Overwatch Lead Developer Geoff Goodman Reveals Details of an Upcoming Sombra Rework

Overwatch lead developer Geoff Goodman has commented on a possible upcoming rework for Sombra.

In response to a question on the official Blizzard forums, Goodman revealed the direction that Blizzard is currently taking with a Sombra overhaul.

Overwatch has been continually updated since its release, but recent months have seen perhaps more significant changes than any other period. Not only has Blizzard continued to release new content in the form of events, maps, and a new hero – and another one presumably on the way – but there’s been a clear push to update a lot of the existing content.

Both Hanzo and Symmetra have recently received major reworks, and Blizzard has also confirmed that they’re planning an overhaul for Torbjorn as well. Next on the list, however, appears to be Sombra.

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This won’t be the first time that Sombra has received a significant change. Though she’s never had her entire kit changed in the way the Symmetra recently has, Blizzard has struggled to find a consistent place for her in the game.

A buff only a few months ago resulted in Sombra being pushed to the forefront of the meta, but once she was tuned down again she has eventually fallen off in popularity again.

Now, Blizzard is once again trying to find a more consistent version of Sombra. It seems the next rework will shift focus onto Sombra’s role as a flanker, by empowering her stealth.

Sure. These changes started by seeing how far we could push the duration of her Stealth and Translocator abilities. As we pushed them out, it allowed her to play more and more as an scout/infiltrator for your team and also allowed her more time to pick and choose when and where she popped out to ambush her enemies.

So now she has infinite duration on both Stealth and Translocator, but we had to solve a couple problems that were caused by these changes. For one, she needed to be able to destroy the translocator, or it would often be stuck in some place she didn’t want it to be. To that end, you can now destroy it by looking towards it and pressing the Interact key. Also, Stealth giving you 75% bonus movement speed forever was… a bit strong. This bonus has been lowered to 50%. In addition, she can no longer contest objectives while in Stealth, since she that would just be super frustrating with infinite duration.

These changes are really interesting for her as now she is in complete control over when she reveals herself, allow her to time her hacks better for her team, or go for a back line ambush during a critical moment in a team fight.

I guess that was more than a hint.

There isn’t currently an exact timeline for the rework arriving in-game, but Jeff Kaplan previously stated that the changes were scheduled “for the July patch”, so it’s likely they’re not far off.