Overwatch 2 devs admit Sombra is the hardest Hero to balance

Overwatch 2’s Lead Balance Designer, Josh Noh, admitted Sombra is the hardest Hero to balance in the game due to her unique kit. 

During a Reddit AMA on May 23, 2024, where players could ask any question to Overwatch’s Hero design team, a member of the community asked which character was the hardest to balance and tweak. 

Noh explained that Sombra was one of the harder Heroes to balance for the game thanks to her invisibility which restricts how powerful she can be. 

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“Probably Sombra due to permanent invisibility restricting how deadly we can make her,” Noh said of balancing Sombra. “But also because she is a hero that excels with strong team coordination.” 

If you have a coordinated team, Sombra is incredibly powerful, which is why she works so well in Dive comps. However, if you are hoping in a Ranked game where no one is communicating, Sombra is quite restricted as it’ll be much harder to dive single targets. 

Noh further added that there are several other Heroes with performance stats that differ widely from their community perception which makes it hard to balance them. 

Although he didn’t name the Heroes, players in the comments speculated characters like Reinhardt, Sojourn, Orisa, and Kiriko, were the Heroes he may have been referring to. 

These Heroes all have a contentious part in the meta. Sojourn and Orisa are not very popular but have long been strong picks in recent seasons. 

Reinhardt meanwhile is one of the most popular Tanks amongst most ranks according to Overbuff, but in the community is regarded as one of the worst tanks to play. 

However, it should be noted Noh said in the AMA that stats from Overbuff don’t show a “complete picture” numbers-wise, but their data on win rates were fairly close to Blizzard’s internal stats.