Contrary to popular belief aiming with Widowmaker isn’t that hard, in fact Widowmaker is literally designed to have the easiest time headshotting people out of every hero in the game as she is hitscan and has a scope.
The reason that Widowmaker is hard is that she is designed to only be viable if you can consistently land headshots, otherwise she is trash. She does not have abilities or alt fires to mitigate the lack of dps/value if she isn’t landing headshots.
The other sniper, Hanzo, he isn’t designed like this! Hanzo in fact is a lot harder to aim with on a per shot basis, however, he is not designed to only be viable if you are landing headshots. Hanzo has abilities that mitigate his lack of consistency/“skill”. He can also “spam” his shots a lot more as he requires no reload.
I am not saying that Hanzo requires more skill than Widowmaker because he doesn’t, however, people have to understand what makes each hero hard. Hanzo’s projectiles are a lot harder to land than what most people give him credit for, yes abilities like Storm arrow largely mitigate that but you have to consider the number of arrows missed to understand the difficulty of landing them in the first place.
You are, Indeed right. Hitscan scope is probably the easiest thing to use for shooting anything in any FPS. In this game however, the enemy has way too many way of defending themselves. So her difficulty comes mostly from positioning and ability to find ways beyond the defenses.
That’s simply not true! If it didn’t make it easier other games with Snipers would never equip a scope. Easier to see head = Easier headshots.
Once again, just aiming with Widow isn’t hard. If a Widowmaker was allowed to sit in the backline, Widowmaker would have by far the easiest time hitting shots. Widowmaker is hard because every shot has to be a headshot otherwise she is not getting value and requires great positioning skill because no dive hero will ever allow her to just sit in the backline making shots all day.
Really? So if Tracer is running around you in circles at point blank range, you’re saying a scope makes it easier to headshot her? Nope. Scope zooms in, meaning you need to move the mouse further to track the head, meaning harder headshots. Easier to see =/= easier to shoot.
Nevermind all of the things that make sniping difficult…
Barriers biding time to recover cooldowns for hypermobile tanks and divers
Tanks having shorter cooldowns than Grapple Hook
1.67 second longer cooldown time than advertised on Grapple Hook, extending all dives on her, letting them get free damage
Recoil causing aim to shift a few degrees after every single sniper shot, instead of returning to the last aimed locarion
A penalty to firerate if you attempt to snap ADS (ADS, descope, ADS) which exists in no other games featuring a sniper or ADS tech
A penalty to movespeed if you attempt to snap ADS, because this game has no movespeed acceleration (and every other game featuring a sniper with ADS has acceleration)
Strafe spam without movement acceleration
Aim punch, which scales with damage received
Falloff buff for other hitscan which doubled received countermarksman damage from range, making aim punch even worse
Inconsistent jump landing aim punch that procs off of height, but also on all grappling hook slingshots regardless of height
Bullet spread that procs on the second shot of every burst of SMG, requiring 1/3 of a second to reset to zero, making it ineffectual, inconsistent mess for cleaning up kills initiated from sniping.
Now with falloff, if that wasnt enough of an insult.
0% sniper damage that deals less than an SMG burst while consuming more ammo than an SMG burst over a longer period of time than an SMG burst, which definitively makes the SMG better at cleaning up kills
Armor escalating many heroes to survive headshots
Hitscan truncation the makes it impossible to secure headshots on characters whose animations cause limbs to cover their face
Map geometry causing jittery aim when walking along certain surfaces
Zero consistency in potentially traversable map geometry
Infrasight color matching the color of enemy glowing attacks, which enables some attacks to obscure vision rendering Infrasight useless
Post process volumes on maps that feature bloom reducing sniping visibility
Occlusion Culling pop-in, because who needs to see a target after you peek an enemy?
But sure, sniping in Widow totally is much easier than every other sniper in every other game that doesn’t have a laundry list of issues needlessly tacked on…
No, why did you write such a long reply if you didn’t bother reading my post??
Widow is by no means easy! Widow having the easiest timing headshotting out of all heroes, does not mean that it is easy to do so, it is just easier to do than other heroes.
Add on the fact that Widow can then only fire once every 1 second and she is incredibly bad defensively with bad dps output and escape. Yer, she is hard! However, you are missing the point! Individually Widow shots have the easiest time headshotting a hero.
Put it this way, if every hero had exactly 1 shot to land a headshot, Widowmaker would by far have the easiest time doing so!
I dunno why, but sniping in OW feels clunky and unreliable compared to other FPS’s out there. I have no problems in other games with accuracy and can get kills consistently… yet this title I can only really go for body shots 90% of the time.
Eh, if you don’t want to use your brain you can kinda just spam shots in the enemy teams direction as hanzo and somehow frag, widow needs to at least select targets or she wont hit anything.
Ana’s needles on teammates are massive comparative to her hitscan shots on enemies.
Hanzo’s arrow hitbox may be the same radius as Genji’s shurikens, but they also have depth to them.
Walking into the tail end of the arrow as it flies by you will still cause a hit… combined with variable arcs and speeds, this gives an arrow substantially more suppression over an area than any other projectile in the game, and gives it more opportunities for ‘favor the shooter’ to trigger a hit.
Furthermore, because of the shape of the arrow, it may even have a differently shaped collision box. An elongated pyramid rotated 45 degrees so the base makes a diamond shape would have substantially more reach against strafing enemies while still having the same radius as capsule or sphere.