Overwatch News

Sombra Hack Nerf Coming Soon

By Bryan Weatherall | March 16, 2018

A Sombra hack nerf is soon to be coming to Overwatch which is in response to a bunch of complaints from a variety of players about the recent Sombra buffs and hack speed increases. Currently at the moment players feel that the hacks are too quick and there’s little they can do against Sombra to counter the hacks, there’s also some issues with characters getting hacked behind walls or when line of sight is lost which has made quite a few people frustrated.

It seems Blizzard has been listening to player complaints and Overwatch developer Geoff Goodman went on the forums and posted the following:

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.

As a Sombra main I can understand the frustration other players might have playing against her as I’ve triggered quite a few and even reached 100 hacks in a single competitive match myself last week. The be honest there really wasn’t much the other team could do about it to stop me. I feel that this might put Sombra’s skill level for players up a little as she’ll be a little harder to play for people starting with her as stray bullets can be hard to dodge, but if you’re a Sombra main you’ll know the right time to hack and not the right time to hack someone is, so we’ll have to see how this turns out.