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It’s been a week since the Sombra patch and complaints have started to grow about how overpowered the Mexican hacker now is. But how powerful is she currently on ladder? I’ve taken a look at Sombra’s pick rates and win rates across ranks on Overbuff for the past week. Overbuff is a much smaller and self-selecting audience than Overwatch at large, but hero pick rates across tiers on Overbuff largely line up with the figures Jeff released so we can assume they’re mostly accurate.
Before we get into that, let’s look at Sombra’s pickrate and winrate pre-patch just to give you an idea why she needed such a drastic retooling. In brief, it was terrible. Second lowest winrate and lowest pickrate for the past 3 months across all ranks. She had a place in pro-play though as a health pack EMP farmer and was oppressively powerful in her niche on certain maps, which is probably why Blizzard was afraid of straight buffing her in that state. Shifting power away from health packs and into her base kit should theoretically do that.
So how about post-patch? Her numbers have spiked to place her in the enviable position of having the 19th highest winrate and 21st highest pickrate. Wow, so overpowered! OK that’s being disingenuous as her winrate noticeably rises the higher up the ladder you go. She has the lowest winrate in silver and fourth lowest in gold. But she’s 9th highest in diamond, 10th in masters, and 6th in grandmasters. Her pickrate jumps in the highest tiers as well, although it’s only 17th in diamond, 16th in masters, but 10th in GM. She’s hardly dominating the game, but since a lot of new people are picking her up, maybe her winrate could be higher once people get better at her.
The rise in her winrate as you ascend the ladder is perhaps why the pro scene is worried about Sombra, since a co-ordinated team is much better about following up a practically uninterruptible hack than even top tier ladder play. Ana’s high skill cap meant she used to dominate pro-level despite poor ladder results and even now she still gets some play at pro level despite having the second lowest winrate on ladder even at GM (only Hanzo is lower, and he’s getting changed so he’s not really worth talking about right now). Any hero who has a winrate spike in GM is one who might become oppressive when pros get their hands on them. So perhaps we should look at the hero with the highest winrate at GM who has recently received a buff: Mei.
No really. Mei. Did you all forget she got a buff too, alongside Doomfist? Their relatively minor buffs have actually had a noticeable impact on their winrates. Mei and Doomfist went from 19th and 20th highest winrates to 12th and 15th. Not huge, but again like Sombra their winrates compared to other heroes rise through the tiers. Doomfist goes from lowest winrate in bronze and fourth lowest in silver to 7th in diamond and 8th in master (although drops way down in GM for some reason). Mei goes from 16th in bronze and silver to third in master and first in GM. Mei’s pickrate hasn’t moved at all despite her buff, so for now only dedicated Mei players have realised maybe she’s actually totally viable now and is crushing it on ladder.
Tl;dr there is a recently buffed hero who is crushing it at the top of the competitive ladder. It’s not Sombra. It’s Mei.
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