It’s funny… I said her pick would be the same if not worse with her rework when she was still on the PTR and people went off on me saying she’s way better. They kept saying her teleporter would change the game and how amazing her ult is. 
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iprefer when i was allowed to have that teleporter charge as it was set up on the field. I always HAD another one ready when it was all used up or killed. it was amazing.
Honestly, I’m beginning to think the biggest failure of the new rework is that they didn’t make Symmetra overpowered, so they didn’t counteract the extremely negative preconceptions people have in the first place.
Symmetra could be perfectly balanced, but it would be almost impossible to tell because there’s such a huge stigma coming into this essentially new character. No one is going to pick up new Symmetra if she’s just fine, and not overpowered, because they associate her with being bad. And this is only worse due to her win rate being lower than before, even if her new win rate is more healthy and still very high compared to other heroes. A balanced hero isn’t going to shake a stigma that’s been around for two years, which means that reworking her to be balanced is still going to fail to change the community’s toxic preconceptions.
Frankly, she needed the Hanzo treatment where the rework made her way too powerful, and then she got reigned in over a few months. At this point, though, it’s probably too late. If they buff her up to the point that she can overcome the community’s preconceptions, people are going to be upset that they grossly overcompensated with buffs, and then people are going to be upset again when they reign her back in.
I personally think that she’s very close to balanced. I think she has a terrible pick rate due to the community’s extremely negative perception and the fact that her kit appeals to a smaller audience. I expect her win rate is lower because she’s more balanced than old Symmetra (I think old Symmetra was actually overpowered, but it was in a way that was mostly invisible and useless at the pro level, so she was perceived as being way less powerful than she actually was).
Sadly, even if this is the case, it’s going to take ages for the community’s perception of her to catch up. It’s almost definitely going to take pro play in a tournament to turn some heads. In the meantime, it’s going to continue to be a challenge to play her in solo queue where she lacks the coordination to make the best of her abilities and will be on the receiving end of tons of toxicity.
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It will not happen, unless, like Hanzo, she becomes so strong that she is a must pick. Even if she gets used in the World Cup by a few teams in a few maps, doing and enabling some amazing plays, if she isn’t seen everywhere, she will still be seem as a niche pick at best. Just like Mei. And we got some very serious a-mei-zing plays in the OWL:
Hey, a fellow soul! I’ve been saying Symmetra was OP since her rework because you have a hero that some people can play:
- without communication
- without team coordination
- with some people in her team actively sabotaging her win chances (eg, swapping off tank out of spite)
- under threat of being banned by false reporting
- Extreme community ill will towards the hero in a basic level
And even with all that, she was still the hero with the highest winrate in the game in all ranks. Every other off-meta hero that lack this kind of power had much lower winrates, like Mei and Sombra.
I said it before, and I keep saying it. The only problem Sym2 had was her reputation within the community. Her kit was not underpowered, which is why using a rework to try and remove that ill will didn’t worked.
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Well, I think her kit was problematic. So much of the power was effectively invisible that her actual power and perceived power were way, way off. That’s really bad because either she’s balanced and people think she’s a troll pick or people think she’s balanced but she’s actually ridiculously overpowered.
Also, a big part of her kit had zero place in pro play or even the highest level of organized play.
New Symmetra doesn’t struggle with either of these problems. Her contribution to the game is no longer invisible or passive, her kit has a ton of power in professional/organized play, and her win rate is actually quite healthy. Honestly, if people weren’t so toxic towards her, and content creators weren’t ignoring her just as much as before, I’d be super happy, even though I think she needs a tiny bit of help still.
I honestly don’t care about pro gameplay pickrates. I understand people who enjoy watching it, but I stand in the side that thinks the game should not be balanced uniquely for their behalf.
Having a unique hero, that brings some diversity in ladder gameplay, and have zero usage in pro tier is fine in my eyes. I don’t mind never seeing Symmetra played in OWL, as long as she is balanced for ladder play.
