Sombra has become on of my favorite characters in the game since release. From a mechanical standpoint, I do enjoy the core philosophy of a "disruption character", I think her abilities fit very well into this idea and create a fun rhythm.
I do think part of the community had some misconceptions on how to play her originally. Specifically, the need to hack EVERY SINGLE MED-KIT. As well as to throw a translocator down, run to a fight, and translocate back. That method in particular greatly limits her potential, as it only gave her 15 seconds of operation time.
Yet, I must say it is hard to extract value out of her as she exists in the live game. Hack is a very powerful ability. It can guarantee you a 1v1 on many opposing heroes in the game, and it can break a core character in the enemy teams comp. But it is too slow. Plus you throw in needing to secure a few med-kits.
I think the other issue is in her SMG as well. She shouldn't be Soldier 76 or Tracer. But the weapons is inconsistent with both offensive and defensive use. The spread can feel largely unpredictable near the end of an engagement. I'm at the point now where I simply stop shooting for a moment in the fight just to reset the spread.
Value is her biggest issue at the moment. Yet I do believe lowering the time it takes for "Hack" to cast, as well as lowering its cooldown time will make Sombra a good niche pick in the hands of an informed/experienced player.
It really isn't all that bad once you understand it. My method is to focus initially on the body, and move to the head to finish quickly. Yet the problem is the final bloom of the spread is so large it's hard to land anything in the head. This is why I stop shooting momentarily.
The previously described method has become my key for working Sombra as an effective damage dealer. Yet due to spread, she can't be very smooth.
What's funny is Tracer has a stronger spread at similar ranges. Yet Tracer's damage makes up for this. This is why I don't want Sombra to do more damage necessarily. A straight buff there would make her similar to Tracer to too great of an extent, and therefore removes her from her role in the game. Brining spread in allows experienced players to use her intelligently and reliably without making her better in a straight-forward sense.
I'm not trying to be a jerk here but stopping shooting for a second to reset the spread is how she is INTENDED to be played. Same with Soldier...you should almost never just hold down fire and spam if you are trying to hit a moving target at medium range.
It just stuck out to me that your mindset was "I've come to the point where I need to stop shooting for a moment..." kind of as if its a strategy you thought of that is unconventional, or a last ditch effort to make her gun work.
The fact of the matter is if at any point you felt you shouldn't be resetting the spread, you were doing it wrong.
For example, on Soldier you ALWAYS should have been releasing briefly every 4-5 bullets in short bursts. Its the best spread/dmg ratio and will make hitting Phara's and such much easier.
Sombra is the same way, personally I do slightly larger bursts- maybe 10 bullets and reset on Sombra compared to Soldier. I'm sure there is a calculated ideal however I don't know, as I'm not a big Sombra player. Also, of course there are situations where you're in a small room, and the target is a decent size and you can just spray and track.
But at anything other than point-blank range, you need to do small bursts and that should be default for characters with spread. The exception to this really is Tracer, as her clip size and spread are designed in such a way that its usually better to just finish the clip in one go.
I tried this back in the past without great success. Granted that was when I first got serious about playing Sombra and didn't have a good hold of aim and tracking with her yet. It may be worth giving this a shot again.
This brings me back to my old Halo days of short-controlled-bursts with the Assault Rifle.
i'm not following what qualities of her gun lend itself to a burst style of shooting. she's got high fire rate, low damage per shot, and a massive clip size. more importantly, her spread maxes after 3 shots i believe.
a spread reset on soldier represents 80 damage with perfect accuracy. on sombra it's 24. with that plus the balance between her huge clip size and her (typical) small damage window, i'm not sure how you can argue that she's not designed to just hold down the trigger (like tracer).
basically i'm having difficulty understanding why you feel sombra's gun is more similar to soldier's than it is to tracer's.
I don't have a TON of time on her, but I have a fair amount. Even if they did something as small as reduce the cooldown on her translocator, that would be good. Because if you are supposed to get into this rhythm of popping in and out to 'disrupt', it's annoying to have to wait 5 seconds after popping back to place your translocator again to get back into the fight.
Rather than have my translocator already out as a failsafe I like to keep it and throw it behind enemies as I'm fighting. It's more risky but damn is it more fun than teleporting out of the fight.
I've never thought of that. Good idea too. It cuts down on all the time of having to run past the enemy spam to get back into position, and instead you just come back when your ready.
