Overwatch 2Mar 16, 2018 4:00 pm CT

Sombra nerfed in an upcoming Overwatch patch

By Alex Ziebart
Editor-in-Chief, Emeritus

In an Overwatch patch late last month, Sombra received a variety of buffs and general quality-of-life improvements, including a rebalancing of her ultimate and improvements to her Hack ability. A few weeks in, those buffs are proving to be a little too much. In an upcoming patch — like the March 20 patch that includes Brigitte — Sombra will be receiving a couple of additional changes, one of which is only partially a nerf.

Originally Posted by Geoff Goodman (Official Post)

We’re making some more changes to Sombra next patch to address these issues. There are two main changes coming:

Any time Sombra’s hack is interrupted by damage, hacking will go on cooldown for 2 seconds. With this change, Sombra will have to be more careful about choosing when and who to hack instead of just holding down the button and waiting for people to miss and/or reload etc.
There is currently a 0.1s window of time at the end of the hack where it cannot be canceled via line of sight or other effects (such as Tracer’s recall, Zarya bubbles, etc). This exists so it doesn’t constantly get broken by very small line of sight blockers such as light posts and signs, etc. We are removing this window and instead now using multiple LOS checks to make sure the small LOS blockers are still not a problem. In addition to this, we’re speeding up the update rate of her hacking so that it is more responsive in checking for these fail conditions. The combination of these things means it should be much more reasonable to respond to a hack targeting you.

The intent of all of her recent changes is still to increase her overall strength and viability. We’re keeping a close eye on her to make sure she lands in a good place.

The second change isn’t quite a nerf, but moreso addressing unintended behavior. Because Hack specifically had a delay on cancellation so it wouldn’t get cut off by every random lamp post or other piece of scenery on a map, it also wouldn’t be canceled immediately if a player ducked behind a wall. Often, players believed they’d move out of line of sight — and usually did — but Hack wouldn’t be canceled because they weren’t out of line of sight long enough. Similarly, abilities such as Tracer’s Recall, which probably should cause Hack to break, often didn’t.

Ideally, the change to Sombra’s Hack isn’t quite a nerf, but ensuring the ability works when it should and doesn’t when it shouldn’t. That said, the previous iteration of Sombra’s Hack benefited her significantly, allowing her to get off Hacks even when the channeling should have been broken. In practice, yes, this is a nerf.

Geoff Goodman’s parting words should be some consolation to Sombra players: Although she’s receiving nerfs, they still want Sombra to be viable and have a place in the game. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have addressed some of her problems in the late February patch.

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