Hawkeye and Black Widow: The Sniper Problem and How To Fix It
It is very safe to say that a majority of people generally dislike Hawkeye for a specific reason, a reason prevalent enough to give him an obscenely high pick/ban rate: he can oneshot you with minimal warning, and nobody likes getting oneshot.
To dive into the specifics, Hawkeye charges up his arrow as he pulls the bowstring back, dealing anywhere from a measly 8 to 80 damage. This isn't where the damage stops, though. As long as Hawkeye's crosshair is in the general vicinity of an enemy, he builds up his passive, adding up to an additional 70 damage. Altogether, on a headshot, combined with his damage buff he gets for being a team-up anchor, he can deal 345 damage, or 138% of the maximum health of over half the roster.
This, plain and simple, isn't fun. The targeting system for Hawkeye's passive is not only lenient, but incredibly forgiving to the point that your passive can only decay down to 50 (which is still enough to oneshot 250 HP characters, fun fact!) if you, for some reason, stop aiming at someone - and the progress carries over as long as you're aiming at someone. Meaning you can charge up your shot, aim at a tank, then flick to the support in the backline and kill them before they realize what's happening.
Now let's talk about Black Widow. She has the lowest winrate across the board, reaching a pathetic sub-40% and having an even sadder pick rate. So why doesn't anybody play this sniper instead of Hawkeye? The main reason - she's actually well-balanced:
She only does a maximum of 240 damage on a headshot, meaning she cannot oneshot you
She's fragile when dived upon, unlike Hawkeye who has a number of tools to counter would-be divers
Every character has a sniper voiceline specifically dedicated to calling out Black Widow's existence that they say automatically, making it almost impossible to NOT know she exists.
It pains me to see this carefully crafted sniper character and then turn to see Hawkeye mindlessly spamming down a choke and getting kills for completely free. So what do I recommend?
Remove Hawkeye's oneshot entirely. This can be easily achieved by simply removing or reworking his passive to be non-damaging in nature, as then his arrows will do a maximum of 184 damage, which is a far cry from oneshotting even baby Bruce. He has many other aspects to his kit that could be buffed to compensate - his blast arrows, his hypersonic arrow, his double jump, even his health. Almost every aspect of his kit screams "generalist" DPS, so I think they could even lean into that and give him 275 HP.
Make Black Widow an actual threat. 240 damage against squishies is fine. To tanks? That's a light breeze. I propose her weapon do 75 damage + 18% of the target's maximum health. The math checks out and leaves damage against squishy targets unchanged, but maybe Groot will think twice about showing his head when he takes 456 damage after the AMPLE WARNING that Black Widow provides.
I recommend Black Widow get a new ability. Remove her batons as a weapon to switch to - an element of her kit that I think is sorely outdated and a relic from a time where she more resembled Sojourn. Make them her melee attack, and give her a passive akin to Groot or Invisible Woman. Every third attack makes the electric batons stun enemies she hits, giving her an ample, but earned, opportunity to line up a headshot on a would-be diver.
This is a whole lot of yammering, but I believe I've gotten my point across. Thank you for reading this far, assuming you didn't skip to the end.