Amount of time spent playing doesn’t determine your skill. you must be pretty bad to stay at gold with widow then
1 Like
I understand where you’re coming from op. People are afraid of Widow so they want her to remain on the edge of being unplayable. Suggest the slightest “buff” and the whiners comes out claiming how’s she’s op or they just blame you and say that you need to “git gud”. 300 hours on a hero is a lot. I bet if you put that same amount of time on Tracer or Genji you wouldn’t have felt the need to make this thread because they are much more forgiving heroes and everything in the game isn’t actively fighting against them. Widow has a lot stacked against her so you literally need to do twice the amount of work to get the same amount of value. That’s facts. Everyone blue moon you’ll pop off but that rarely happens and it’ll only happen if your fighting a team of potatoes. There are so many things that can counter Widow. I’m thinking you’ll be better off picking Hanzo. After his rework he’s going to make Widow obsolete. I hope I’m wrong because I like Widow too but I just don’t know.
2 Likes
Uh. Every Widow above 3500 can do OP things, and she isn’t niche at all. She’s map dependent, but she works well on so many maps that you can hardly call her a niche hero, especially when looking at her usage in the pro scene.
Widow isn’t a balanceable hero, unless they were to do a full on rework. She’s unbalanceable because her effectiveness completely scales with mechanical accuracy. She can be the most useless hero in the game or the most broken, OP, unfun hero to play against, depending on who is playing her.
I’m sorry that you’re frustrated, but that is just how the hero is designed. If Blizzard were to buff Widow for the lower tiers, it would make her completely over the top in the higher tiers. Theoretically, Widow has unlimited potential. If you don’t miss your shots, you can’t lose. The hero has everything in her kit to allow you to climb and win games, you just have to go get it.
I’ve played ranked games where the Widow hardly ever misses and it takes a full team effort just to deal with the Widow. And if they’re pocketed by Mercy, it’s a nightmare. You dive on the Widow, she grapples away and continues 1 shotting your team as she gets healed up by Mercy. You dive on Mercy, she usually has a Zen orb on her and she flies between the Widow and the rest of her team. You ignore the Mercy / Widow duo, and you still lose because the Widow is uncontested and is picking off all the squishies. It feels like they’re breaking the game and it’s not any fun to play against. The last thing Widow needs is a buff.
Actually there is.
It’s called a Bolt-Action Sniper Rifle.
You spent so much time to build an nonexistent argument. How exactly does Tracer counter a Reinhardt? She can be a counter only in two cases:
- Your dps and supports suffer from some kind of eye or hand illness, because if you want to kill Rein with Tracer you need to blink right behind him i.e. have the whole enemy backline (supports, hitscans, snipers) at your back.
- You count her as counter due to her pulse bomb.
If we include ultimates as counters, then Junkrat hard counters 90% of the roster and Zen is hard countered by anybody. Tracers use tanks as batteries, and playing around Reinhardt is even more risky than dueling a Roadhog. Reinhardt’s role is to protect and he needs support to do so. If your supports do not help you, it’s not that tracer or genji counter you, it’s just because you are not supposed to 1v1 any dps in the roster.
I’m really curious how Genji counters Orisa. Orisa can really be a life saver against Genji and his ulti. Genji does not have enough dmg to kill Orisa even without shield. If your aim is so crappy and you cannot land a single halt on him, that’s your fault, not genji’s.
There are a bunch of Genjis around who can ensure you that it’s almost impossible to solo almost any tank with him.
Orisa vs Reaper… Reaper at his current state can kill Orisa if and only if Orisa’s team does not protect her from the flanking routes or if he achieves to use his shadowstep unnoticed. In any other case, Reaper needs a coordinated dive and he can wipe anyone and not just Orisa. Finally, shield dance combined with halt give you pretty good chances to kill Reaper even in a 1v1 situation.
Reaper vs Winston… In this case, 99% of the times it’s up to Winston when to engage reaper. A good winston can outplay Reaper via shield dancing. He just needs to learn to press shield 1 sec before landing and then Reaper will just miss his half ammo, or he will have to retreat.
Roadhog counters Reinhardt harder than he counters Winston. A proper hog really denies Reinhardt to do any skill other than shielding, while in the same time he does massive dmg to his shields.
Now let’s go to widowmaker:
Your list on other heroes includes anyone who can be a pain in the butt, while they are not even counters. Let’s use the same mind set for widow.
Any kind of shield: Rein, Winston, Orisa, Brigitte
Any kind of Area denial if you are not already set: Junkrat*, Pharah*, Moira Orb
/* Try to go on the plane in second point in Gibraltar while a Junkrat or a Pharah are there.
