Widow is destroying Master, GM, TOP500 and OWL

Which is who, and how does Bliz do that? I agree with your basic idea, I just have no idea how to actually accomplish that.

One thing I think would help is to allow heroes at lower levels and (around) Master+ to be different. Not drastically different, but enough to tip the balance for the best players, while not destroying lower level play.

Like would giving McCree and Soldier longer ranged damage help? I’m not sure, but I often play soldier and at lower levels I can often at least chase a Widow away. With more range a hit scan DPS at higher levels might be able to do the same.

Nerf Mercy’s damage boost and suddenly Widow and Hanzo would become a lot less scary.

Both of them could use their own nerfs as well, but I’d prefer if they all got nerfed.

So you want a 0 dps game?

You can’t really adjust Widowmaker with her current kit, though… She’s either going to be overwhelming, or underwhelming. I think she needs a new kit entirely, imo… Her new ultimate could be 15s of Infrasight + Scoping. Her Venom Mine could do more damage and, if triggered, she can press E (by default) again to enter Scope mode for 5s (the duration of Venom Mine). Grappling Hook can allow her to hang off ceilings and walls to give her vantage points and maneuverability with her standard weapon, which resets on kills?

Probably a terrible idea, but I hate Widowmaker as it is and I feel like there’s no way to fix her with her current kit.

Well right now, individual a dive heroes are is being run more than Brigitte but your still getting these complaints.

Brig hasn’t been in comp for three full months, my dude.

Unless you consider D.Va to be purely a dive hero (which I don’t) there’s only one rank where any dive hero is being used more than Brig, and that’s GM.

If you do consider D.Va to be a pure dive hero, then bronze through gold is absolutely rife with dive meta.

Sombra absolutely can counter a Widow.

What’s the point of complaining about meta if you’re not talking GM? That’s what the game should be balanced around.

In GM this week, D.va, Tracer, Genji, and Winston were all run more than Brigitte.

Also I never said Brigitte had been around 3 months…

Only if you play her.

Most people aren’t (she needs dev-love)

Agreed. Remove Counter Strike: Overwatch, please. It ruins the originality of the game.

You responded to the original post saying she wasn’t destroying. Then you go on to wave the aim elitist flag, and imply that a person who is mechanically better should practically always win in an fps. As if this game were battlefield or something. It isn’t, it’s Overwatch.

I feel she is very strong to the point where she is destroying (though not as much as Hanzo). When the best counter to a hero is that same hero, usually there is an issue. Don’t get me wrong, she SHOULD be rewarded for insane mechanical skill, but she should not be without weakness. Right now she has amazing kill power AND amazing mobility (not to mention a flanker detector, but I won’t get into that because venom mine is blatantly fine). She is a sniper and should be able to put out insane damage, but she should also be vulnerable to being jumped on, but right now she simply isn’t.

I suppose that, once again, we disagree here.

No, it was Junkrat. When is this data even from anyway? It doesn’t say anywhere on the graph.

I’m fairly certain that 20% means that she has a 20% chance of being on any given team. This puts her at a 2 in 5 chance. 40% not 20%. (Though it was hard to find exactly what this percentage means).

Either that or it is total minutes on any given hero. It is hard to tell because I could not find anywhere on the site that explained what those percentagee actually mean. I looked at the most recent one and it said that Reinhardt had an 85% pickrate in GM, and to me it seems as though the odds are much higher that he is picked at least once (even if only for a minute) on any given one side.

Either way, the site doesn’t go into great detail as to what their statistics even mean (at least from what I saw, though I admittedly didn’t look overly hard). Even so, it is easy to cherry pick data and articles that support our own claims. I could easily do the same by throwing pro data at you from Winston’s lab. I’m not going to do that though, because that is something called confirmation bias.

Whatever the case of the data, consider that Widow is competing with 15 other DPS, and that those DPS slots are sometimes used for extra tanks or healers, that’s pretty significant. For this reason, DPS heroes rarely have ludicrously high pickrate unless something is drastically wrong. Right now, Hanzo has a pretty high pickrate and before Brig Tracer had a big one. Widow’s is not anywhere near their pickrates, but that does not mean she isn’t a little bit overpowered.

All I’m suggesting is that her mobility be reduced slightly to give her a more clear weakness. Her weakness is supposed to be close ranged combat, but her mobility is so good that she can just always get away from it anyway. A 1 or 2 second cooldown increase on her grappling would be more than sufficient to solve this issue.

