If you mindlessly blow cooldowns and dive alone with Genji you’re just going to die easily against remotely competent players.
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Have you played classic FPS games, which Overwatch is supposed to be a love-letter to (as self admitted by several developers in many pre-launch interviews)?
None of this “realism” applies to this genre of game that Overwatch is inspired by. Widow was meant to be a straight expy of UT’s sniper/Team Fortress Classic/Railgun in Q3A, with counter-measures in place to prevent spam.
Move to where, exactly? In Overwatch, there’s really only two designated sniper spots per objective point/choke that allows her to perform in her intended niche.
There is no new location. Once the first one gets too hot, you bail to the second one. And once the second one also gets too hot, then there’s no where to move to. You have to be in an unideal location that’s usually out in the middle with no health packs, doorways, or grapple hook points to rely on.
Even spots that could have been, aren’t allowed because Blizzard intentionally made all good potential sniping spots blockaded off by slippery barriers and invisible walls.
Again with the “real life”, it doesn’t matter.
In all games that feature a sniper, it’s the responsibility of enforcing a sightline and putting as much damage out there as possible. To which, Widowmaker already had built in counter-measures to sniper spam, it was just more responsive and allowed her to duck-and-weave.
I’m not against her being a glass cannon, for the record, but the game intentionally limits everything she could possibly do that being a glass cannon is a death sentence against competent players.
You basically have to rely on your team 100% of the time just to do your job. No other hero is like that.
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Issue #1 is also related to the fact that if you don’t have that cooldown timing, quickshots would be rife and Widow would be a hitscan choice over 76 and McCree. Perhaps not in all situations, but the last thing we want Overwatch to be is Call of Duty. So those limitations to her scoped capabilities do prevent that well.
Issue #2: Well to be fair this issue isn’t just pertaining to Widow. Dive can stuff up anyone, but players who are out of position or exposed, like Widow is usually when positioned, are affected the most.
However, this was used to advantage in a few pro matches where a Widow baited the dive, sacrificed herself so the team would go straight for the healers. I don’t recall who it was, but there was an analysis video on YouTube regarding the tactic.
Issue #3: You have different attitudes. I personally think it’s nice to have an FPS where snipers aren’t always mandatory. Like a lot of defensive heros, she is situational and does have on of the higher skill requirements to be effective.
Additionally, one of my diamond mates who plays Widowmaker says to be an effective WM, you need a great amount of situational awareness and preparedness for the potential dive on you.
I don’t see any buffs that could benefit WM against dive, she is in the same boat as the rest of us.
Outside of dive, she is a relatively well balanced character, highly lethal in the right hands.
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OMG Thank you SO MUCH for posting this :)
. You are a wonderful individual to post this! There is a lot of hatred for the Character and it is so nice of you to post this! Thank you!
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You’re wrong about Widow being the biggest victim. She’s never a terrible pick if you’re good with her.
Ana is the real victim. She’s quite literally next to useless.
But other than that, good post.
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This is a really common misconception.
She already has a cooldown.
Quickshots have never been viable, her kit has intentional counter-measures to prevent quickscopes from ever being effective.
- Widowmaker at launch, had a fixed firerate of one shot every 0.5s. At her maximum firerate, her bullets only dealt 15 damage (30 on a headshot), for a maximum DPS of 30 damage (60 with headshots).
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You had to wait a full second to reach 100%, in order to do maximum damage (150 bodyshot, 300 headshot). For most heroes, the damage was only lethal at 0.63s after scoping-in (and only with a headshot).
- Her max firerate with dangerous damage would have been 1 shot every 1.13s, with a little bit of strafing between each shot.
-
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This was extremely informative and I 1000% agree with all of this.
Between
Winston.
Dva.
Tracer.
Orisa’s Shield.
Rein’s shield.
Sombra.
Genji.
Brigitte Ult.
Shield gen/armor strat.
The fact that you can’t be effective unless you’re godly and you can’t practice because everyone gets mad at you.
The negativity you get just for PICKING her in the first place–
its so hard to play Widow now. And she is my favorite character second only to Genji. ![:confused:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/confused.png?v=5" ":confused:")
Like. It feels like there’s just no place for snipers in the game anymore.
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Have you met Mercy? Also Mccree? He’s 10 times easier to pin down. Lots of other heroes too.
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cough Ana cough
Widowmaker is actually playable enough right now on many maps. Ana… really isn’t unless you’re playing several tiers below your true rank.
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Mercy has GA and Valkyrie. She should never be by herself unless her team gets wiped, in which case she should get wiped.
