Widow grapple hook nerfed, but where are her grapple's bugfixes? Or any of her bugfixes at all?

Totally agree with this thread, you’d think everyone would be behind bug fixes anyway it makes the game a more real and genuine experience. I guess the Winstons that kill Widow b/c her hook failed to do what it was supposed to won’t complain but that’s a pretty terrible thing to get behind.

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grappling hook is the only ability in the game that you can fail to use and get away with it (example: im pushing widow away with winston primal rage, make he fail grapple, and after half a second she grapples away anyway) .
if you ever make it consinstent in how it works, needs a change in that terms, go on cooldown when you use it and not when the grapple lands. or at least 2 seconds cd (like sombra hack when she gets interrupted).

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This is false. If someone starts a hook (it physically latches onto an object) and you boop her away using any sort of boop (Primal Rage, Lucio alt fire, Concussion projectiles), the hook is interrupted and the ability goes on cooldown.

If you’re trying to interrupt Widow, you have to time it after the “plink” of the hook grabbing a wall. Otherwise you’re not actually interrupting them – the grapple hook never latches onto anything, and never latching is a free recast (it always has been).

(Also, Hammond has the same thing for his claw).

Failure to use is not related on latching onto air. Failure to use is everything else associated with it… the fact that it aims to the wrong object, the fact that it can’t connect to certain walls at all, the fact that it connects to a spot that is a sliding ledge, the fact that it literally just gives up and doesn’t work on cast or refuses to swing you up and over to a ledge it autoaimed for you.

The fact that every single cast has become a slingshot just to compensate for all of the above – you shouldn’t have to compensate for it… and just think of how many seconds are wasted that you could have been used sniping, how many opportunities missed by just a fraction of a second because you were airborne and correcting for the hook’s misbehavior, how many games could have come down to an Overtime frag that you missed because the hook just didn’t work properly.

And the assumption that its inconsistency is part of its balance is ridiculous. It should be consistent in the first place. Balance is wholly separate from consistency, that doesn’t ever approach consistency unless the thing in question is meant to have RNG (like weapon spread).

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uh, guys, did you miss the fact that she’s second only to hanzo among dps and was one of the most played dps in dive since with mercy pocketing her and the grapple she’s next to undivable?

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Being meta does not mean you aren’t plagued with problems.

Furthermore, her pickrate in GM does not affect the rest of the ladder. GM is just 1% of the population.

Grappling hook was given a shorter cooldown partially because it was plagued with problems. Taking that back without bugfixing is shameful.

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Earthshatter? Charge? Anything doomfist has?
Widowmakers grapple is FAR from the buggiest ability in the game and is super good with super long range. I find it works 99% of the time I use it

Hello again. Don’t think I didn’t forget you, even on a new account.

You don’t use Widow. On your other connected account you had barely any playtime on her.

The hook has over 7 documentable misbehaviors.

I’ve posted this list in every single thread you’ve participated in about Widow, and you refuse to listen.

Reinhardt and Doomfist both have abilities that fire correctly. Whether or not the enemies are affected as expected are due to unforeseen circumstances with collision and line of sight checks, and basic math and geometry. With abilities like those, there are thresholds where it will not work as intended on enemies, that’s completely unavoidable.

Widow’s hook does not affect enemies. It affects herself. It’s a whole different class of ability. Just by that criteria alone, that excludes all abilities that have an enemy interaction bugs.

  • On pure movement, Rein’s movement ability, charge, has a 100% reproduction rate in terms of movement.
  • Doomfist’s rocket punch, seismic slam, and uppercut all have 100% reproduction rate in terms of movement.
  • Swift Strike, Guardian Angel, Rocket Boosters, Jump Jets, Leap, Concussions, Blinks/Rewind, Lunge, Combat Roll, Sprint, EMP jumps, Fade jumps, Barrier Bash, even Hammond’s Grappling Claw, all have consistency in them.

Grappling Hook does not have this consistency. It’s consistency is on a map to map basis. It doesn’t fire correctly half of the time, and most of the procs that it has all have some degree of unreliability;

All established movement technique on highly mobile heroes is wrestling to get ABOVE-average performance.

Except Widow. Widow is constantly wrestling with a movement ability just to get average performance. She has to turn every single grappling hook into a slingshot to manually course correct, just in case.

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I don’t know who you think I am, this is my only forum account and it’s usually connected to my stats but for some reason it’s bugged out. Happens sometimes on the forums. I’ve never even participated in a thread about Widow and I do play her a bit, moreso on my 2nd DPS account.

