Why temporary stealth is a terrible idea

General Discussion
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Part 1: the problems

Problem 1: logistics

Stealth is currently a passive ability, which works well with infinite stealth because if the majority of the time if you’re eligible to be in stealth you would prefer to be in it. But obviously you can’t have a resource meter tied to a passive ability so it will have to be moved to an ability slot, problem is with virus all the normal ability slots are full now. Binding abilities to crouch and jump can sometimes be done, but usually only if they make logical sense (e.g. crouch to slam down as ball). This is a smaller issue, but I wouldn’t be surprised if sombra ends up with a clunkier control scheme than she has now.

Problem 2: Speed
They are lowering the duration because they want her to be invisible less, but this has a knock on effect of reducing the time she has the speed boost from stealth as well. This is a pretty huge unintended nerf that they will have to compensate for

Problem 3: Compensation
if you nerf her this hard, something else in the kit will inevitably need to be buffed fairly substantially to compensate, given that sombra is already an underperforming hero in all ranks. But what? Nobody on earth wants hack lockout time or virus damage buffed, EMP is arguably too strong already, translocator really can’t be any better, and buffing the gun would just be another instance of the awful OW2 trend of homogenizing the dps role. Maybe they could reintroduce stealth objective contesting, but I really don’t think that’s a good idea

Problem 4: Why?

Good sombra players are hardly ever staying in stealth for a prolonged period anyway other than between fights. Why fix a problem that doesn’t exist because some garbage sombra player is throwing by not shooting for 90% of the match but he happens to find one zenyatta alone to pick off andthat zenyatta is so mad that he died that we have to rework the whole game around him???

Problem 5: Luck

If you ever played the tf2 spy (and you don’t know all the weird physics tricks and ammo rollouts and such that make spy good), a character with temporary invisibility, you’d know how often you completely run into situations of: you’re planning to uncloak to go for a backstab soon, the enemy turns around randomly, and they happen to move in just the perfect way that it is impossible to escape their line of sights in time, the stealth ends, and you die to pure chance. This is just inevitable with a mechanic like this on a timer. Yes you could prevent this by playing less aggressively, but doing so is throwing away too much value from your kit, your optimal strategy is to just take the dice roll, which is bad design in a competitive shooter

Problem 6: Aggression

People are going to back down from making plays that they had enough time in stealth to make just because the risk of running out of stealth is too high. It’s not a lack of skill causing this, it’s that there are too many variables out of your control for you to be certain of how much time you need. This just removes a big part of sombra’s identity for no real reason

Problem 7: Tedium

Yeah, being beholdent to a timer constantly with huge punishment for any mismanagement is just unfun tedious gameplay. It’s the reason why nobody played sombra 1.0. It won’t be quite as bad since translocator isn’t timed as well, but it’ll still be a big enough downgrade to make people want to play her less. I know I personally will probably switch to venture after this change, not because sombra will be worse, I’d bet whatever mini-rework they give her will end up being a net buff, I just don’t want to be playing resource meter juggling simulator

Problem 8: Whiners

Whiners will never be satisfied. Once you introduce this change, they will be crying just as hard about sombra. It’s a pretty devastating look at the future direction of this game if you’re going to be pandering to the hate mob. Last time they gave in to the mob we lost one of the best gamemodes

Part 2: Can it be done right?

For most of this post I assumed this would work similar to original sombra’s stealth. There are some mitigating factors I could see that could maybe improve a limited stealth

  1. long duration

If the duration was so long that there was nearly no possibility of it running out mid-combat (e.g. 15+ seconds) and was only there to stop spawn camping or spending half a minute tailing a support, then I don’t think it would be too big a deal other than when respawning

  1. Separating speed boost

If the speed boost was somewhat separated from stealth things could be improved. For example sombra could passively enter a “pseudo-stealth” form where she appears translucent and gets the speed boost, and while in this form she can manually activate the stealth for temporary full invisibility, then when the invisibility ends she returns to pseudo-stealth and retains the speed boost until she shoots, takes damage, etc.

  1. Partial stealth

If you became only partially visible when the duration ended. For example you stay invisible, but enemies get some sort of “invisible sombra nearby” warning when they come within a certain radius of you

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I feel that this argument backfires on you because those “garbage Sombra player[s]” (aka most Sombras in most ranks) are why we have infinite stealth in the first place. What was the purpose of changing stealth to be infinite in the first place, back in July 2018?

Developer Comments: These changes allow Sombra to more easily play as an infiltrator and scout for her team, as well as give her time to pick and choose when to reveal herself to ambush her enemies.

It was to make her easier to use because at the level where 90% of us play, Sombra has sucked for pretty much her entire existence.

At this point, it’s pretty clear that hasn’t worked at all, since as you say: most Sombras fall into the noob trap of spending more time in stealth than actually doing anything useful.

Infinite stealth has not worked and has only introduced new frustrations. It’s time to try something else.

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there’s also the fact that infinite stealth completely removed the risk and resource cost of getting into position for sombra which kinda goes against the positioning game as a whole

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They could put virus onto m2 as an alt fire.

They already made her faster in stealth, they can buff the speed again.

To be honest… no idea.

The only ability i personally have beef with is the virus. The nerf they did to it right after release was good and i had no issues after.

They could just lessen the impact damage of the virus and move some of it into the DOT and it would feel better.

Making invisibility limited won’t affect anything about how you play against her.
It’ll still feel like she’s permanently invisible in the backline, even if she has a 15 second invisibility on cooldown.

You’ll still get virused from nowhere right as a teamfight starts, regardless of if she has perma invisibility or not.

Invisibility doesn’t help her with spawn camping much if at all. It’s positioning and map cover, together with the target’s awareness.

