Overwatch team looking at Widowmaker for balance changes

No one can hide from my nerfs

The slight nerf to McCree and the undisclosed buff to D.Va are a forgone conclusion. It’s happening. But the third character that’s currently being looked at is Widowmaker, who is on Blizzard’s “radar.” I’ll let director Jeff Kaplan sum it up — “Widowmaker is on our radar. We are discussing her. We have some internal experiments going to see if we can keep her viable while lowering the frustration threshold a little bit. Right now, this is just exploration. If something more comes of it, we’ll let you know.”

Folks have been clamoring for Widowmaker nerfs for a while. Here’s the thing — not only can she be countered by constantly moving (something a lot of players haven’t picked up on yet), but she also has a pretty high skill ceiling to boot. A lot of the complaints also stem from her being able to one-shot body shot Tracer and Zenyatta. Now, the latter I get, as he’s generally a slow-moving target and his health/armor/shield could stand to get a slight increase, but Tracer? If you can get a fully charged body shot on a Tracer, congratulations, you deserve your kill.

My educated guess? They’re probably going to increase the visibility (or adjust the noise) of her ultimate, so the other team is more aware that it’s up, and possibly look at slightly tweaking body shot damage. Anything else would be overkill. Based on my discussions with him pre-launch Kaplan and his team seems to err on the side of caution though, so I don’t think they’re going to nerf anyone into the ground just yet.

Jeff Kaplan [Battle.net]