Just a few weeks ago, the Overwatch hacker Sombra received a pretty significant buff. In exchange for hacked health packs no longer generating ult charge, her weapon spread was reduced, making it much easier to deal damage, and her Hack time was sped up considerably.
Many in the community said this was too much. In particular, the increased Hack speed made the ability near-impossible to interrupt, as it's now possible to squeeze in a Hack between reloads or a few missed shots. Well, it looks like Blizzard has taken note, and nerfs are incoming.
Overwatch lead designer Geoff Goodman chimed in on the forums recently to lay out some upcoming tweaks to Sombra's Hack:
"Any time Sombra’s hack is interrupted by damage, hacking will go on cooldown for 2 seconds. With this change, Sombra will have to be more careful about choosing when and who to hack instead of just holding down the button and waiting for people to miss and/or reload etc," Goodman said.
In addition, some tweaks will be made to Hack's line-of-sight checks to make it so slipping out of sight to cancel a Hack is more possible.
"There is currently a 0.1s window of time at the end of the hack where it cannot be canceled via line of sight or other effects," Goodman said. "We are removing this window and instead now using multiple LOS checks to make sure the small LOS blockers are still not a problem. In addition to this, we’re speeding up the update rate of her hacking so that it is more responsive in checking for these fail conditions. The combination of these things means it should be much more reasonable to respond to a hack targeting you."
Goodman said that the recent changes intended to increase Sombra's power level, and that she should still remain more powerful than before even after these tweaks. "We’re keeping a close eye on her to make sure she lands in a good place," he said.
These changes should hit the PTR in the next patch, though no details for when that will be have been mentioned.
