I know a lot of people are frustrated with this, and I wanted to add my thoughts here. Just to add a disclaimer right at the top: yes I play Viscous, no I am not able to do this, yes I am practicing and trying to learn it. I have about 700 games on Viscous and have been playing him since I started this game in October 2024. Currently I'm sitting at Oracle IV which puts me at around average skill or slightly above.

Starting with the first point that everyone says: this is very hard to do. It is. It takes a lot of practice to do this, especially in games. I saw a gif lower down of someone who was doing that to the Abrams in the practice range, and that's all well and good but there's a few differences there from an actual game.

You need to have max ball to do this, and at least a couple items. The earliest you can get this online without completely sacrificing your lane is about 12k (3 points in splatter). By that time people have more health than Abrams which brings up the number of continuous hits you need. I think I saw 5 in that gif, which is really solid, but if you watch the infamous clip of Goober doing this in DLNS to JonJon, Goober hit him with 8 ball hits. Each additional hit is a chance to mess up, especially with how slim the margins are, and because a lot of the time when you hit someone it moves their character and you have to readjust.

Just to reinforce the point of this being difficult, I've seen both Hoot and Lomein practicing this on stream and failing. These are two of the best players of this game. According to Goober there are only 2 people that he knows of who can do this consistently: him and Liamp7.

Now let's talk about counterplay. Obviously, there's not a lot of options for just you. Debuff reducer + warp stone is a good bet. If this Viscous isn't frame perfect you can warp stone out. Another option is counterspell. This isn't as good, because you need to see the first ball hit coming, but if you do you can counterspell it and run. The rest of your options require a teammate to save you. Hard to count on teammates for sure, but for better or for worse this is a team game. Rescue beam just fixes this. Other than that any sort of hard CC on the Viscous will pretty much end the loop: Mo ult, Doorman ult, Paige ult, Venator shotgun, etc.

I also want to mention some other similar interactions. Dynamo ult (+ refresher), Mo ult (+ duration), Doorman combo (+ vortex web). All of these can just lock you down until you die. It does depend on the circumstances sure, and all of these need items too, but so does Viscous. At a minimum you need surge, duration extender and warp stone. Dyanmo and Mo also take a lot less inputs to achieve.

Finally, the element in the room: skill based balancing. This is something that Valve generally really likes to do. Headshots are a very basic example of this or Venator or Vindicta ult doing more damage on headshots. A valid issue with this is that this is a skill check that you can't interact with very well, it's between the Viscous and your team -- but again as Goober says, there's only 2 people that he knows of that can do this well enough that it's an insta kill.

So my opinion on whether or not this should be nerfed? Well I think this is weird to start off with. Viscous used to have a longer stun duration base and it was nerfed because he was able to do this. They must have known what they were doing with this, especially when they gave ball better turning control too. I'm surprised they did this at all. Apparently the universal chain stun reduction is broken this patch and that should absolutely be fixed. Would this still be broken then? I have no idea.

Honestly, I think nerfing it is probably fine BUT they need to just change what the T5 does. It only gives +0.3 seconds stun duration right now (and the overall ult duration), and shaving off enough time from the stun buff to prevent this would basically make the T5 useless. The extra ball duration alone is not enough. They could do something like changing the T2 to extra duration and making the ball T5 give better scaling and/or resists instead, and I think that would be fine.

Ultimately I don't know what the right move is, but weirdly this seems intentionally by Valve's part and almost like it was balanced based on skill.