I can’t say that I belong to the upper quarter of the player base, but there are 3 other quarters who, if they have experience similar to mine, just don’t have fun playing as or against Widowmaker.
She has a railgun, but her kit isn’t fine because it isn’t fun to play with. It does the “job”, but it could be so much better and so much more fun to play.
If venom mines could talk, they’d be begging to be culled.
Just because the upper 25% of the playerbase are good at Widowmaker, that’s still 75% of people who aren’t. And that’s a problem, in my eyes, that needs attention.
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I thought a bit and decided to address terratunaz as well.
All of these sound like good ideas and I support them, but I’m a bit more radical and I’d prefer a complete overhaul of Widowmaker - everything she had, just tear it up, go back to lore, concept art and so on and start over.
There are plenty of other videogames where there are snipers and you could grab inspiration from there, but I think we might get away with just operating on several key concepts that Overwatch offers itself.
- Team game, so team impact is important
- Spider fetishism
I would prefer that Widowmaker keeps her absurd railgun of doom because you shouldn’t play around with snipers and the areas they cover, but I’d also like a bit more spider-related stuff.
Spiders thrive in nature with foresight, instinct and lots, lots, LOTS of preparation.
I think Venom Mine could be redone a bit - harder to set up (make it directly attachable to surfaces at point-blank, make it a timed thing, so on), but so much more rewarding when it’s tripped. How to balance that exactly is up to whoever’s actually getting paid to balance videogames, but you have tools such as
- Movement penalties to the victim (slowdowns, paralyzes, disabling mobility abilities)
- Intel penalties to the victim (giving away the position of the victim to Widowmaker herself and, by extension, maybe other ways to penalize sneakiness temporarily)
- Damage to the victim
You can adjust these three and end up in at least something that’s related to spiders, and maybe it’ll actually be fun to play with. If you want to take out Widowmaker by flanking, you should be very aware that the spider has set up her webs of lies and traps, and any slip-up turns the hunter into the hunted.