I don’t see how people could refute that it might be necessary at this point.

widow is ruining fun

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Well, perhaps true, maybe not all dps heroes should be like that. There is room for high skill, yet non-mechanical skill-based dps heroes (like Mei and Sombra I guess?). They can mechanically outperform someone but still lose fairly because their focus isn’t on the mechanics. At any rate, if a hero whose only output is mechanically intensive damage mechanically outperforms you, there would be little point to that hero if that damage wasn’t valuable.

But why does she need a weakness? Why shouldn’t the best way to beat a Widowmaker to be better than that Widowmaker? Shouldn’t this game be a contest of skill at the top end? I’ll admit it’s problematic that the only heroes capable of contesting her other than snipers aren’t viable right now, and other high skill heroes like McCree having falloff so harsh that he can’t kill her. However, I do disagree that a hero shouldn’t be their own best counter. That’s usually fine provided other heroes provide different value, giving you a reason to pick them still. For instance, Reinhardt is a fantastic Rein counter. All his attacks go through barriers, charge is devastating, and earthshatter is usually only reasonably blocked by a Reinhardt barrier. Despite that, Winston is a valuable hero because he does a job Reinhardt doesn’t. Widow being valuable for burst damage and being great for killing Widows is fine, provided that S76 being great at sustained fire provides similar value (which is where the issue comes in).

http://www.omnicmeta.com/2018/03/overwatch-hero-meta-report-pc-mar-22-18.html

And true, I meant that you’d be facing her in 1 out of 5 games. But still, a hero having a ~20% pickrate is really not huge. I would argue that the pickrate of viable dps heroes are slightly inflated due to the fact that there are so many useless or mega-niche dps heroes out there. There may be 15 dps heroes, but that includes the likes of Bastion, Reaper and Doomfist. Widowmaker is also a hero that I am happy to see be more useful than the likes of Junkrat in grandmasters, too.

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Every hero needs to have a weakness, or else they will become too good in literally any situation. I think the game should not have heroes like that. For instance, though Rein is strong in the meta right now, Reinhardt lacks range and mobility (specifically vertical). He excels at brawling and defending his team in a deathball, and also while pushing through chokes, but what he does well in that area is made up for by his tremendous weaknesses and team reliance. This allows for counter-play.

To be clear though, I do think widow does have a weakness (i.e. close range fighting), but that weakness is covered by her mobility so well that it is almost non-existent.

Me too. I don’t want to see her be garbage. I want her to be strong, just not so strong that she doesn’t have a weakness.

I will concede that this is a good point.

No, I agree. Let me be clear, I am 100% fine with her kill potential and damage output as it currently stands.

Yeah, you’re right.

I think… the ideal situation I want to see is one where someone with immense skill is beaten by someone using either a larger amount of the same skill, or a large amount of a different skill.

For instance, a great tf2 sniper was countered by two things: an even better sniper or a great spy (who basically had to outsmart his opposition with stealth). It wasn’t the case that you could just switch classes and automatically win, but the spy challenged him with a totally different skillset and was barely affected by the sniper’s aim.

With Widowmaker, example ways I would like to see her having counterplay would be:

  1. Aiming better than her
    or
  2. Getting the drop on her due to her lowered awareness when scoped
    or
  3. Out manoeuvring her with skill-based mobility to remain close (not many examples of this in OW, but think Lucio or Doomfist if they were balanced differently)

I wasn’t a fan of when she had a 12s cooldown and there was no real way to survive a Winston jumping at you and holding m1 in your general direction. A weakness of that extent just discounts skill, rather than being skill based itself. Things like a Genji sneaking up on a Widowmaker and dashing after her as she grapples away are much better forms of outplaying imo.

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Sure yeah, I can get behind what you just said. Well argued (GG).

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It’s not that people have only just begun to realise it, it’s that people on the forum will throw a hissy fit if you point out that Widow is a trash tier design that will always fit horribly into this game.

No? I just want variety. That can’t happen when Hanzo and Widow dominate.

DF?

Hanzo?

Both are very high skill cap (Hanzo slightly lower skill floor, though).

That said, no need to nerf them - Brigette punishes dive too hard is all. Her and Hanzo aren’t getting Genji/Winston flanked every other second.

This is true for a heavy aim based hero. But when you have a former silver player reaching GM playing Braguette, it sounds like he succeed because he herited billions of $ from old grandma.