Dear Blizzard team,
I’m writing about the Sombra support rework, and I’ll be honest with you. this one hurt.
I know balance patches happen. I know heroes get tuned, nerfed, reworked, and everyone survives it. That’s not what this is. You didn’t rebalance Sombra. You deleted her and left something else standing there wearing her skin.
Sombra was the only hero in the roster who played like that. Invisible, alone, deep behind enemy lines, reading the fight on her own and picking the exact moment to break it. No one else does that. Not Tracer, not Genji, not Reaper. You removed an entire playstyle from the game and didn’t replace it with anything. The people who mained her weren’t playing a DPS, they were playing a completely different game that happened to share a lobby with ours.
My closest friend is one of them. She has thousands of hours on Sombra the overwhelming majority of everything she’s ever played in Overwatch. Years of learning flank routes, of knowing exactly when to hack and when to wait, of solo-dismantling a backline while the rest of us held the point. That isn’t muscle memory you can transfer to another hero. It’s gone.
When the news dropped yesterday, she left our voice chat mid-sentence. She hasn’t logged in since. We’ve queued together almost every week for years, and last night I sat in an empty lobby. That’s what this patch looks like from where I’m standing.
And she isn’t an outlier. Look at the forums. Look at the reddit threads. Look at how many Sombra mains are saying the exact same thing right now, not “she’s weak,” but “she’s not there anymore.” That’s a very different kind of feedback, and I hope someone on the team is actually reading it.
So I’m asking, as plainly as I can: please stop before this ships.
Give Sombra her original role back. Or keep the old kit available in some form legacy hero, arcade mode, anything. Or at the absolute minimum, talk to us openly about why this decision was made, before it becomes permanent. Right now it feels like it happened to us instead of with us.
You built a hero that people fell in love with. That’s the hardest thing to do in game design, and you did it. Please don’t throw it away.
Thank you for reading this.