Which brings the other point you raises…
That is a problem. A huge, huge problem, and the main source of all the negativity towards Symmetra. But since it’s a perception problem, and not exactly a balance problem (unless she was deemed OP by the devs or the community), the way to tackle that is by… educating people. Get some streamers to talk about Symmetra strengths. Get some OWL players/choches seriously talking about what they would do if Symmetra or Torb or other off-meta heroes were “required” to be played in their team. Do some educational videos like League have their Summoner’s Code.
Heck, at least make some basic videos explaining the strengths of each hero in the roster and where you should be looking to play them, like HotS do.
Any of those would help her a lot more than a rework. Especially one that was this controversial, didn’t raised her pickrate in general, and didn’t solved the issue of people being reported on sight for playing her.
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I hope you can see from this juxtaposition why pro play does matter to everyone. A big part of how the community educates itself is by watching the very best players. If the very best players think she’s trash and never touch her, that’s going to affect our teammates on ladder. People will always take the easy way out of demanding swaps instead of something that requires them to learn and adjust their own play.
Besides, for Blizzard, having one of their heroes ignored and even joked about in pro play is really bad, even if not all of their player base cares. They’re not League where they have so many heroes, you can’t possibly expect them all to see play. Plus I can also tell you that some people don’t watch pro play because their favored hero/heroes aren’t represented (that’s about 50% of why I don’t follow it).
Also, it’s been two years. I don’t think Blizzard running little TED talks to try to convince people that certain heroes are actually better than we think would be effective if two years of “she has the highest win rate in the game, bar none” didn’t catch anyone’s attention. There’s also a certain level where you have to consider how people feel in the game, and recognize it as valid; if playing with someone feels bad even though they’re not actually reducing your chances to win, that can still be a justification for change. This is a video game after all; fun does matter.
As I’ve said, I think the rework succeeded in creating a hero who is better balanced, isn’t invisible in her contribution, can be used in pro play, etc. The main thing they failed to do was to set the rework up to make a big enough splash to wash away the stigma attached to the hero. It’s so frustrating that she’s barely even mentioned by content creators and constantly written off as “still niche” even though the only “niche” people place her in is “team mobility.” You know, that same “niche” that has these same people slobbering all over Lucio half the time.
I’m hoping that with a few small buffs, she can get to a perfectly good place and that the toxicity will fade over time, and that she’ll start getting more attention… It’s irritating that it’s going to be way slower than, say, Hanzo’s rework and how it helped him. Maybe Blizzard intentionally tried to avoid that because of the frustration with Hanzo.
Overwatch is a game with a serious lack of information from official sources. The in-game tutorial is a joke, there is no standard official source for a lot of game numbers (damage, healing, cooldown, etc), and there is a ton of misconceptions going through hearsay in the community that it’s hard to even get correct information if you are not testing stuff yourself, or checking reliable external sources.
TED-talk style videos would be a nice improvement towards informing their playerbase. As the HotS spotlight videos show, you don’t even need to scream damage numbers in those videos. Pretty much only showcase every ability in use, its intended use, one or two basic ways to use it, and then in the end the intended way the hero is supposed to be played, and what are their strong and weak points.
That is regardless of Symmetra situation. Overwatch need to teach their players better, or at least provide raw numbers in a hidden webpage, so we can at least point an official source for them.
I understand why the words of pro players carry more weight to the community in general than the words of RandomJoe#1264. That’s why I suggest using them to do some random brainstorm, so your average player also start thinking about it.
E-sports in general is a different beast, and I like that more and more people are enjoying them to the point even big corporations are investing heavy money into it (OWL finals in ESPN is huge). But just like I live in Brazil and I don’t care about soccer, I can play Overwatch and not care about OWL or Contenders.
I like Sym3 as well. While I personally didn’t really connected with her like I did with Sym2, I still have fun while playing her.
My gripe with the rework is mostly with how people that enjoyed the unique playstyle of Sym2 have no hero to fallback, and how it destroyed the accessibility aspect of the character, and lots of disabled people that literally could only comfortably play Symmetra, were left with no other accessible hero to play.
