You can’t be too mean to the devs though - they have a lot on their plate and IIRC it’s a relatively small team that designs and balances these things. I’m sure that in testing this version of Symmetra seemed absolutely perfect - the ability to ramp up to such a high DPS, throw turrets, and move her team around the map at a whim all combined seem like a great package.
And there was no way for her to effectively be a support hero in their paradigm (they even tried to make the turrets healing objects IIRC, which would’ve not been very good, so I’m thankful that they didn’t do that).
A long time ago, I posted this skeptical-yet-optimistic thread about the Symm rework which got a significant amount of attention, by my estimation, but it seemed to be that the Symm mains that wrote on that thread were opinionated that she should be DPS. And I think that’s certainly the case. Stacking armor and shields do cause a huge problem at low ELO, so it’s probably for the best that it’s gone.
That being said, this new Symm (which doesn’t feel or play anything like you would’ve expected someone with Symmetra’s character to play) is certainly missing something, beyond game mechanics and balancing numbers, and I’m pretty sure that it’s “personality”.
I already wrote about this somewhere, but those turret placement voicelines - where the hell did they go? What an awful decision to remove them.
Symmetra 1.0 16 Dec [2016]: .52% / 61.00%
Symmetra 2.0 02 Nov [2017]: .65% / 63.32%
Symmetra 3.0 02 Sep [2018]: 0.71% / 54.80%
So how I reconcile and explain this is, we’ve returned to the previous statistics for symm play. Low pickrate, played only by those who have mastered her, and therefore, an elevated winrate compared to what you’d expect. Someone in another forum post called this “natural selection”, which I think is an apt description of this reality.
Clearly if their goal is to make her more accessible, it’s working, because she’s being picked around 40% more than she was, proportionally, in December of 2016.