Team Mojo

Sombra has been underwhelming. According to Masteroverwatch‘s stat tracking, she’s currently the least picked hero in competitive play. Sombra also has the 4th lowest K/D ratio and the 5th lowest medals/game ratio. Blizzard is committed to changing her, but they’re taking it slow. Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch’s game director, recently said, “We have ideas if we need to bump her up, but we’re just being slow and patient so we don’t have Ana 2.0 all over again.” Translation: The Overwatch team wants to avoid over-tuning Sombra and turning her into a must-pick, which is what happened to Ana in Season 3.

Many people have made guides on how to play Sombra, Overwatch’s newest hero, but what about playing with a Sombra on your team? This article outlines the steps you and the rest of your team can take when someone picks Sombra.

Don’t become tilted the moment someone on your team picks Sombra.

Let’s first start with the most basic tip. If you assume that you’re going to lose a match before it starts, chances are your prediction will come true. Don’t complain on your mic or switch to a hero that wrecks the team composition, or the next thing you know, your team will consist of a Widowmaker, Torbjorn, and Hanzo. Asking nicely for a Sombra player to switch is fine, but don’t overreact and complain that the match is lost before it even begins.

Pay attention to your team composition.

Sombra works well in a few types of team compositions.

• Dive comp: In the chaos of a fight, Sombra can hack priority targets and help other flankers eliminate enemy supports. Sombra’s main gun is too weak to solo most 200hp heroes, so it’s advisable to run another hero that can help her clean up kills. Winston, Tracer, Genji, Pharah, and Zenyatta are viable candidates that complement a Sombra.
• Traditional 2-2-2 comps: Sombra – for the most part – should take a DPS slot in your team composition. A 2-2-2 team composition is a good way to go. Soldier: 76, Pharah, and McCree are decent picks for the 2nd DPS hero. Sombra usually doesn’t output enough damage to be the sole DPS hero in a team running three tanks, but if the team does decide to go 3 tanks, make sure there are enough damage dealers among them (such as Roadhog).

Sombra doesn’t work as well in 1 healer comps. In many cases, Sombra’s health pack hacks don’t compensate enough to run only 1 healer. Going around and hacking health packs takes time, which leaves the team fighting 5 v 6. Even on King of the Hill game modes, it’s usually advisable to run two healers because you can’t always rely on Sombra’s hacked health packs to compensate for the lack of healing. Running to health packs takes players away from the fight, so Sombra doesn’t completely take the place of a healer. Dive comps with Winston/Tracer/Genji usually require both Lucio and Zenyatta, so even those compositions require 2 healers. Games can be won with only one support, but it’s not the optimal way to go unless the solo healer is extremely reliable and skilled. Ana is the only hero that can reliably solo heal in high-ranked matches.

Pick heroes that synergize with Sombra’s ult.

Sombra’s ult charges quickly and works extremely well with nearly every offensive ultimate in the game. She prevents enemies from neutralizing or blocking your team’s offensive ults. She also charges her ult incredibly fast, so make sure that you and your team are ready to initiate when your Sombra has ult. Notable ult combos include:

• Zarya + Sombra. Graviton Surge is one of the strongest ults in the game, but it can be partially or fully countered by a few things, including Zenyatta’s ult, Lucio’s ult, DVA’s defense matrix, and Reinhardt’s shield. Sombra’s ult shuts down everything that can prevent your team from securing kills in a Graviton Surge. Throw in another offensive ult with Zarya + Sombra for an easy wipe.
• Sombra + Soldier: 76, Reaper, McCree, Genji, or Pharah. These heroes’ offensive ults can be effectively neutralized by other popular heroes, including Reinhardt’s shield, Roadhog’s hook, DVA’s defense matrix, Zarya’s shield, Zenyatta’s ult, and Lucio’s ult or speed boost. Letting Sombra ult first will make it much easier for your team’s DPS heroes to secure kills when they ult.
• Sombra + Reinhardt, Mei, or DVA. These three ults are very hit-or-miss. Allowing Sombra to ult before popping a Reinhardt, Mei, or DVA ult will ensure that no enemies will be able to escape or block the ult.
• Sombra + Ana: Ana’s nanoboost is usually paired with another damage dealing hero or ult. As with the scenarios listed above, allowing Sombra to ult before nanoboosting a target will make it much easier for your team to secure kills.
• Others: Some heroes usually don’t justify comboing with Sombra. Tracer and Junkrat’s ults can one-shot most heroes, Winston’s ult is mostly used for disruption, and Bastion, Torbjorn, and Roadhog’s ults deal plenty of damage by themselves and are usually better off baiting out support ults from the enemy.

