niche is only fine if the niche hero in question is proportionally stronger in their niche for how narrow it is, i.e. strength in niche actually strong enough to compensate weaknesses outside of the niche. otherwise the hero is by definition weak and there’s no point in making the hero have such a niche. additionally, if a hero’s niche is so narrow that they can’t reasonably be stronger in their niche while being fair (e.g. needing like >=100% winrate in their niche to balance out weaknesses), then blizzard f’ed up hard and they need to expand their niche/deflat and make them more general.
The former of “proportionally stronger in their niche for how narrow it is” is not sym atm.
her winrate rn in gm for the past month and past 3 months struggles to be in top 10 and the top 10 has a decent amount of generalists in there (if not far more general than she is). like if she is really only played on certain maps only (because “niche”) to justify how low her pickrates are, then it doesn’t make sense why her winrate lacks high skewness in being higher.
this is further especially the case if you further try arguing unpopularity to justify her excessively lower pickrates. because if she’s unpopular, it means less chance of mirror matchups, and thus her winrate should be spiking up even further. (side note: don’t forget popularity is positively correlated with the hero being powerful).
but it hasn’t.
So the resounding question is why is that the case?
And a likely answer is that she’s simply bad.
And when you start comping her kit vs others, esp in terms of how often she can get uptime for herself to do her job vs how often others can get uptime for their respective jobs, the answer of “sym simply being bad” seems more and more likely. I could and legit have written essays of analysis of sym’s kit, but to spare you the details and proofs: amongst the cast, she legit has low sustain, low effective range (yes, even when including orbs), low burst AND low mobility.