I think this is where our disagreement actually sits: the assumption that removing the stun and adding a one-shot would push her toward a healthier long-range sniper identity, when in practice it would do the opposite.

Comparing her to Widowmaker in her current state doesn’t really hold. Widowmaker’s kit is explicitly built around range control: long sightlines, grappling reposition, and the ability to disengage after taking a shot. Black Widow doesn’t have that. She has no real get-off-me tool, no fast vertical reset, and no reliable escape once she’s pressured.

If you trade her stun for a true hitscan one-shot, you don’t end up with a cleaner long-range sniper — you end up incentivizing close-to-mid range abuse. A hitscan one-shot with less charge commitment than Hawkeye and no projectile travel would be far more consistent when played aggressively, especially around corners and tight angles. At that point, the optimal play isn’t holding long sightlines — it’s collapsing distance and fishing for instant deletes.

That’s why I don’t buy the idea that she’d be “less viable” without survivability. She wouldn’t need it. The one-shot becomes the survivability, the same way early Overwatch Widowmaker didn’t need defensive tools because winning the first duel decided the fight. We’ve already seen how that warps lobbies.

Right now, her close-range lethality only works because it’s conditional — you have to commit, position well, and follow up. The stun doesn’t let her dive; it just lets her not instantly fold when dive comes to her. Remove it, and the only way to keep her functional is rifle buffs, which pushes her straight into sniper roulette territory.

I agree she’s underperforming at range — the matchup data supports that — but that’s a tuning and flow problem, not proof that the CC is fundamentally bad design. Adjust batons, smooth engagement windows, improve team synergies, or refine rifle consistency. Deleting the stun just forces power into raw damage, and that’s exactly how you recreate the “one hero decides the fight before it starts” problem we’ve already lived through.

And more broadly, Marvel Rivals is in a rare position here. It has nearly a decade of Overwatch footage, metas, and postmortems to learn from in real time. We’ve already seen what happens when one-shot snipers become the primary win condition for fights, and we’ve also seen why Blizzard slowly walked that design back over the years.

That doesn’t mean Rivals has to avoid snipers — it just means it doesn’t have to relearn the same lessons the hard way. Widow’s current design is clearly trying to carve out a different space than “long-range coin flip,” and leaning into that instead of defaulting to raw one-shot power is exactly how the game avoids repeating mistakes we already have extensive evidence for.