Help Sombra charge her ult.

Did you know that Sombra receives ult charge when she or another hero uses a health pack that she has hacked? She charges her ult faster than most heroes, so don’t be afraid to take chip damage from the enemy team and seek out Sombra’s hacked health packs. This tactic works especially well when your team is attacking the first point of 2CP and hybrid maps, which always have health packs close to the first choke point.

Change your engagement tactics.

Sombra’s actions leave her out of the fray for long periods of time. While she’s off hacking health packs, waiting for cooldowns to reset, or flanking, your team is left fighting 5 v 6. If your team is running a dive comp, you should engage when Sombra does. If your team is running a standard composition, you should wait for Sombra to ult or hack an important target before you engage. Sombra’s ult should charge faster than everyone else’s, which will give your team an advantage in many team fights. Sombra’s ult disables the enemy’s ults, but often times enemy supports aren’t close enough to their tanks and Sombra’s ult will only be able to disable the enemy team’s frontline. Don’t be afraid to use offensive ults to draw out the enemy team’s support ults.

Communicate!

Sombra isn’t very effective at taking down heroes by herself, which makes communication very important. If the Sombra on your team doesn’t have a mic, make sure you’re frequently pinging your ult charge status. Sometimes the Sombra player isn’t communicating at all, in which case you’ll have to do the best you can to follow up on Sombra’s ults. You can also call out the location of hacked health packs and Sombra’s ult status to your teammates if your Sombra isn’t communicating.

Season 3 is off to a flying start, which makes now the perfect time to take a step back and evaluate your gameplay by analyzing your stats. Overwatch’s in-game stats are notoriously bad at providing players with meaningful insights. Thankfully, many third-party Overwatch stat tracking websites have sprung up. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular sites, and analyze which stats are valuable (and not valuable) for players who wants to evaluate their performance.

Three most commonly used sites are Overbuff, Master Overwatch, and Overwatch Tracker. They display per-game stats, hero/class breakdowns, basic trends, leaderboard rankings, percentile comparisons to other players in the database, and other useful tidbits of information. Let’s review some of the important (and misleading) pieces of data offered by these websites.

Skill Rank Percentile

All of the third-party stat tracking websites provide a skill rank percentile: How your skill rating compares to every other player in their database. However, these sites only have access to a player’s data when someone has searched his or her name on the website. Because a lot of casual players never bother to use these websites, the sites’ skill ranks are biased. Subsequently, your real skill rank is probably a few percentage points higher. This also explains why your skill rank will be slightly different if you compare across websites.

Comparing Your Stats with Other Players

All of the third-party stat tracking websites will display a percentile that indicates how you rank among other players in their database. Higher percentiles are better  (99% means that you beat out 99% of the players in their database) unless you’re measuring a stat like deaths, in which case a lower percentile is better. Overbuff’s hero stats section is a great way to evaluate your stats compared to the rest of the player base. Click into each hero’s page to see how the top and bottom players perform in each stat category. Just make sure that you’re not comparing stats across different heroes; Mercy players will almost always have a K/D below 1, whereas Soldier: 76 players should never have a K/D below 1.

