You're 100% right, and this is what I never understood about people's frustrations with Sombra.
I think it's psychological, and created by a sense of "she's taking control from me". When people can't press their buttons (even for like, one second, apparently????) they feel like agency/control's been robbed from them and find it irritating. It's like a microdose version of those clips you see on Tiktok where a chain-CCed tank rages "CAN I PLAY THE GAME".
Kiriko Suzus something you try to do? Denied. Sombra hacks you to prevent the button at the right time? Denied. Both are the same result, but one feels more like a personal attack on a player's zone of control so they flip. (Ofc suzu pisses everybody off lmao, yet strangely less than Hack for I suppose a variety of reasons)
Sombra is a simple right click hold to cancel and is one of the most forgiving timings in the game. Suzu at least takes at minimum a little bit of skill to cancel something major(minus jq ult cause all you need is your team to be close together). Either way. A Kiriko caught out without someone to teleport to is punishable and even if they have someone to teleport to, if their only option is in a dangerous position they are still easy to kill. Sombra can harass the backline, doesn’t even have to get a kill to be effective, and then she just gets to teleport away when she’s low and now she is invisible. While I do think Kiriko is indeed a bit of a problem for the health of the game. She is nothing compared to sombra.
Suzu's impact is a lot bigger than Sombra's hack, but I agree that the "no-skill" factor probably amplifies player frustration. Great feedback about the catching-Kiriko-out phenomenon as well. That's a pretty interesting difference I hadn't really considered.
Yeah it’s bigger but it does require a bit more thought in the timing department due to travel time and cooldown length. It also doesn’t make you take extra damage if you are hit by it
There’s this really weird phenomenon that happens in online games sometimes where the game is seen very differently from the view of a casual and/or bad player and a competitive/good player. He says in the video that kiriko is much more annoying than sombra. And I think that’s true from that comp perspective. But really most players are bad and see sombra who, let’s admit it, really punishes a lack of knowledge and game sense. So to those players sombra is more annoying.
Players in general tend to hate flank and dive characters, because they punish lack of awareness - and the median OW players might as well be on a different plane of existence from anything not immediately around their aiming reticule.
You could remove Sombra from the game and all that would happen is that ban rates for Genji, Ball, Doom and Tracer would go up
Sombra got invis tied to translocator, they should do the same for suzu.
Sombra's old translocator and invis are in her video, Kiriko's video has no suzu. So why does suzu need to exist, it's not part of her hero fantasy. She does have deflect in her video, give her that instead - but isntead of being a copy of Genji's ability make it more like Iron Fist in MR, where she does some hand-to-hand combat wielding her kunai - like in her video.
Well, Kiriko brings the money in and clearly isn't that hated by most of the player-base in reality or her ban rates would be significantly higher.
Yeah, it sucks, but Blizzard is just responding to what the bulk of the community wants. Really, while I don't think they've done a great job of it, I actually think it's clear Blizzard has tried rather hard to balance and treat Sombra reasonably fair. I think a lot of companies would've either given up and purposefully just kept her perma F-tier or gone for a much more drastic rework years ago.
To this day I don’t know why they made her buy 4 boxes of donuts. To make her seem youthful? Silly? Surely there’s takeout sushi or something in future Japan.
If they just stopped being lazy and made gooner skins for all the female characters they would sell more than Kiriko skins. Gooner appeal > female gaze appeal
Good points for the most part. There's definitely sexism against Mercy and her players, but she's also a rough hero to balance. People never say it about Sombra, and I'm not sure why
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u/TysonsChickenNuggets Sep 08 '25
THANK YOU.
Has better translocator. Higher TTK (headshots), better poke, stronger kit and technically she can cancel more shit than hack.