We will know when Torb and Bastion reworks arrive on PTR. If your theory is true, both will come underwhelming as well. Especially Torb, which is another hero that is severely underestimated and is pretty much one minor patch from being perfectly balanced (reduce his head hitbox).
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Her winrate is down because she is less of a niche pick… so its going to 50% which is normal for a non situational pick.
That affirmation have no weight if its not accompanied with an increase in pickrate. Her pickrate is the same in competitive play, but her winrate decreased. What this points out is that she is still as niche, but got worse in that niche.
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I agree that they could do more, but I also sympathize with them wanting to let the community define the game themselves. It’s two different ways to approach game development, and I don’t mind too much that they by and large let the players figure it out.
In fact, I think one of the most toxic things in the game, the ridiculous obsession with hero swapping and hero choice in general, came from people taking something Blizzard said out of context and then treating it as gospel. In response to people suggesting removing hero swapping, Blizzard said it was core to the game. People have taken that to mean that it is the sole driving feature of Overwatch and that all problems can and should be solved by hero swapping. I can’t even remember the last time I experienced toxicity that wasn’t about someone’s hero choice.
Just imagine if Blizzard said more about how to play the game and people took it out of context and treated it as gospel. 
To be quite honest, I connect with new Symmetra better than old Symmetra. She was 100% my favorite character both before and after the rework.
Also, there are other heroes who are accessible. Reinhardt, Winston, Mercy, and Moira can all be played with zero aim. Many other characters can be played with very minimal aim.
If anything, the least accessible thing in the game is Pharah’s existence, since defeating her requires someone on your team to have pinpoint aim. If you get a bunch of people who rely on projectile prediction like Junkrat or tracking with Tracer/Symmetra, you’re just out of luck.
Well, they may also learn from the Symmetra rework that doing a rework and landing it as a bit underpowered can backfire, too.
Possibly. The other explanation for her old inflated win rate was her situational nature (I still think she was just invisibly overpowered). Now that it’s gone, her win rate would be more normal, and it has been. But it’s still very strong. I don’t get why people are freaking out about the win rate so much.
Pick rate does not indicate how niche someone is in gameplay terms. Pick rates are driven by meta, popularity of the hero, how broadly appealing the kit is, etc. In my games, I find Symmetra to be applicable in almost any situation and in almost any team comp, and really the only time she’s notably worse is against Pharah.
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To be fair, 3.0 plays quite a bit differently.
Players had tons and tons of time to learn 2.0 and all its quirks. 3.0 only just started. And she’s much… trickier (aka more annoying) to play now. I’d say give it another month before we start pulling WRs and PRs out as evidence that 3.0 is worse. Let’s give people some time to git gud.
I mean, she is worse. Period. But we can’t fairly use playerbase statistics to back that up just yet.
There is bunch of people in the thread I linked that said exactly that, and I recommend you to read it. We, abled people, often ignore how much stuff we take for granted regarding motion control.
Tl;dr: There was more going into Sym2 accessibility than simply the autolock gun, and those heroes don’t provide that.
That happens in HotS and League as well, and you can’t swap heroes in those games. Some people just don’t want to play with or against certain heroes, but instead of learning new fun ways to kill those heroes, they rage in chat.
Also, you combat misuse of information with more information. If you have half dozen videos saying that Widowmaker works better if she have sight of the point instead of fighting on it, people might eventually stop asking Widow to jump into the point while its already being contested.
That was me on Sym2 as well. Pretty much only a good Pharah, Mei or Tracer could force me to swap out of Sym in pretty much any map.
IMO, that’s also why it was infuriating for people asking us to swap, because we could still see our own contributions to the fight, and we had a lot of ways to approach the battle that only required a change of strategy, not a change of hero.
Sym3 is not that different in this aspect, but she lost a lot of close range prowess because of how lackluster her beam is now. As I said, she is not a bad hero.
