Summary
Why: There a few core issues with Sombra which not only makes her ineffective but makes it difficult to buff her.
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She’s incredibly reliant on her teammates in order to truly be effective yet her kit doesn’t fully reflect that. Primarily, this is due to the visual indicators for hack being awful and barely visible.
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Due to her translocator essentially being a get out of jail free card, it’s difficult to buff the rest of her kit. If you were to buff the rest of Sombra’s kit without properly addressing her Translator than you can easily end up with the case of her being high reward, low risk.
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her now invisibility while much easier to use, feels a lot more limited. The infinite cloak means you no longer have to worry about running out of cloak. However, a single point of damage will break it thus severely limiting your mobility while cloaked. In my opinion, this easily leads to Sombra having a far more passive playstyle.
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she has a powerful ultimate at the cost of the rest of her kit which often times makes her feel like an EMP bot as sometimes it’s simply easier to just farm Ultimate charge.
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For a stealth character, Sombra feels rather loud sometimes which makes it difficult to sneak around.
Solution: Now that I show the problems with Sombra, let me introduce some potential fixes.
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add better visual and audio cues to hack. As many people have suggested before, purple sugar skulls above the enemy’s head would be a perfect replacement for Hack’s current visual cue as it’s not only much more visible but is distinct as well meaning there shouldn’t be any confusion about what it does. Additionally, giving Sombra an extra voiceline such as “[Hero’s name] hacked” would be a good audio indicator as well giving your team more incentive to try and kill them. Finally, I think adding temporary wall hacks unto a hacked target would make hack even more beneficial as it allows another flanker such as Genji or Tracer to chase down a hacked target should they try to escape. Essentially, I’m trying to incentivize Sombra’s teammates to take advantage of a hacked target without the whole team having to be in voice chat.
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Replace Translocator with another ability. By removing her instant escape option, it makes easier to buff the rest of her kit such as her gun since she’ll be much more vulnerable.
As for the ability that will replace it: Decoy. Sombra will send out a holographic copy of herself out with 50 health which fizzles out after 5 seconds. Cooldown is 8. However, should an enemy kill the decoy than it will leave behind a corpse and a kill feed will appear for the enemy team although they won’t gain any ult charge from it. Now I feel like Decoy can be a more difficult yet more versatile ability compared to Translocator.
Amongst the possible uses are
As an escape tool: Even though you’ll probably need to use stealth in conjunction with decoy and you’d need to use decoy out of site so that the enemies don’t realize you’re using decoy, I still feel like decoy could be used as escape tool despite being much more difficult to use.
Faking your death: The potential to trick the enemy into thinking you’re dead is incredibly useful because that means they won’t be worrying about you. Let me use an example. Let’s say you have EMP ready but the enemy Lucio and Orisa both have their ultimates ready. Lucio and Orisa knows that you’ll only activate your ult in order to counter theirs which means that they’ll only use their ults when they think it’s safe.
Though if you could trick them into thinking you’re dead when you’re really not than you could bait out their ultimates.
Baiting out abilities. I mentioned this before with ults but decoy could be used to trick others into wasting abilities on a hologram such as McCree’s Flashbang or Genji’s dash.
Acting as bait. If there’s someone who acts incredibly aggressive than you can use a decoy to trick them into overextending by using a decoy as bait.
As a distraction. This one seems like the most obvious.
Tricking the enemy team in thinking you’re alive: just like how there are benefits in others believing you’re dead, so to goes to others believing you’re alive. If you even seen a paranoid player in TF2 than you know what I’m talking about. They’re worried so much about the spy that they don’t pay attention to anything else.
- Drastically modify Stealth. Stealth 3.0 will now run on a resource meter draining 10% power per second (a 10 second duration at full charge) and will grant Sombra a 175% movement buff while active. Should she take damage while invisible, Sombra will appear faded for one second before turning invisible again. When not in use, stealth has a 2 second cooldown before it begins to recharge at a rate of 20% per second thus making her cooldown anywhere from 3-8 seconds depending on how much cloak she used up.
Now while this will make stealth harder to use due to no longer being infinite, it will be easier to use as players don’t have to worry about their cloak breaking if they get shot. The Resource meter also means that if you only need to use stealth for a short time such as making a quick escape or chasing down an enemy, you still have the rest of your cloak needed if you need to activate it. Finally, returning the extra speed will make it easier to chase down low health targets.
- Increasing the cast time ult charge requirred for emp would be the easiest nerfs towards it. Though a better and more interesting option would be to add more counterplay to.
For example Mei’s cryo freeze, Zarya’s bubbles, Orisa’s fortify (doesn’t affect supercharger or barrier), Reaper’s wraith form and Moira’s fade all grant immunity to EMP while active. Mei’s ice wall can be use to block an EMP. Of course, they’ll need to use their abilities before you EMP but you get the idea.
Similiar to translocator, nerfing EMP makes it easier to buff the rest of her kit. It should also help encourage a more active playstyle instead of simply being an ultbot.
- make her footsteps quieter and revamp the whole sound system. From what I’ve experienced Overwatch doesn’t pay that much attention on how far away sounds or where they occur exactly. Doesn’t matter if Sombra is 15 meters away or only one, her decloak volume is going to be the same no matter what. Now I could be wrong but that has been my experience in Overwatch.
As for how this new sound system will work
Certain sounds will be quieter the further away you are from them.
Louder sounds will muffle quieter sounds. The bang of a sniper shot will muffle the noise of footsteps or a decloak.
Walls will reduce sound that passes through them by 50%
Ult sounds remain unaffected.
![:man_shrugging:t3:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/man_shrugging/3.png?v=6" ":man_shrugging:t3:")