She’s still capable of fulfilling her job as a single-target main healer without her team peeling for her.
McCree has a flashbang, a reload reset, and a panic button in FtH. He can hold his own with those tools alone, he actually has a fallback/an answer to being dove upon.
Widow does not have that luxury of having an answer to being dove upon. Aim punch makes it impossible to do her job if she stands her ground, and grappling hook doesn’t work half the time that she will die either to the player diving upon her as she tries to escape, or to environmental deaths. Other times she manages to successfully grapple away, she’s usually at low enough health that a Tracer or Genji or even a well-placed Helix from S76 will clean her up.
Sorry, I don’t agree with this.
Widow has been suffering from dive long before Ana was even a character in the game.
Ana’s usefulness dwindling not necessarily because of how popular dive is, but because she’s being outclassed by Moira for secondary healer, and can’t prevent teamwipes like Zenyatta can from Grav Blade, or Earthshatter+other DPS ults.
She’s a very far cry from not having an answer to being dove upon. She has some sustain, and a life-saving CC ability in her kit if she is dove upon, provided her teammates aren’t idiots that wake up the monkey/D.Va.
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Buffing Widow would make her OP at high ranks. Windowmaker needs an incredibly high skill floor and is unforgiving to unskilled players because she can one-shot squishy heroes from a safe distance. A good enough Windowmaker can effectively shut down an entire team. You cannot buff a hero that already has that potential unless you want to remove their one-shot capabilities.
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Everyone says so.
No one can explain how.
Not true in the slightest, but do realize that removing one-shot has been on the table since her original nerf… not by me, but by a collective voice of the initial Widow mains around launch period.
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You are really under selling Grapple as well as her ability to control sight lines and hit the divers before they have any chance of even reaching her, all while overselling the abilities of other heroes.
All I can really say is, watch OWL. Watch high level Widow streamers. You’ll understand what people’s concerns with her are then.
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Watching OWL is irrelevant to ladder play. The ladder doesn’t have players who regularly practice against each other, with a supervising coach, for 40+ hour workweeks to engrain synergy between teammates.
The closest we can ever get to that is repeatedly running a 6-stack, and even then, it’s still a test of adaptability and improvisation. You can’t know how an enemy team plays the way Korea would know America, in order to implement a disengage strat like they did in the World Cup '17.
Most people on the ladder don’t even know the names of callouts. Even in Master and GM streams, people still say arbitrary directions like left, behind, top right, etc.
Just because she can pop off in OWL does not mean she’s in a good spot. Period.
It just means that OWL pros are good, despite her shortcomings.
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You lost me at community attitude is part of her issue. What should blizz do? Nerf community?
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Have you ever watched a pro play Widowmaker? She can already shut down an entire team pretty much by herself. Buffing her would allow her to be even more oppressive than she already is.
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If the attitude is so prevalent that Blizzard will never give her attention, then it’s a significant issue.
Not all issues have solutions. That’s why they’re called issues, not “problems”.
Have you ever watched a pro play any hero? They can already shut down an entire team pretty much by themselves. Buffing them would allow them to be even more oppressive than they already are.
Widow’s oppressiveness has nothing to do her kit and everything to do with individual skill and repeated consistency.
Even the best SF4 pro can win a set against another pro using Dan Hibiki, the worst character in SF4.
That’s a testament to their skill, practice, and dedication, not to the fact that the joke character is actually balanced and meta.
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So, if a lot of people agree on something then blizzard should just ignore it?
If there’s a fair and reasonable argument for a character to get help, is proposed, and the masses drown out those arguments by simple fearmongering without even testing it?
If the masses repeatedly parrot what they’ve heard, that this character can’t be buffed or “they’ll be too good on the high end”, despite the fact that there are plenty of buff ideas that have been proposed in the past that don’t necessarily impact the high end as much as the low end?
If there’s a ridiculous gated skill floor that the community wants to maintain for no other reason than to never have to deal with that character, that the character can’t even get one concession or safety added to their kit to at least make that skill floor slightly more accessible?
If the core audience of a character has to deal with needless toxicity & report abuse surrounding their hero pick, to the point where they want to reasonably address and fix that hero so that there is no longer any needless toxicity?
Yeah. I think so.
Symmetra is getting another rework for specifically these reasons… I don’t see why Widow shouldn’t be granted that same opportunity.
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Yes. Pro ow is back to being a contest between who has the best widowmaker.
Just look at today’s fusion vs gladiators match. Two whole maps were nothing but both teams waiting to see who would win the widow duel. Shurfore or Carpe. The rest of their teams barely mattered.