Any kind of Dive: DVa, Genji, Tracer (Winston already included in shields, and doomfist is not a counter even for a silver main widowmaker).
Any other Sniper which is benefited more than you in that map: Hanzo, Widowmaker
Any hero with long distance combined with Sonic Arrow or good coop/game sense: Mei, Zenyatta right click
Limited area denial in choke points: Zarya bubbles, Roadhog
… and I do not need to mention ulties like Valkyrie or Coalescence.
Using your definition of a counter (i.e. anything that may effectively disrupt your gameplay with that particular hero), then widowmaker has at least 10 counters. Also, widowmaker in comparison with your examples (except Symmetra) is highly dependent on the map. For example, widowmaker is not effective in Li Jiang tower, period.
1 Like
You have emphasized exactly his point.
Any brief mention of Widow’s balance is immediately and invariably met with “lol you’re bad, get gud” without at all considering the power creep that has crept on her space.
You casually brushing aside his concerns because “OWL pros are good at Widow” or “if buffed she will be oppressive at high ranks”, just because the guy self-admits he’s not the best, identifies a really toxic culture where a Widow player can’t even defend himself/herself without being shamed, ridiculed, and silenced.
Even when they’re trying to promote civil discussion and barely mention at all their opinion about Widowmaker, this happened.
Case in point, the first ever megathread of any character, on the old forums.
Read these posts, and tell me exactly what this Widow player had done wrong to deserve being downvoted so much, despite trying to be cordial, thanking Blizzard mods, and respectfully disagreeing with the direction they went with her.
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20745186024#post-1https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20745186024#post-2
This is exactly why the downvote system was removed.
This is not a valid solution. This is a treatment to an underlying problem, which is that people are needlessly toxic towards Widow because of her balance state, which goes hand-in-hand with players ridiculing Widow mains in all discussion.
Again, tracing everything back to the player and blatantly disregarding power creep/actual problems, is childish.
- Nevermind that the average crit hit percentage ends up being 1/20 shots for the whole population up til Grandmaster, where it’s only 1/10 shots.
- Nevermind that hitting a blinking Tracer is hard that most people can’t even hit her half of the time.
- Nevermind that the entire Widow population agrees that Hanzo has an advantage with cover due to peeker’s advantage and projectile hitboxes (even if it’s the smallest hitbox, it still is larger and more generous than hitscan).
- Nevermind that Hanzo has janky arm/shoulder htboxes that can LITERALLY BLOCK a would-have-been headshot (and that other characters like Pharah and Mercy, because of their air-height, can also block headshots with their arms while reloading)
https://youtu.be/8HqQq4PAB7w?t=25
No, it’s definitely the player’s fault /s
The substantial buffs to her damage, were over two years ago. And the game has powercrept since then.
Since Widowmaker’s damage buffs (before S3 started) the following balance changes were put into effect;
- Mercy adjusted to have invulnerability on Rez, then replaced with Valkyrie which increases her movespeed and self-healing, Single-Rez undoes opening pick severely limiting potential (even with it’s current nerfed state)
- Bastion rework (Ironclad), healing on-the-move
- Symmetra rework, all 250 HP heroes are now capable of surviving one-shot headshot with shield generator
- Lucio aura rework, speed buff, wallriding changed so everyone gets an average higher speed when disconnecting from a wall
- Roadhog healing on-the-move, and damage-taken reduced while healing buff
- Pharah airspeed increased giving her better agility while hovering, rockets deal less knockback on making follow up shots easier, rockets deal more splash damage overall (minimum damage on the outside edge of splash damage has increased)
- Soldier 19 damage per shot (current)
- McCree, Deadeye lock-on time shortened, damage ramp changed
- D.Va Micro Missiles added, raising her overall DPS in dive situations
- Added barrier characters Brigitte, Orisa
- Orisa’s barrier size increased, modified to block feet shots when deployed on platforms
- Brigitte Rally, all heroes are now capable of surviving one-shot headshot with armor provided from Rally
- Critbox sizes reduced for Winston, Orisa, Roadhog
- Winston cooldown timer for barrier starts after he activates the ability, instead of after the barrier times-out and dissipates
- Zarya Graviton now prevents Widowmaker’s grapple hook from being cast
- Torbjorn turrets no longer a source of ultimate charge
- Junkrat double mine, faster RIP-tire, gravity has less of an effect on RIP-tire
- Buffed Sombra
Incoming changes;
- Hanzo’s Sonic Arrow cooldown is being reduced, as confirmed by Jeff, giving him greater vision up-time
- Reaper getting on-demand Wraith cancellation, allowing him to be less predictable
The buffs to her hook and venom mine aren’t at all substantial in dealing with that power creep.
