Sombra received a fairly major rework during the most recent Overwatch update. She lost the ability to farm health packs in order to charge her ultimate, but in return she gained a tightened spread on her weapon, a cast time reduction for Hack as well as the ability to disable more effects, and perhaps most importantly for infiltration, 5 extra seconds on her Translocator. The end result was that Sombra finally got uplifted from the very bottom in terms of winrate to a highly respectable 56.82% in Grandmaster.

However, while the new Sombra is definitely a much more useful hero, the reduced cast time on her Hack ability has also made her incredibly annoying to play against. After all, nobody likes having all of their toys taken away just because they haven't managed to continuously shoot at Sombra in order to stop the Hack. With that in mind, I am glad to announce that Blizzard is now looking to adjust Sombra's Hack in order to make it more counterable and strategic to use.

Rather than babble on, allow me to share with you the brief developer post on this issue:

We’re making some more changes to Sombra next patch to address these issues. There are two main changes coming:

• 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.

• 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 (such as Tracer’s recall, Zarya bubbles, etc). This exists so it doesn’t constantly get broken by very small line of sight blockers such as light posts and signs, etc. 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.

The intent of all of her recent changes is still to increase her overall strength and viability. We’re keeping a close eye on her to make sure she lands in a good place.

This might make Sombra slightly too weak as I don't think she's on par with the other DPS heroes even in her current state, but it is still a necessary change as it gives Blizzard more breathing room when it comes to potential buffs. After all, it is much easier to buff Sombra's damage or spread when the enemy actually has a chance to prevent the hack and fight back.

Whatever the case may be, I look forward to being able to play Reinhardt without having the Hack constantly go through my shield because of the silly built-in leniency!