When the most effective counter against a character is the same character their design is bad.
It’s that simple.
I’m not saying she has no other counters, I’m saying that Widow is the best Widow counter
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There are lots of counters to Widow?
Anything with a shield to effectively hide your team when they are still in los for their own shots.
Winston and DVA to get in her face.
Tracer, Genji, and Sombra to just make her move.
Mei to put walls between her and your team.
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if they could get close yea, but do they ever get this close to her ?
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I think she needs slight scope waver. I don’t care if she’s augmented or not.
Not really? I mean, I play a LOT of low gravity where Widowmaker reigns. And yeah the best counter is having a better Widowmaker but there are a lot of characters that mitigate her ability to take shots.
No, that’s just common sense.
A charcter that can one hit kill people from long distances will naturally be a good counter to themselves.
Take a look at TF2’s Sniper.
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i dont know how high your rank is but here in mid high diamond the widows i see are not that easy to get to … even with double barrier … and the 2 cp and hybrid plus payload maps are almost always sniper friendly too opened and they always see you coming … low gravity ? what about comp ?
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This discussion is in the general discussion forum, not competitive discussion forum so I don’t assume that a person asking about counters is speaking exclusively about competitive matches.
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How do you feel about Reinhardt metas?
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Just get in her face, omfg, I AM A HEALER MAIN, and I am so sick of seeing this bs about widow, your tears mean literally nothing and your statement is patently untrue, she is countered by MERCY IN VALK,FFS. She’s not scary, just go squish her 4head.
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How many times do we have to say that these “counters” are not effective at actually countering her due to how her kit is?
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Shields have currently more than halved her pickrate and severely cut her winrate too. Seems they are quite effective. Also by counters, no it is not always guaranteed to make a character useless, just harder or tradeoffs. Widow usually ends up in a spot of trading kills in dive comps, cause she is gonna die to those dives, it is just a matter of if she got more value, before she died, than her opponents got from killing her.
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Counters dont have to KILL her. They just have to make her less effective. A lot of the times that can be as simple as throwing Moira’s purple orb into the corner from which she’s trying to shoot. Other times, that can be Orisa or Mei keeping a shield/wall in front of her team.
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Sure, double-shield has halved her pickrate
So have a dozen other heroes who aren’t effective against shields
And they’re nerfing the 2 prominent shield characters (out of 3, mind you) too
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Most effective. Like just shoot her head with widow. Cant be more simple
Oh, I rather like her tall leggy blonde knockout look that she’s sporting as Nova or redhead Kerrigan.
She’s VERY well-designed. Especially if you’re a guy O_O
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The mirror problem is merely a symptom.
The real problem is her total lack of counter-play. So, if you watch the following videos, you get the definition as set by one of the lead designers of LoL:
- Counter Play - Making Multiplayer Fun for the Opponent - Extra Credits - YouTube
- Riot's Counterplay and Teamplay in Multiplayer Game Design - YouTube
Say what you will, but for all of their faults Riot has done more to academically advance our knowledge of multiplayer game-design than anyone short of Richard Garfield himself.
So the definition of Counterplay is roughly as follows:
Counterplay is the availability of responses a player may make when another player takes an action.
In order to be considered “counterplay” a response must be:
- Possible
- Clear
- Interesting
Widowmaker’s problem is that she doesn’t introduce anything new. There is nothing you can do that you could not do before a Widowmaker has taken the field, and in fact your total available responses are less than what they were without her to consider.
Widowmaker takes. She restricts. That’s all she does, and it’s why her design is overall bad (Hanzo is not much better. He’s just generally been less impactful overall and nobody noticed him until after he got SA).
Take Ashe as an example of a hero who introduces good counter-play.
If your opponent goes Ashe you gain the following options you did not have before:
- Bunch up on purpose to draw out dynamite.
- Counter dynamite with AoE healing from Moira, or Lucio and quick-charge their ult for a teamfight.
- Watch out for Ashe to call down BoB and CC him or focus him off the table to negate the ult charge you gave to Ashe, and then go in with your support ult.
- Watch out for Ashe to get damage boosted by Mercy to jump on the Mercy.
- Mercy is likely to Damage boost Ashe to give Ashe the ability to one-shot-kill 200 health squishies.
- Drive Ashe to range and wait for Mercy to move to damage boost Ashe before focusing the opponents’ other support because they will be more vulnerable with their mercy at a distance focusing on the Ashe.
- Counter-pick the Ashe with Winston, D.Va, or Hammond to shut her down and negate the selection.
- Use the pressure created by the counter-pick along with boops and other re-positioning tools to isolate the enemy support or peeler that comes to save the Ashe and kill the two of them 6v2.
In exchange for these options you can…
- Not clump too much because of Dynamite.
- Be ready to deal with a 7v6 fight because of BoB.
- Stay out of the open because of Ashe’s scoped shots.
- Mind your positioning because of Ashe’s Coach Gun.
- Don’t peek without a healer able to heal you, and make sure you can survive a 170 damage crit.
Compare to Widowmaker you can:
- Stay out of the open because of Widowmaker’s scoped shots and stay behind a barrier.
- Mind your pathing on the flanks because of Widowmaker’s venom mines.
- Don’t peek.
- Don’t flank when she could have her ultimate.
In return she introduces the following play options:
- Pick Winston, D.Va, or Hammond and pressure her if she:
- does not have access to grapple
- Can not crit you while you close
- Is not close enough to her team to get support
See the difference? Widowmaker really only gives you access to one choice: dive tank her when she’s vulnerable, and it will always have a large number of caveats that can prevent it from working depending on the skill of the tank and the skill of the widowmaker (turning your big monkey butt towards widowmaker so she can’t headshot you mid-leap is a LOT more difficult than it sounds, especially if you don’t have enough hours on winston to be comfortable with him as a tank first).
Because her introduced counter-play is so sparse, this naturally lends itself to mirroring which is a natural counter for any hero. If you pick the same hero you want to counter, the match-up will come down to which one of you is better at that hero and little else. Especially when dealing with a hero like Widowmaker who has unlimited range and an extremely powerful ranged attack.
She needs more counter-play. She needs a redesign that adds more options for her opponents. It’s why making simple adjustments to her like decreasing her re-fire rate won’t do anything, because it simply will not introduce any possible, new, interesting choices for you and your team to make when she takes action and makes decisions in-game.
She needs change at the macro level. She can even keep the one-shot-kills. She just needs some mechanic that can give her opposing team some strategic or tactical options that will put her on the back foot for a few seconds (on the order of 20-30) to a few minutes (1-3 depending on the player skill of the widowmaker).
Anything less is just a band-aid that will leave a mirror match as the most effective counter simply due to a lack of counter-play options.
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I can’t imagine the response you’d get if you posted this exact thread about the sniper on the TF2 forums
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