One Overwatch player has come up with a simple buff that would change Soldier 76’s ultimate to work more like Torbjorn’s turret, and would make it deal more damage as a result.
In an effort to beef the hero up and bring him back to the forefront of the DPS metagame, Overwatch player LambdaC9 came up with a simple, yet brilliant buff for his Tactical Visor.
Soldier’s ultimate is basically a built-in aimbot, and after it’s activated he locks on to any enemy in his field of view for six seconds, but there are some major drawbacks.
One of the biggest is that it locks on to the center of an enemy hero’s hitbox, so if your target goes behind cover, even slightly, the lock-on is broken and Soldier will stop shooting them.
“I have to move to the side with Soldier to uncover Roadhog’s center hitbox in order to make my aimbot work, even though I can clearly see him and could shoot at his side hitbox,” LambdaC9 said. “It is really annoying because during fights sometimes you’re aimbot is going AGAINST you.”
Lambda proposes changing Soldier’s Visor to lock on to enemies like Torbjorn’s turret does, where it aims at any part of the hitbox, instead of just the center.
“Torbjorn’s turret changes its [line of sight] if it’s target’s center hitbox is covered by an obstacle,” they explained. “Soldier’s Ultimate does not behave this way, it always goes for its target’s center hitbox, which means if something is blocking it, the aimbot is not gonna work even if your target is clearly in your field of view.”
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Timestamp at 9:25 for mobile viewers:
In the above clip, former Overwatch League pro Sleepy is playing Roadhog and as you can see, unlike Soldier’s ultimate the turret is able to keep targeting him even when Hog is behind a pillar.
“Soldier’s ultimate is considered weak these days,” Lambda admitted. “So I thought making it behave like Torb’s turret would be a slight improvement, especially for shooting targets peeking around corners or hiding behind payloads.”
Unfortunately, there isn’t a way for players to change this and try it for themselves in the Workshop (that we know of), so it would be up to Blizzard devs themselves to make the change and maybe give us an Experimental mode to test it out.
There’s no denying that Soldier isn’t as highly picked as he used to be in Overwatch, and it would be interesting to see how an ultimate buff like the one suggested could work out and possibly improve the hero’s pick rate.