Overwatch’s Widowmaker

I’ve already mentioned that Overwatch did not escape the “if one team has a healer, they win” syndrome, and they are likewise still suffering from ” chronic Sniper-itis”. Even the subreddit has noticed the amount of bloody snipers limping around in the back not being particularly useful or fun to fight against.

Which is a shame, because played well Widowmaker can be so much more than a sniper. When not scoped in, her rifle becomes a bullet hose that Soldier 76 would be jealous of. Her E-attack is a poison mine (the only non-Ultimate DoT attack in the game) which serves to both counter a push and dissuade the enemy from taking a certain pathway, and I think a lot of players under-use it as a general purpose defensive weapon. In general I think Widowmaker makes some great strides towards being a more team-oriented sniper than usual, though she doesn’t have nearly enough of it to encourage players who are set on hiding in the backfield.

Widowmaker is the only class I’m making an article about from the perspective of playing against her instead of as her. I cannot get the hang of headshots in this game; everybody seems to blend into the ultra-stylized environments and even the good Windowmakers seem to deal more two-hit-KOs than anything else. Her scoped shots require charge, like TF2 Sniper’s, but she can fire multiple times without unscoping. The aforementioned assault rifle mode makes her feel a lot like the TFC Sniper when it comes to playstyle, and her grappling hook is pretty sweet but I constantly use it on accident trying to sprint. But I’m sure that with practice a decent Widowmaker can use it to Rico Rodriguez herself into all sorts of zany places and unleash hell from multiple vantage points or escape foes who push into close range.

But to be perfectly honest, I wish Blizzard had gone for a more support-oriented sniper than a picking sniper. There are more than enough classes that can dispatch enemies with accurate head shots, like McCree, Hanzo, Ginji,and Mei, and a debuff sniper rifle (like the Sydney Sleeper) would have been more interesting while still rewarding the player for accuracy and encouraging them to stick with teammates for assists.

Nobody in Overwatch is particularly well written (regardless of what Jigglypuff keeps insisting in the SPUF thread) but Widowmaker’s even worse in that regard. I’m not sure why they picked her to head one of the first Meet the Team videos when the best they could do for character was “I used to be afraid of spiders, now I’m not”.

Who am I kidding, it’s because she’s a smoking hot woman in spandex with a sniper playstyle; she’s in no danger of becoming unpopular. She’s probably the second most famous character in the franchise behind Tracer. But just looking at her from a design perspective, she’s all right, but I don’t know how pleased I am to have to deal with particularly good ones. For the most part I play Junkrat and sticky jump behind them to nade them to death in close quarters. But then they shred me with their assault rifle. I thought Snipers were supposed to be weak at close range?