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Perma stealth is simply just overpowered as a concept in any FPS game, Sombra has easily proven this to me ever since they shifted it over to being a passive.

In comparison to literally every other fps such as Spy cloak in TF2, cloak pilot in Titanfall 2, active camouflage in Halo, Skye from Paladins,and Spectre’s active camo in black ops 3 they all share something in common and that it works for a set amount of seconds because anyone who has a basic knowledge of game design knows that permanent stealth is just inherently broken no matter what you do.

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Then where would you put hack?

It’s ok for pc players because we simply have more buttons, but not for console.

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So what’s the broblem with nerfing it without compensation

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Her current 40-something percent winrate across all tiers.

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Oh i meant broblem

That said, I’m seeing ~47%, which isn’t like horrifically bad and heroes at that WR have certainly gotten hit before. I simply don’t consider that alone sufficient when looking at blizzard’s historical behavior.

Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think they won’t compensate her, either—OP just said that she would need “substantial compensation” then went on to diminish the importance of permanent stealth. I wanted to point that out. :woman_shrugging:

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The problem with sombra is that it’s need more counterplay. Is a problem how a character that have invisibility that can’t be countered and let her choose when to ambush someone alone, and then then have the ability to disable the skills so they can’t have a proper duel in that ambush…, so it is difficult ot balance her as if she is too strong, she wins every duel and if she is not, she is kind of useless not being in team combat.

The idea of virus was having some type of skillshot to make the duel more fair, but it didn’t work as it is very easy to use and not miss it in an ambush.

Right now the only counter is good team play and awareness of your team.

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Surprised OW team does not have that basic. umm.

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Merge it to virus :smiley:

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Problem 9:

She’s had stealth duration before…and varying degrees of damage output…and hacks that last 1-6 seconds….and no virus

Basically people have always hated her…so not sure why anyone thinks they’re going to fix her all of a sudden

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Solution: remove it from her passive. It should have never been a passive. Not being able to have full autonomy on when/where you use it is dumb.

Boost her speed then.

If they remove Stealth off of her passive, there is room for another passive. :slight_smile: I couldn’t give you a suggestion but there is an option there.

Because people don’t like fighting against it. That’s it. That’s the reason. People don’t enjoy it. And if it leaves room in her kit to actually give her something that helps her be good and less obnoxious, then people theoretically should be okay with that.

That is why Translocator exists. And we don’t know how it’ll work. Maybe translocator instantly stealths you so you can’t be seen, or maybe there’s other things in her kit that might help. She might even get 25HP back since she’s no longer going to be invisible for so long anymore.

Depending on how this goes, this could address the problems people have. If she is balanced or even underpowered after this, and they still complain, then yes. They can pop a forehead vessel and froth at the mouth all they want because the things they dislike keep getting addressed and they still get angry. They are never going to delete a hero if they can’t accept that, they can quit lol

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Stealth mechanics in any sort of hero shooter or MOBA are always duration based, typically lasting no longer than 6 seconds with decently long cooldowns. Either that, or they have some sort of draw back.

The fact that Sombra has permastealth as a passive, no less, is incredibly overpowered. It always will be, especially since she can interact with the map whilst Stealthed, and gains bonus movement speed the whole time.

It needs to be duration based.

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Opportunist from OW1.

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a buff for hack I would like to see is making it so the first 1.5 sec its the full hack, but for an additional 2 seconds or something movement abilities are still disabled. This would apply to emp as well.

High movement heroes are still too strong (mainly because they refuse to nerf them cough cough tracer) , and most of the counters to them are way easier and more efficient being used on heroes without movement abilities. So I think this would be a nice buff that makes her a strong counter to highly mobile heroes, without having an effect on heroes like ana, mei, etc. that dont have movement abilities.

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The only change I see coming as a result of giving her stealth a limited duration is a reduction in her pick rate. The same people will still find annoying like before but they’ll see her less.

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I don’t know. After the pickable passive event I’d rather have anything else then opportunist. I don’t know if they were both at the same threshold, but during the event, I swear I saw it flash once or twice.

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It’s actually one of the most hilarious things to happen, especially if it’s in the midst of a melee fight. Double if the spy takes a random crit swing.

As far as the cries about invisibility go, the sad part is most gamers in here have probably never played a game that actively has these, so they have little clue on how to approach a sneaky enemy. And given how this game is drawing in a lot of CoD players, other aspects of balance are going out the window just to appease them.

Same thing a decent spy will do. Most of the time a spy will walk around disguised or at least cloak when some malding pyro is running around checking every corner.

I imagine her stealth would work like the Cloak and Dagger where spy is partially visible when the meter is drained. In this case I’m assuming she would be just as visible as a partilly cloaked spy to enemies.

But honestly this game needs a more comprehensive voiceline list than the small one we have right now. In TF2 they don’t call out snipers unless it’s in MvM, not that you’d need to because sniper’s rifle is easy to recognize when you hear it(also the kill feed).

Even the alert for sniper is underwhelming and often comes too late because by the time anyone alerts the team, you’re either dead or missing a large chunk of hp. It would be funny if Sombra had a disguise kit and you could accuse teammates of being spies though.

“Spy around here.”
“Hacker creeping around here.”
“Looks like i got competition.” - Sombra
“Seems here we got a lil snake in the grass.” -Cassidy or Ashe

“I smell a rat…” -Hog
“Oi!” - If a friendly Junkrat is nearby
“Not you.” - Hog

“That Mercy’s a spy!”
“The freakin Tracer’s a spy!”
“ZARYA IS SPY!”
“That Pharah is a bloody MERRRCYYYY!”