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Blizzard finally announced the long-awaited Overwatch 2 Sombra rework, and despite changing the multiplayer game hero’s kit quite a bit, most fans are actually not furious about it. Well, some of them.
The changes come as part of Blizzard’s ongoing – sometimes, fans say, too frequent – balance changes, where the studio will tweak hero abilities, add and remove features, and then sometimes do both and roll them back completely.
Sombra’s changes will undoubtedly go through that cycle as well, but for now, it seems like she’s in a pretty good place to start with. The biggest change is Sombra’s new Virus skill. She plants a virus into a target, and it deals small amounts of damage over time – more, if she hacks that enemy.
Blizzard also made some substantial changes to her stealth. In the past, Sombra could become invisible by using a skill, and she’d remain that way until an enemy detected her or she broke cover. Stealth is a passive ability now, one that activates automatically when Sombra isn’t taking or dealing damage.
Her translocator instantly teleports her now, and using it shortens Sombra’s stealth cooldown timer.
Some fans on Reddit and the Overwatch forums thought the changes weren’t substantial enough, while others raged about how ineffective it was or how useless the character is. One thread on the Overwatch forums is dedicated to lamenting how bad the changes are for Wrecking Ball in particular.
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Pleased or at least neutral reactions also showed up – for now, at least.
“I don’t see much difference,” one Redditer said. “She is still going to run around stealth hacking the support characters.”
“That looks alot [sic] more fair than current hack it leaves for good counterplay as well since you can potentially dodge it,” one user said on the Overwatch forums.
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“I’ve been asking for DoT on Sombra for ages,” another said. “It will be much healthier for the game.”
Others expressed concerns over the possibility that Sombra’s new skill would make life too hard for tank mains. Sombra’s Virus skill could wreck tanks too quickly, if it’s combined with other damage-over-time skills or debuffs, like Moira’s orb or Ana’s sleep dart. Even the optimistic commenters qualified their sentiments with a “wait and see.”
We don’t have long to wait and see, either. The Sombra rework will roll out with Overwatch 2 season 7, which launches on Oct. 10, 2023, with a new Diablo-inspired Halloween event and more.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF