Taking down Reaper before Wraith Form

Question

In conjunction to Where to Aim After Hooking with Roadhog. I play a LOT as Roadhog and have always had a lot of difficulty hooking and killing Reaper before he uses Wraith Form.

In a scenario where Reaper and Roadhog have full health and nothing on cool down; Is it possible for Roadhog to hook, shotgun blast (around the stomach according to linked post by @karlyr), and/or melee Reaper before he uses Wraith Form. If so, how miniscule is this window and is there an easier way to accomplish this?

Any assistance is much appreciated!

Edit #1 : This also pertains to Roadhog vs Mei and her Ice Block ability.

Edit #2 : I had Reapers abilities mixed up - I meant Wraith Form not Shadow Step.

Answer 1

As of the new patch (1.7.0.2) on January 24, 2017, Roadhog's hook mechanics have been changed. Any enemy that has been hooked by Roadhog will now be pulled closer than in previous patches, which allows Roadhog to more reliably one-shot them. This includes heroes like Reaper and Mei. As a result, this answer isn't really accurate anymore; however I will keep it here for documentation's sake.

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Due to Reaper's higher starting health (250), and the fact that his wraith form has no channel time, killing him can be very difficult if he's starting at full health. Add to the fact that Reaper can actually queue up his wraith form while being hooked by holding the button down, it can be near impossible. (The same idea goes for Mei, as well as other champions who always seem to live after getting hooked (Ana, for example)).

After reading through this Reddit thread, it turns out there is a way to kill Reaper more reliably after hooking him with Roadhog. After successfully landing a hook, turn and look about 90 degrees away from where you shot the hook in the first place. For some reason, this causes the hooked enemy to land much closer to you, which means that more bullets will hit them when you shoot them. People in the Reddit thread have reported being able to oneshot a Reaper much more consistently using this strategy.

Another simpler approach when dealing with Reaper or Mei is to shoot them from a distance (preferably with your alt-fire), then use your normal hook combo to finish them off. (Or only grab them if you know they've taken some damage first.)

One final way of dealing with Reaper is highly dependent on Reaper's reaction time and his latency. After hooking him, take a short step forward, jump, and shoot downward toward his midsection. This will cause some of the pellets to be headshots, dealing extra damage. Finish off with a melee attack, and he should be dead. The problem with this approach, of course, is that if the Reaper does not have high ping, you've just given him an extra quarter second(-ish) to activate his wraith form, possibly negating all the damage entirely. This strategy should not be used often since it is so unreliable, but I wanted to include it to be thorough.

Answer 2

I play Roadhog a lot too. How I usually take down those 250 health characters is either primary fire first or alt fire first (depending on their distance) to get them around 200 health, then hook them and shoot them.

I usually don't like to melee after I shoot them because there is so much delayed frames of where you can't shoot after melee. So if you melee them and they still don't die, you're giving them a big frame of window to shoot you.

So it's shoot - hook - shoot. You can cancel the shooting animation with the hook so it's not much time lost

Answer 3

As Kaizerwolf said, it isn't likely that you will be able to oneshot them unless they panic and don't use their shadow walk immediatly or are plain lagging leaving you a window to land a melee.

On the other hand, I had some occurence where I hooked and oneshotted a Reaper (without stepping or a landing a melee). Which is what I was referring to in my other post. From there I have no idea what happenned differently. It might be a lost bullet from an ally or even the RNG of where the bullets are going.

Either way I didn't need the melee attack in these occurences. (Since he would have had the time to Shadow Walk away)

So proper answer to "would the hook + shotgun kill him from full health" : Pray RNJesus. You'd need some other source of damage to get it realiably. Otherwise, it's a source of ping if you have the time to land a melee.