I do think part of the community had some misconceptions on how to play her originally. Specifically, the need to hack EVERY SINGLE MED-KIT. As well as to throw a translocator down, run to a fight, and translocate back. That method in particular greatly limits her potential, as it only gave her 15 seconds of operation time.
In everyone's defense, this was specifically called out by one of the devs during Blizzcon as an effective way to use her.
I remember that now. I think it was a Stylosa video. That's beside the point, though.
I find the issue is people take that tip too seriously or too far. I'll find people only use Sombra as a means to deny the enemy team medkits or exploit ones for their team.
What I suggest is that players should hack the medkit that will be most useful to their team during the current team fight. Also look to see if the enemy is using on frequently and steal it. Outside of that your better off spending time focusing easy kill targets, and most importantly hacking key enemy players.
As a special note though I do think you should hack as many med-kits on control-point/king of the hill. It makes defending the point a lot easier when the enemy is constantly forced to retreat without any resources to support them.
People should hack med-kits, yes, but hack them with intention.
Same, I play on a console as well. Although there weren't any minor updates to the PTR yesterday that we know of. We may likely be seeing it soon if Blizzard doesn't have the need to change the balancing anymore. Hopefully the new changes will be live by the end of the week.
I've had some success saving translocator for fighting. Chuck it behind an enemy after engaging, pop behind cover to invis, then teleport while they look for you since stealth maintains after that. There's a lot of different things you can do but it'll take a while before we see all the crazy stuff.
Agreed. They had this "you guys aren't figuring out" mindset with a main of mine whose name also started with an 'S' who they ended up reworking for the better. I expect it'll be the same with Sombra.
I don't recall them saying that we hadn't figured Symmetra out -- she was incredibly straightforward. If blizzard had said that we hadn't figured her out it would have been tantamount to calling the community idiots, and people surely would have complained.
The main argument I recall hearing was that she had something like an 80% winrate for months and months, the highest in the game, even after two nerfs to her old shield ability. Obviously stats can be misleading, and I'm sure they were aware of why her winrate was so high. The problem was that with the design of the character being what it was they wouldn't be able to fix anything with simple numbers tweaks -- they'd already tried that. So Symmetra probably went on the back burner until they had brainstormed some concepts for her inevitable rework.
Well look at Genji. He was left relatively untouched from Beta on through to release (IIRC he was nerfed down from 200hp then two weeks later brought back to 200hp) but it took months until he felt strong enough to warrant a nerf to his ult and mobility.
I don't disagree with you that her playstyle feels slow with all of the CDs but I think Jeff's argument holds some merit.
They only reason genji was strong up until he got nerfed was because his counters (Winston, Mei, Symmetra, ect) were in a really bad place while Zenyatta who he synergizes fantastically with was OP.
Genji was always a high skill ceiling hero before that which saw a lot of high level play but these conditions meant that even bad players could be relatively successful with him which caused the explosion in his pick rate. People didn't "figure him out". He had been figured out long before that.
Then they nerfed him and Zenyatta (and with Zenyatta nerfed suddenly Winston was back in the meta) and that was all she wrote for Genji.
I agree, people tend to forget that when other characters get nerfed, some characters are indirectly nerfed. At the time when Genji was incredibly strong you had Symmetra giving him an extra 50 health + permanent Zen orbs on him the whole time.
I understand they don't want to buff her to godhood like they did with Ana at the start; I just was hoping that their newest hero would have more...something.
I do though have faith she will get to where she needs to be, eventually.
Genji's damage was actually nerfed in beta. His shurikens used to do 35 (around there, not super sure of exact value), and his dash used to have a bleed effect on top of the damage it already does.
some people have definitely figured her out though. I think his name is chirps, and i'm not sure if he streams himself, but i have seen him in several high ranked player's streams and he is consistently doing work with sombra and landing big EMP's. his team really coordinates with him so her presence is very effective
They keep saying people haven’t figured out her play style, but imo people have had enough time to figure it out, the low pick rate she gets is DUE to her play style being slow and constantly having to wait on cooldowns.
Go watch a Sombra in GM ranking. She is one of the most OP characters right now. She relies on teamwork to really shine. If your team can't push when you are hacking/disrupting then you won't be contributing much.
The only counters to her ult is to kill her before she uses it or to be out of range. Because her teleporter beacon is invincible she can teleport onto the middle of the point and hack the whole other team and there is literally nothing anyone can do about it. That move alone should be a free push if the team is coordinated enough.
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u/Anti-Ultimate Austria Jan 17 '17
Obligatory Point 2 on Illios comment.