- Hook cooldown buff isn’t even a buff. It’s a band-aid over the abysmal ability that is Grappling Hook. (Don’t you dare say to tweak the sensitivity slider, because the sensitivity slider doesn’t fix every issue with the hook)
But sure.
Widow is used in Overwatch League, so that must mean she’s fine. /s
Widow is good in Grandmaster (where only 1% of the playerbase plays her, and still only use her 3% of the time compared to Genji and Tracers 6% and 9% pickrates), so that must mean she’s fine. /s
Sorry, but this is wrong.
Widow isn’t just countered by killing her. She’s countered by displacing her, countered by nullifying her damage, and countered by being unable to contest.
Season 3 Triple Tank meta countered her, without explicitly killing her.
- Double barrier
- High health pools
- Rezzing high-health pool heroes
- Pocket healing from Ana, Mercy
- Insane kite damage on a 200 HP hero if you were within range
Literally countered Widow without killing her.
- Double barrier forces her to reposition and play aggressively, leading to more opportunities to kill her
- Can’t kill heroes who have high health pools in one-shot with pocket healers
- If you do kill them, they just come back with Rez.
- Can’t jump down and contest or else met with certain death.
- On certain maps, enemies can literally bodyblock her so she can’t even grapple to contest.
Triple tank still works at countering Widow. It’s even worse now, with Single-Rez (even in the nerfed state) being on a 30 second cooldown.
5 Likes
Only real counter to widow is her team. With minimal assistance from supports she destroys all her supposed counters 1v1, and ultimately uncounterable with anything but other widow in realities of random matches where its near impossible to coordinate attempt to take widow down together, and even then she might very well survive with full team assistance, making dive a suicide.
Also expecting to get really good as widow with no prior fps exp in only 300h is not realistic unless for every hour in game you spend 10h in aim trainers and 5h in analyzing games of top widow players. OW, ironically, with all its generous hitboxes and no-aim abilities are very harsh on hitscans aim requirements thanks to absence of movement acceleration and huge amount of movement abilities.
You don’t play widow for easy climb or relaxing games, you play her to improve and to pull plays where every split second matters. She is very rewarding hero, but it takes great amount of time and effort to get there.
Widow is meant to be difficult. Or make her easy, but then take away her oneshot potential. Take your pick.
Playing Widow well should be something to be proud of. Why would you want to be another zero effort Sym main? Or a zero effort Mercy main?
She does excellently what she was meant to do. Buffing her would be a terrible mistake. You can’t “fix” people en masse. You can solve these problems yourself, though. Muting does work. Reporting does work (to an extent). You cannot fix everybody around you to suit your personal needs. That’s called communism.
Many things the OP said isn’t even exclusive to Widow. I really don’t know what’s so difficult to comprehend. OW is a team based game that’s built around your ability to switch at any given time. You adapt. That’s the point of the game. If you don’t adapt, you either become exceptional with your main or you break. That’s the truth of it.
Balancing in the modern era is a method to reduce overrepresented characters and increase underrepresented ones. It is LITERALLY meant for addressing problems and frustrations that the community “en masse” finds, in order to make those characters more fun and engaging all around.
Shame on you for equating a political viewpoint to balance, and saying that reporting and muting is the end-all solution when the real solution so Widow players never have to report and mute in the first place is to rebalance her.
And thank you for reinforcing my point. Completely ignore the giant list of powercreep.
1 Like
Never suggested that it is. But that’s the best we got from Blizz right now. And it works for the most part. It doesn’t cure the cancer, but it eases the pain, so to speak.
There’s nothing wrong with Widow. If anything, the current meta doesn’t really favor her, but that doesn’t mean she’s useless. A decent Widow can be fricken terrifying.
It’s unfortunate that you’re refusing to read posts and blatantly disregarding Widow’s actual problems.
- Didn’t read the list of bugs.
- Doesn’t pay attention to power creep.
- Has the audacity to say “there’s nothing wrong with Widow”
Puts a damper on actual discussion, really.
2 Likes
Well, my bad for not feeling like reading fricken essays on why a working hero needs buffs because bads can’t utilize her properly.
Interesting that so many people can use her, isn’t it? Many other heroes have/had bugs. They’ll be fixed, if they truly are bugs.
No. I’m not going to forgive you.
Literally, before each bulleted point list, I posted exactly why I compiled those lists. You didn’t bother skimming to read those explanations, you just flat out ignored them.