In coloquial terms, meta is something with high pick rate, and niche/off-meta is something with low pickrate. I know niche is not equal to off-meta (Eg, Reinhardt is niche and meta), but I was arguing that you can only justify “more people are playing her, which is why her winrate dropped” when, well, more people play her. Which is not the case.
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I’m no expert on accessibility, so it’s not really something I want to dive much deeper into. I think it’s also not as simple as “Symmetra was the only accessible hero.”
I know in my own case, I only struggle with twitch aim characters due to my own medical condition giving me shaky hands. Tracking isn’t bad, and projectile aim is mostly fine. It’s not as simple as “accessible or not.”
I understand it’s possible. I’m just pointing out that there are also reasons to let the community do its thing. There are advantages and disadvantages to both aproaches.
Okay, let me be completely clear. I don’t think Symmetra was niche before. I think she was just overpowered, and that her win rate dropped because she is now closer to being balanced.
However, for those who do buy into the old argument that her old high winrate was due to her being niche, I argue that her low pick rate does not mean that she’s still niche. It just means that she’s no more popular than she was before. Her kit certainly doesn’t carry this huge advantage on first point defense that people blamed for her high win rate, so a lower win rate is to be expected. The argument was never that more people were playing her, but that people who do play her play her in more situations and that she no longer has that situational advantage.
And again… Worse than old Symmetra, but still better than any other dps…
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I agree with that part 100%. She is much less OP than she was before, and her contributions are more visible for her team.
The problem is that it runs counter to the justification for the rework.
The goal of these changes is to move Symmetra to her new damage role and make her more flexible and viable across more areas of the game than she was previously. Now that Symmetra is no longer a support hero, she is expected to be able to dish out heavy damage, and these changes allow for her to do so. She should be more powerful and interesting in more team compositions and maps, and she should also be stronger on offense and defense.
That descriptions means the devs intended the rework to be a overall buff to the character. Everything listed in the quote is meant as a positive improvement. More flexibility, viable in more sections of the game, more reliable damage, viable in offense and defense, etc. And by making her less powerful in general, it goes contrary to their intent.
(For comparison, Hanzo rework specifically mentions that the main reason behind it was to remove Scatter Arrow)
That is the primary reason why I consider this rework a failure. It fails to meet the declared objectives, even thought it might have meet their hidden objectives (toning her down to balanced) and the patch notes justification is just lip service. But that is going into tinfoil hat territory.
For now, I’ll thank you for the discussion, but I think we agree on most points and are mostly discussing semantics now.
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Yeah, it’s kind of confusing. Honestly, I think if you just assume that everything they’re saying there is talking about her perceived power and viability, then it makes a lot more sense. Also, if you consider those words in the context of pro/organized play, it also makes more sense.
It’s also very likely that Blizzard had some internal disagreement about what the actual issue was, and they worked to come up with a solution that pleased both sides of the issue. However, I don’t think they ever had the goal of increasing her win rate, since it was already too high.
I really only think they failed in changing perception. I imagine they’re probably pretty happy with her actual power level (I know I am; I’m only hoping for small buffs for a very specific part of the kit). But I imagine they were hoping that the community would be more open to what’s effectively a new hero. I doubt the expected the stigma to barely shift. I hope they’re trying to figure something out, but it may just be a “wait and see” issue…
I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite post in the Citadel.
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Yes, but she had an inflated winrate because of how situational she used to be.
That doesn’t mean that she’s bad.
How do you explain Sym mains with the same winrate in all situations?
Meh, it takes time to learn the ropes of a new hero, even I’m still learning new things about Symmetra. Many players even now are completely unaware that she can teleport stacked sentries by dropping a teleport gate on top of them for instant max-damage flanks. And while new players are still figuring things out, older Sym players who dislike the changes are dropping the character. It might be awhile before her full potential is completely unlocked. And of course, there are shiny new characters like Hammond drawing players away from her development. I’m really interested to see how she’s played when the next OWL season starts up.