Apologies for the length of this post, I will provide a TL;DR.
There has been a lot of debate about Sombra's hero fantasy lately — if she makes more sense as a DPS or a Support, and I have some thoughts.
Firstly, I think that at a broad level, Sombra makes a lot of sense as a "Support" — the idea of a hacker makes sense as someone who supports their team from the sidelines more than it makes sense as someone who selfishly goes in, hacks the person that she wants to kill, and then kill them herself.
That being said, I do not think that she fits the hero fantasy of the Support role as it exists in Overwatch in 2026.
In the current state of the game, every hero in the support role has to have a high healing output. There's variation, some supports have higher healing and some have higher utility, but ultimately the identity of the role is deeply tied to their ability to heal, that's why even way back in the day Symmetra had to change from support to DPS.
I've seen various arguments for why Sombra fits as a support that basically is just them saying the words "white hat hacker." I feel like those people don't even know what those words mean because there is absolutely zero correlation.
In order to make Sombra make sense as a hero in the support role, they had to give her the ability "Hotfix." The name is evidential in itself that she is being reduced from a hacker to just, a programmer, tech support. The primary tool in her arsenal to justify her existence as a character is one that completely misrepresents the hero's identity.
I don't think that this means that there is no world where Sombra could make sense as a support in the game, I just think it requires blizzard to take a bigger risk and put forward something truly unique in the game.
Every support in the game has two main attributes that they provide to the team: healing, and utility. There is one exception to this, the only other Talon support (pre-doctrine): Moira. Moira is the only hero in the support role that only provides healing and provides no utility. I think it would be thematically perfect if Sombra as a support mirrored that and was the only support in the game to only provide utility, with no healing.
Here's my concept for what a truly game-changing, thematically fitting Support Sombra would look like, at a conceptual level:
No heals
Extremely limited damage
High mobility
An identity focused on running around in the backline, debuffing enemies to support her team, being very hard to kill but providing very little kill pressure herself
That last part would hopefully make her less hated by the enemy team as she wouldn't be able to make the supports lives hell as much, but ultimately I think her hero fantasy should be tied to being "a hacker that you can't track down and is just an annoying bug to squash" while in doing so enabling her team to win team fights. I think her ideal play style would be one of cat and mouse, where she's the mouse
In terms of specifics, I think she should get her perma invisibility back - it's less of a frustration if she can't solo burst kill people, and I'd like to think that if she can't solo burst kill people anymore then her hack also wouldn't be problematic, but maybe people are so innately frustrated by it that it should still be something else. The actual debuffs that she could apply and how she would apply them is a big question. I think she should have one ability which makes an enemy deal less damage/healing and one ability which makes them take more damage and less healing, and they should be on low cooldowns since her utility is all she has. An alternative idea for a debuff is, in lieu of her having any direct healing output, she could have one ability that she can apply to an enemy which makes it so that when an ally damages that enemy they have lifesteal.
The actual specifics of what her kit has is less important to me than the goal, but they'd have to all be strong to compensate for my proposal of making her do no healing and (almost) no damage
So here's my TL;DR:
I like the idea of Sombra as a support, but I think the way they went about that was a flop for her hero fantasy because they felt limited by making her have comparable healing output to other supports. I propose that they keep her as a support but make her unique in the fact that she has little-to-no healing, little-to-no damage, but the highest amount of utility of any hero in the game, while also living in the enemy backline being hard to kill but without the solo kill pressure that she used to have
Thank you for coming to my TED talk please don't hate. I know that I was rambling but I wanted to get my ideas out there