Since an Overwatch update released in February, complaints have emerged about Sombra. Specifically, her hack has been deemed too effective following the changes made in that patch, and now Blizzard has confirmed that it plans to dial things back a bit in a future update.
Designer Geoff Goodman shared the news on Overwatch’s forums in response to a thread calling for Sombra to be nerfed. Among other things, the February patch decreased the cast time of her Hack ability and expanded the number of abilities it blocks. Goodman confirmed that the next patch to be released will address some of the complaints about how Hack now works.
The first change involves imposing a two second cooldown whenever Hack is interrupted by damage. According to Goodman, “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.”
Blizzard’s other adjustment involves line of sight. As it stands, there is a 0.1 second period of time at the end of Hack’s cast where it can’t be canceled by abilities like Tracer’s recall or Zarya’s shields, or by Sombra losing sight of her target. The video below was shared in the initial post of the thread and shows off cases where Sombra is able to complete a Hack in situations where she seemingly shouldn’t.
Goodman explained that the 0.1 second window “exists so [Hack] doesn’t constantly get broken by very small line of sight blockers such as light posts and signs, etc.” Blizzard has decided to remove this window and instead use “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.”
He concluded, “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.”
There’s no word on when the patch with these changes will be coming. We also don’t yet know when Overwatch’s new character, Brigitte, is due out, but she’s been available on the PC version’s Public Test Realm for some time now. As such, a full PC, PS4, and Xbox One release for her may not be far off.