Comparing your stats against other players will give you a general idea of your performance (for example, if your K/D with Reinhardt is less than 1, you should reevaluate how you play the hero). However, there are many limitations to these numbers. For example, Lucio players at higher SRs tend to spend more time in speed boost. That will decrease their healing stats, but it doesn’t objectively make them worse than Lucio players with higher healing numbers. Healing averages are particularly worthless stats for support heroes; focus more on lowering your deaths per game and improving your game sense. A clutch support ult can turn the tide of a team fight, but it doesn’t get tracked by a website.

Bottom line: Don’t focus too much on the numbers! What most affects your SR is if your team wins and loses. Padding your stats won’t help you win games.  

Overbuff Hero Rank

This is a close to worthless measure, but it’s used a lot – especially on Reddit – by players who are trying to prove how skilled they are with that hero. The Overbuff Hero Rank factors in skill rating, win rate, games played, and hero stats. Unfortunately, games played isn’t a good indicator of your actual skill with a hero. Skill rating and win rate are better, but hero stats are also an issue because your stats are partly determined by your skill rating. A Master-level Winston player might not have better stats than a Platinum-level player because they are usually playing against different levels of competition. As an example, check out my Winston stats below. Am I really among the top 400 Winstons? Probably not. My season high is 3126, and my win rate + hero stats would most likely suffer if I were playing at a Masters level of competition.

Per-Game Stats vs Per-Minute Stats

The three stat tracking websites provide a range of per-game stats and per-minute stats on each hero that you play. I prefer per-minute stats because Overwatch’s current meta rewards aggression. If you die all the time, you’re not going to have high per-minute stats (because you’re spending a lot of your time in the respawn screen). Playing for a high K/D doesn’t always help your team if you’re being too conservative and not securing meaningful kills. The game counts assists as eliminations, which can skew K/D ratios higher for heroes who can damage a lot of enemies very quickly. I usually default to Master Overwatch’s per-minute stats. Overbuff’s site is also useful, but I find Overwatch Tracker’s layout and stat presentation to be the worst among the three sites. 

Track Your Own Stats in a Spreadsheet

More analytical players should consider manually tracking additional stats in a spreadsheet. Although the stat-tracking websites are good at collecting hero-based data, they are not very useful for visualizing your SR gains and losses. Manually tracking your SR gains and losses, map win / loss ratios, and other stats will supplement your knowledge. This handy and easy-to-use document was shared on Reddit and can be edited / added upon: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BEwADRlbFgjaFzSKHr7qPTjdx1jUOr28nUWtgGNxkMY/edit?usp=sharing. Simply click File -> Make a Copy, or File -> Download as Microsoft Excel to edit the document with your own stats. Feel free to add and change columns if you’re interested in tracking more stats, such as medal count, SR difference between the teams, game leavers / disconnects, etc.

At the end of the season, you can use this document and calculate an average SR gained per win and lost per loss. For example, mine ended up being average gain: 25.68 points and average loss: 26.20 points.

Tracking your Streaks and Avoiding Tilt

The document linked above automatically populates a graph that charts your SR gains and losses. Start filling out the chart and you’ll begin to notice how much streaks will affect your SR. Streaks are especially noticeable during the 5th straight win or loss, although sometimes they can kick in after the 4th.

Once your streak bonus kicks in, you’ll find yourself gaining (or losing) more SR than you normally would. In the case of losing streaks, “tilt” refers to the worsening of a player’s performance as he/she goes on a losing streak. Not all players experience tilt, but going on a day-long losing streak is a enough to derail weeks’ worth of SR gains; this can be difficult to visualize unless you’re actively tracking your SR changes. There’s no surefire way to eliminate tilt that works for everyone, but if you’re a streaky player, consider taking a break after losing 2 games in a row. Play another game mode, grab a snack, or do something else to refresh.

That’s all, Overwatch players. Go out there any enjoy Season 3!