For anyone that likes to say that an 8 second cooldown was too strong, you clearly have never played Widow. That 8 second cooldown is, in practice, 9.833 seconds – it was effectively, already 10 seconds.
First thing first. Grappling Hook does not go on cooldown right away.
Unlike almost every character in the game where the cooldown starts immediately, the exact moment you release the button, Widowmaker’s grapple hook doesn’t go on cooldown until after it has stopped reeling.
And it doesn’t start reeling, until after the cast has completed.
Grapple hook has 2 parts; cast and reel.
Casting
The cast time it takes to fire and latch onto a target. This is anywhere between 0.1-0.833s cast time, depending on the target distance. Since most players aren’t looking to shoot the grappling hook at a point blank target, and everyone takes time to spin around to find a suitable target, that cast ends up taking roughly about a second (especially on console where you are limited by your turning radius).
note
- The bugs present on Grapple Hook (which, by the way, are not fixable using the sensitivity slider) make the ability so cumbersome that players in GM resort to casting at the ground a few feet away to slingshot, which would cut down the time by at least half.
- However, this doesn’t save much time at all because they typically aim at the ground nearest their healers/a health pack (because they’ve been dived upon by an enemy attacker). The time it takes to coordinate that is still lengthy.
Reel
The Grapple Hook also has a reel time. At the farthest ranges of the hook (20-something meters), it takes exactly 1.0s to reel to that target. The hook’s autoaim often procs at targets near the outer limits of its range, beyond her control.
Slingshotting can help, where you jump mid-reel to cancel out of the reel. It saves a bit of time. But slingshotting also opens up some risk of failing to reach a ledge.
(hidden, third timer)
Because the grapple hook’s auto aim often likes to tease you (literally like a bully) by having the cable go to an auto-aimed target that’s just a tiny bit out of reach, only to not latch onto it, it forces the hook to be recast. That means that the cast time can double, or even triple. And in that time, especially with a Monkey riding on your coattails, you’re dead.
This is why so many Widow players just give up and stand still when Monkey pounces on them.
On the other side of the fence, if you play with the slider turned low (you can’t turn it to 0 because 10 is the lowest you can go), the cast time is also extended, because you have to be looking directly at the target ledge for a successful cast… you have exactly one default-sized circle crosshair of tolerance, if you’re off by a pixel when you press the cast button, your hook hits thin air.
Oh and it’s buggy…
The hook has a huge swath of bugs that make it the buggiest ability in the game.
- Argue all you want about Sombra, Rein, and Doomfist having buggy abilities, but Widow’s grappling hook is, factually and numerically, the buggiest ability in the game;
- While Hack, Earthshatter, and Rocket Punch might not assign effects to enemies in some situations, at least some part of their abilities work with 100% reliability.
- Every single component of Grapple Hook’s components has bugs.
- Every single one of these has a bug related to them, and half of these are map-specific – what might be fine on Gibraltar, suddenly doesn’t work on Eichenwalde.
The ability can literally lead you to your death for no reason.
When other abilities fail and you die, that’s because it has an element of risk being directed at an enemy. Moreover, at least there’s a visible indication that some sort of shenanigans caused the failure.
Widow’s hook fails for no explicable reason. It’s a hazard to herself. You have no clue if it will actually work this time, or if it’ll decide to pull you to a floodlight or a phone booth… entire vertical areas of maps are inaccessible because of the hook.
No other ability is that much of a liability.
Widow mains have literally picked up a habit of compensating for every single hook by slingshotting every single time in order to course-correct for the hook’s misbehavior. Doing so means that they don’t land as quickly to their destination. They waste dozens of second every game to ensure that they have at least some air control to get close to where they wanted to go.
And now it’s being nerfed.
At 10 seconds, the hook is effectively a 12+ second cast.
This doesn’t even take into consideration other bugs that she has, like the hitscan misprediction bug that actually (really, no joke) causes missed shots (because of the sniper’s first-person camera recoil), or the rendering occlusion bug where enemies are temporarily invisible (especially at lower framerates) when rounding a corner.
And this also doesn’t even consider the fact the upcoming falloff changes which nerf her considerably;
- she now has falloff, SMG is worse, she loses long range cleanup kill potential with descope>SMG burst fire (which was objectively faster and more damaging)
- other hitscan characters have more damage
- because other hitscan characters have more damage, the aim punch in scope when she gets hit will be stronger and more frequent
None of these changes are welcome.
At the very least, bugfix her before nerfing her.