I see your point about her movement ability being buggy and it certainly is, but I don’t think that because it just affects her that makes it more buggy than an ability that affects other characters like charge and shatter. Because more often than not the error is based on the ability than general collision code.
Doomfists abilities most definitely have many bugs that affect himself as well as the enemies he’s interacting with.

Edit: There we go, think I fixed the connection bug

What is a movement ability supposed to be used for? Movement.

What is a damaging ability supposed to be used for? Damaging enemies.

What is an ultimate ability supposed to be used for. On enemies, to secure frags.

They’re entirely separate categories of abilities. For movement abilities, Widow has the single-most worst interactions with her own ability that no one else has to face.

The sheer number of problems Grappling Hook has, outnumber any other problems with other abilities.

  • Just because they aren’t as immediately visible/apparent as the other abilities, doesn’t mean they aren’t a problem.
  • Just because Grapple Hook doesn’t affect the enemy, doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly buggy to the point where it is, sheerly numerically, the buggiest ability in the game.

You have no earthly idea what you’re talking about. The enemy interactions with Earthshatter or Rocket Punch is almost entirely dependent on collision. There are thresholds with collision that have to be dialed in to particular values, because if they are too generous it ends up being completely unfair to be on the receiving end. Case in points;

  • Pharah getting hit by Earthshatter despite being airborne
  • Doomfist PTR where every single angle of every single wall, destructible railing, map prop, resulted in a OSK.

At the very least these abilities are getting attention.

Widow hasn’t even gotten that.

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Yeah ok, so what do you classify Earthshatter as?
An ultimate ability, used to secure frags. It not doing that means it’s not working as intended just like Widowmaker grapple not working as intended.

And I’d say Doomfist is buggier, just cause the movement part works, doesn’t mean the damage parts aren’t buggier. And I’m pretty sure the Doomfist bug thread was bigger than 7 documentable bugs.

Not saying Widowmaker isn’t buggy, but easily not the buggiest

I think Widow needs a complete rework.

She is so odd where she is at the moment. Literally everything can counter to a degree. Unless you are some Widow master you generally get shut down pretty quickly.

But if you are good? You can pretty much shut down most of the enemy team all by yourself. Either way the majority of players who interact with her. Hate her.
And god help you if you get a mediocre Widow player.
Unlike other heroes that manage to be somewhat useful despite struggling. Widow players who can’t get those consistent hits are pretty much a disadvantage.

This is just plain old bad Hero design and with more and more heroes becoming dive like hammond and doomfist. Widow players good or bad are increasingly getting short end of the stick.

You seem to not understand what"bugginess" is…

Bugginess is far more nuanced than “it didn’t do what I wanted”. Bugginess is the susceptibility of failure. A failure to execute, not the seeming appearance of failure.

Earthshatter is cut and dry – it behaves in one way every single time, and if an enemy skirts on that fine line of fine-tuned thresholds where they might not be affected, that’s not a bug.

  • Press Q > spawn a “wave” of hitboxes in a cone shape at the first location where Reinhardt touches a standable surface after pressing Q > spawn animated decal showing the cracks in the ground > deduct ultimate charge > check for line of sight with barriers > apply damage and stun effect

Any time Earthshatter doesn’t work, it’s because of poor/incomplete design that isn’t taking into consideration all possible factors. Not because it’s actually buggy. There are only 2 possible points of failure – standable surface as the origin point for the cone, and the line of sight check with barriers.

The same goes for Doomfist’s Rocket Punch. When enemies slide on a wall instead of getting killed, it’s because they’re at a geometric 3D angle where the wall damage isn’t applied. All of the bugs associated with Rocket Punch are based on these angles, these thresholds. That’s not actually buggy – if you hit someone at a 31 degree angle against a wall, when the ability only affects 30 degree angles, then the wall damage isn’t supposed to be applied.

There’s also the fact that collision isn’t just boxes (even though hitbox implies that they’re cubes). Collision on a street lamp is actually a cylinder/capsule instead of a box, meaning that the angles are now comparing to oblique surfaces instead of head on.

Sure, it feels bad when they don’t work the way you want, but that’s the risk of having an “affects enemies” component to an ability. These aren’t actual bugs, and these two abilities still have a reasonably high success rate in spite of these thresholds being less-than-generous. These two abilities just “appear” to be buggy, when in reality it’s just a poor design of the ability and what the abilities proc on.

