Blizzard just killed Roadhog's hook combo - and turned Sombra into a support

The hook-into-one-shot is dead. If you've spent any time in ranked, you know exactly which combo I mean: Roadhog lands the chain, you get yanked to point-blank range, and the killcam is the first thing you see before you've even processed what happened. Blizzard confirmed at BlizzCon that Season 5 retires it, and honestly I'm surprised it survived this long.

That's not even the biggest shake-up in the package. Sombra - the invisible hacker who's been a Damage hero for as long as anyone can remember - is moving to Support. And the support role is getting a second new face on top of that: Doctrine, hero number 54, a vampire-themed character who heals and hurts with a scepter and a swarm of bat-shaped drones. Season 5 kicks off on October 6.

Here's what we actually know about the Roadhog changes, because it's more mechanical than "he's less annoying now." His primary fire becomes a 2-round burst shotgun, so the damage that used to arrive in one blast is now split across two shots. That short delay between them is the whole point: a hooked player gets a reaction window to pop a defensive or escape ability before the second burst connects. Stack that with the critical multiplier dropping from 2x to 1.5x - the number that carried the hook-shoot-melee burst - and the guaranteed kill is gone. In exchange he gets a new ability, Trash Compactor: it absorbs incoming projectiles for about 2 seconds, compresses them into an explosive ball of scrap and launches it back at the enemy. It can also be used to jump into the air, which finally gives Hog some real mobility. For the first time in years, Hog is being designed as a tank that creates space rather than a chain with a health bar attached.

I'm genuinely into this direction. A tank whose main job was deleting one target per cooldown was always a weird fit in a format where the tank is supposed to anchor the fight. At 1.5x, precision still pays, but a landed hook is no longer an automatic kill - it's an opening your team has to follow up on. That's healthier for ranked and way healthier for pro play, where a hook meta tends to turn into coin-flip picks.

Sombra is the bigger question mark. Here's what's been reported so far: her hack now works only on allies and health packs, Cyberspace Shift heals teammates, and translocator, invisibility and EMP stay in the kit. That's a clever way to keep her identity - the hacker is still hacking, just pointed at her own team now. Still, I'm not going to pretend I know how it plays until I've seen numbers. What I will say: invisibility on a support is a spicy concept. A flanking support who can reposition unseen is either brilliant or a nightmare for the enemy backline - and the gap between those two is usually about three patches of tuning.

Two new supports in one season also changes the draft math. Doctrine and a reworked Sombra hit the same pool at the same time, so the meta on October 6 is going to be chaos, and I'd expect pro teams to spend the first weeks of the season just figuring out which of them actually deserves a slot.

Want a look before the season? Doctrine has a limited-time Hero Trial running through September 14 - so you've got until tomorrow. Season 5 also brings Watchpoint: Grimsvotn, a new escort map set in a prison inside an Icelandic volcano, and Blizzard showed a Hero 55 teaser hinting at where the story goes in 2027.

My prediction: Hog mains will complain for a week, then realise their hero is actually useful to the team for once. Sombra mains... I'm not ready to make a prediction about Sombra mains.

Image: Tim Bartel from Cologne, Germany / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Overwatch_(19706493603).jpg