball in short work
It used to be ignore him and boop him. Now it’s Sombra + McCassidy (not either or) or bust, mostly because he can’t be booped anymore due to smoothbrain tank passive changes.