They’re both hit-scan snipers, with limited mobility on a cooldown, and worst of all: nearly identical effective ranges relative to gameplay design.
While I never have and never will be a fan of hit-scan sniping in a team-based shooter, I still want everything to have its place. Including the campers.
I want Widow to feel more niche, but much more impactful and unique from Ashe in gameplay. I want to shift away Widow’s team-wiping capacity for the ability to instantly delete nearly any tank that plays too sloppy. Rework her from a sweeper to a duelist, so to speak.
HP goes down to 150, since snipers should be more of a glass cannon. The rest of her kit gets buffed like crazy to compensate. This should make solo-flanking a consistent possibility for a counter, a Widow so far from team shouldn’t have such an advantage.
Primary fire: 25% tighter spread.
Scope-fire: 4-second charge time, solid laser down crosshairs, enemies can hear a loud ding when charged. 200 damage on body-shot, 500 on headshot. Hard-counter those pesky birds, or delete an unalert tank. Just don’t miss, because they have 4 seconds to deal with your 150HP-having booty before your next shot.
Grapple: down to 8 seconds.
Venom Mine: larger detonation radius, enemies take 35% more damage (from all enemies) while poisoned instead of damage-over-time (Jarate).
Infra-sight: teams’ headshot multiplier increases from 2x to 3x while active. It’s giving them access to enemy weakpoints, after all.
I still want thoughts, but I really think Widow’s current design is too controversial for the game. At least anything broken at 150HP is going to be consistent to counter compared to 200HP dealing 300 damage every 1.2 seconds. You usually need two or more enemies to take down a Widow hiding behind 4 allies, that derails our concept of game balance, 150HP should solve that issue so sloppy positioning can justify an easy counter.
Anyway, this isn’t my main! I’m only about 50 levels from a diamond border on there. I’ve put in thousands of hours since launch and I love the hero kit design aspect of the game! I love talking about rework concepts on here, I still think Widow could use a rework. She’s not fun to play against no matter how balanced she theoretically is, I intend to brainstorm remedies to that.
Snipers are part of what makes a FPS game. Yes, this is a hero shooter, but being able to play a sniper is awesome. I love playing snipers, because I can play so far back people either have to go out of their way to get to me, or ignore me and I get to freely shoot. Mearly existing as a sniper can change the way people play, and even if I’m not getting kills I love that I can be an annoyance simply by existing lol.
This Widow can instantly delete a Doomfist, Junkerqueen, Ramattra and Zarya at the start of the round before they even realise you’re playing Widow and react, especially on maps like King’s Row where she won’t be punished for it.
Being able to one-shot a tank at the start of a round swings the fight so massively in favour of the Widow’s team it’s ridiculous.
All of those tanks 450 hp as a base, Zayra has 475 (higher with shields deployed). Widow’s full damage is 300 on a headshot, so unless a Mercy is boosting her she can’t “instantly delete” them as you claim. And even when boosted she could just barely eliminate them in one hit.
And that’s not factoring in Ram and Queen’s abilities that take their HP to 625 for a few moments.
Junkerqueen is 425. And her shout only works if she’s alive to do it. A 500 dmg headshot makes her very insta-dead. All of them would be, and add in Monke, Orisa, Zarya, Sigma, and Rein if mercy boosted. Only Hog would survive.
But…Widow and Ashe don’t really have similar gameplay at all, and their effective ranges are really different, and their methods for damage are really different, and they duel in different ways, and their kits are totally different.
I realize you dropped that part of the argument after the first line, but it’s like saying that Ana and Widow have similar game play.
I mean she aims with 1 button and shoots with another… don’t really see other similarities apart from that.
Widow can 1 shot.
Ashe can’t. Ashe has the longest reload speed in the game.
It only does 200 with a shield, which DPS onetricks naturally cried out of the game… so it we could always just make another shield tank or return older shields to the game if this is too “absurd” to handle?
I agree that she should have a less dominating and oppressing presence in the game, but you can justify a lot of fun shenanigans on a hero when they only have 150HP and I feel like that would be a good opportunity to make something fun out of her. The inspiration was obviously the TF2 Sniper’s design, which happened to work perfectly fine and is considered one of the most balanced sniper designs in the broader gaming community.
She’s further up the line, so I think there’s an offset that creates a roughly equal survivability rate between the two. Especially with 200HP on each. My Widow design isn’t meant for versatility but for hard-countering birds or tank-carries.