Widowmaker’s bugs actually ARE bugs. There’s multiple points of failure stemming for multiple behaviors of the ability. Unlike Earthshatter which operates one way every single time, Widow’s grappling hook is a tree of operations.

  • There’s an invisible auto-targeting system.
    • There’s a hierarchical system embedded into the auto-targeting system;
      1. Map prop brush - invisible brush volumes are painted around props to trigger highest priority in the hierarchy
      2. Ledge brush - ditto above, but instead of painted around props they’re painted on each ledge
      3. Destructible railings - ditto above, except instead of brushes, they’re just the destructible railings collision boxes
        • this might actually be tied for 2nd priority with ledge brushes because of how often you’re pulled to destructible railings
      4. I can’t confirm this, but I suspect that there’s a surface-normal parser that calculates when two collision boxes meet at opposing angles (like cliffsides and rocks and overlapping model geometry).
      5. Directly where you’re aiming (a flat wall, the ground)
        • There’s the player-specific “sensitivity slider” that introduces variability on all of the above auto-targeting system.
  • There’s the hook reel component, which is a continual physics impulse towards the hook’s location, which is happening alongside a continual gravity physics impulse. This is the difference between being reeled straight from ground level to a ledge, to being reeled while airborne while you’re still falling being similar to a Spiderman swing
  • There’s the swing-up-and-over component, which is yet another physics impulse that boosts you up to the ledge you’ve reeled to – it’s supposed to activate on all ledges that the hook auto-aims to.
  • There’s the refund ability on point-blank/out-of-range cast component.
  • There’s a line of sight check while casting the hook, where any map geometry that crosses in front of your crosshair will override and become the new destination of the hook.
  • There’s the drop component, where if there’s no ledge, it’ll just drop you.

All of these components are constantly fighting over each other. They all have varying degrees of influence, and each one of them is a significant point of failure, because they produce unexpected behaviors as evidenced by the giant list of video evidence listed in previous posts;

Earthshatter and Rocket Punch don’t have these separate behaviors depending on the environment it is used in. They don’t have an auto-targeting system. It doesn’t have a refund component when aimed squarely at a wall. They don’t have a physics impulse component.

We have video examples where something like the refund at point blank cast doesn’t actually proc; the swing-up-and-over despite autoaiming to that location doesn’t proc; the hook physics impulse sends you backwards instead of toward your destination; the auto-targeting proc-ing when the destination is out of range (even when there’s a ledge within range); the auto-targeting redirecting mid-cast as the hook’s cable is already out in front of you.

These fail to execute.

These are ACTUAL bugs. Not unpredictable interactions that couldn’t have been accounted for, that seem like bugs.

Again, you’re measuring impact. Not the susceptibility to fail. Not the points of failure. Not the shortcomings of multiple systems fighting over each other for priority.

Doomfist’s damage not proc-ing sucks. But it’s not nearly as buggy (read; numerically, quantifiably) as something that has 10+ individual points of failure that are all sub-optimally designed and don’t properly execute.

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“it doesn’t work like it’s meant to, nah that’s not a bug. It’s just not working”
Yeah Okay, thanks for the talk dude

The same goes for Roadhog Hook Issues.

When the hook patch notes?

Hack would like a word with you.

Seemingly a bug, and actually a bug ARE two different things.

By all accounts, a Rocket Punch that hits at 30 degrees, but doesn’t hit at 31 degrees, isn’t a bug. Even though it seems like a 30 degree hit, it’s 31. That’s not a bug.

I suppose it could be worse…at least they didn’t reduce her charge rate or range. I can live with two more seconds, but the incoming McCree/Soldier meta is going to be so…lame and even more anti-dive.

I wish they’d fix the hook. So many times I have died because it doesn’t work properly and I fall to the ground to my instant death from enemies waiting below. It’s pathetic. How could Roadhog’s hook once be so accurate that it could hook a Tracer around the bus, through the alley, next to the building, on the second floor; But Widow’s hook will bounce off a wall right in front of her…

The grapple has failed on me numerous times, and looking at the Overwatch Daily Moment youtube videos, many pro players had issue with the grapple as well. It is buggy and I want to see this fixed asap.

still no blue post, what a surprise! i think the biggest kick in the wools is when they add more heroes to the game while they can’t even be bothered to fix existing characters, especially issues that have existed, and have been constantly brought to their attention since beta.

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They did issue a bugfix in the most recent patch. See below;

It’s just map-specific fixes, but it’s something.