To catch you up to speed, assuming you even read this post, I posted;
-
Every single balance buff since Widow’s significant buffs from between S2-S3, that makes playing Widow unfavorable
-
Every single issue of grappling hook that definitely puts it in the “not fine” category of an ability that’s advertised to be used aggressively (to reposition) and defensively (as an escape).
-
Explained that requests for Widow “bugfixes” have actually been downvoted and silenced so that Blizzard never sees them, by petty people like you who have that “baddies can’t utilize her properly” mentality.
Also, “bads can’t utilize her properly” does not mean anything when “using her properly” is gated behind 1% of the player population.
If only 1% of the player population is capable of using her properly, it doesn’t mean that the kit is balanced around the top players. It also doesn’t mean that players are bad, they could be completely average.
It means that the kit is designed to be as inaccessible as possible.
You have to put in triple the effort to see the equal performance/value as an accessible easy hero like Soldier or Winston, with no safeties like Tracer/Genji, and are expected to carry every single time or else you face punishment from report abuse.
3 Likes
Which sounds good to me. Widow isn’t a hero you just pick up and decimate people with ease. Again, good Widows are a damn nightmare. Bad ones are useless. She’s designed to be very hit-or-miss. And it’s fine like that. Not every hero should be Mercy or Junkrat.
I’m a really bad Widow, I suck. But even I can utilize her to some extent, I never cry about missing shots lol. It’s because I suck. I usually pick her up when there’s Pharmercy or Junkrat that’s dominant, and most of the time I annihilate them, even as a bad Widow.
Git gut?
Well I mean yeah. unless your carrying it can be difficult to see widows value to a team becasue that value comes from getting picks. Due to her high skill floor, thats not an easy thing to do for most of the player population.
Thats just the nature of the beast that is widow. there isn’t much you can do about that unless you make her easier to play, and in turn less deadly.
If there are bug fixes that need to be done i am all for it. But gameplay wise, Widow is pretty well balanced.
widow counters doomfist, pretty easily too.
DEFEAT
20 characters of DEFEAT.
Then stop playing her.
Widow ruins the game, the less of them around the better the game is to play.
2 Likes
She wasn’t designed to be hit or miss. She was intentionally designed to be a straight sniper.
A character, who was designed to be an exported character archetype from Arena FPS games like Unreal and Quake, is harder than any version of the “sniper” character in Unreal and Quake.
Widowmaker is unreasonably the hardest sniper in any video game to date.
Even by modern FPS games, she’s much harder that any other sniper in any other game. Call of Duty sniping has got nothing on this, Call of Duty literally has failsafes to fall back on, and Widow’s failsafes are non-existent or heavily countered that they might as well be non-existent.
The only reliable failsafe is teammates. Teammates from a community that couldn’t give a damn about Widow players and won’t give her the time of day to help Widow out in the first place.
At no point did ANYONE “cry about missing shots”. We literally mentioned EVERY OTHER frustration except about our personal ability to hit people.
Stop projecting.
By saying “git gud” (which you misspelled, by the way), you’re demonstrating exactly OP’s point, and mine.
OP is angry and bitter at the fact that Widow’s frustrations are permanent. Frustrations that are completely unreasonable for ANY OTHER HERO, that would have been patched out/are in the process of being patched out.
And these frustrations are only permanent because of your attitude towards discussing her problems.
You’re handwaving every single argument a person could have, and blaming it all on player skill. Even when these arguments are literally echoed across pro players – pros have said on stream that they’d like to see Widow buffed because she’s been in a bad spot for a long while now.
Your attitude is the majority attitude that won’t even approach a discussion table civil-ly and resorts to shaming.
-
You’re harassing a player based on their player skill when (I checked), they’re completely average. They’re not bad. OP is not bad, OP is completely average.
-
You’re pushing all of the people who are average, into the bad category, and basing your entire argument on an extreme part of the spectrum of skill, in a vacuum.
-
You’re not taking power creep into consideration.
-
You’re not taking bugs into consideration.
No other hero would ever garner this much resistance. I don’t know why people are so polarized over the idea of a sniper being useful, but they are.
Your attitude against Widow, despite the evidence I’ve compiled that very clearly demonstrates that she needs some compensation for power creep, isn’t anything new. It’s tired, expected, and childish. And that’s the reason why we make these threads, to highlight both Widow’s problems, and the fact that alongside her problems we have to fight a community that gives zero damns about us.
3 Likes
Believe me fam, this would have been the single best way to make every problem you list here worse.