I have a feeling that we are going to get another hero before OW2 comes because OW2 is probably going to be released until mid next year and I have a hard time believing that nothing is going to be released for one entire year. My guess is that at the very least we will get another hero by the end of the year, then OW2.
I am sorry you do not understand how win rate is calculated. Its a shame when people avoid knowledge because the facts will prove them wrong.
If you want to believe the numbers, the pros, the high end players, and even the developers were all wrong and you were right you can feel free. If someone wants to believe the sky is green they can feel free.
Enjoy your night.
The worst (or best?) part is that echo looks like all kinds of fun. DPS queue times are gonna skyrocket.
The numbers are not wrong. People just interpret them with wishful thinking instead of pragmatically when it involves non-popular heroes.
It already affected Symmetra, Torbjorn, Doomfist, Mei, Sombra and Moira across the game lifespan.
Play a whole different game.
- 80% of the playerbase is between silver and plat. Specifically when talking about ladder balance, their opinions matter more than high end players.
- Even within high end players, there were a lot of them that either main/OTP Symmetra, or that understood she was a sleeper hero.
- Even within those who did not saw her as powerful, everyone agreed she was strong on defense. Their main complaint was that Sym was “cheesy”, which is bollocks argument.
The original developers envisioned Sym as a support, and fought teeth and nail to keep her there. The team from 2018 decided she would fit better at the newly merged “Damage” role alongside her second rework.
DPS Sym is not the same character as Support Sym. Current Sym is a lot more Utility DPS like old Torb was, and old Sym was a Zoning Support.
In some parts of the world, the sky is, indeed, green. 
1 Like
The developers then admitted they were wrong which was good because they were very wrong. They realized that she was not a support, admitted it, and then months later moved her because of course it took Blizzard months and because it was not a priority.
Its important to remember they did not envision 2/2/2 when designing Overwatch so they did anticipate teams even wanting 2 healers and 2 tanks and all the healing would be needed for that. Once they realized how the game was taking shape they learned and adjusted accordingly. In the way they envisioned OW being played Sym could be a support, but that game never existed and never came out.
Fun fact: Torb also had a mid 60% win rate and was still terrible for the exact same reason as Sym and that is because her win rate was boosted by the conditions under which you played her and I will clarify that to be nice.
The way win rate is calculated in this game is done relative to the amount of time you spend on a hero in that game and then weighted accordingly. What this means is if I play 100% of a game on Soldier and win and then 50% of my next game on soldier and lose I do NOT have a 50% win rate on Soldier. It is actually 66% and this is the key to understanding Sym and Torb.
When you played Sym and Torb the overwhelming majority of the time they were played was on a 1st point defense. One of two things is going to happen on that first point defense: you are going to hold point A OR you are going to lose point A and swap (which if you played any amount of OW back you saw both happen all the time). If its the former then your team PROBABLY wins and if its the latter you are more likely to lose (not guaranteed of course because you can win from there all the time and often do but you are more likely to). Now in those games that you won that way you were Sym between roughly 1/2 to as high as 75-80% of the game. Meanwhile if you lost A, your time on Sym as a % is going to be FAR lower especially if you lost it quickly it could be as low as 1/20 or around as high as 1/3 to 1/4.
Now I could keep going and break down how if I am on Sym/Torb for most of the first 4 minutes we are still more likely to win whereas if I am on them for less that means we lost faster meaning FAR more likely to lose but the loss will not affect as much. I do not feel going that deep into the math when its clear already how it will end up.
This is effectively the reason that win rates on low pick rate heroes are drastically untrustworthy and have been for years (and why despite not being good Sym and Torb were dominant and often 10-15% over the rest of the cast in win rate).
I’m glad she is DPS so they won’t nerf her to hell like the tanks and supports 
That said as a mostly support / tank player I am sad these classes do not have any additions this round, they REALLY need some variety so I do hope the plan to release significantly more tanks and supports in future as they mentioned they were doing behind the scenes is true…
1 Like
No, they changed her role and recreated her from her base theme.
I would agree with you in this part if her rework was a minor one, like Torb or Hanzo received, and then she was moved into DPS. The way they did, if you look strictly at her mechanics, it was basically deleting a character and releasing a new character.
Any argument that Sym was moved into DPS because “the devs corrected a mistake” is null because of the simple fact that the move was done at the same time of that rework.
Again, Sym2 and Sym3 are completely different characters. You can’t point at one to prove a point about the other.
Never disagreed with that. And in fact, I believe role queue hurt a lot more heroes than helped them.
Some of them were better options if they had more role-teammtes, and some of them were better if they were the only role representative within the party. It was amazing within the fluidity that original OW sold itself upon.
I understand the reason why some people wanted role queue, but I also think it was a terrible move from Blizzard to incentive the playerbase for 3 years to diversify their hero pool across all roles, just to shaft the flex players that actually followed that advice. They could had implemented a role queue system that had space for flex players. But I’m digressing.
That is measured more by their tie rate. Which was, indeed, also a lot higher than average.
But there is also another variable that we had stats on that would make this argument at least a bit more fuzzier than simply “they lose point A and swap”. Do you remember which other character is often used as a hail mary option when you need to perform a full hold?
Bastion.
Bastion never had the winrates even close to Sym or Torb, while still having a high tie rate, just like them. Bastion winrate also considerably shrink as you climb in ranks, while Sym and Torb had around the same winrate across all ranks.
So, yeah. People would pick Sym (and Torb, and Bastion) as a hail mary defensive effort to turtle the win out of the match. And the high tie rate they had proved it was often successful in this regard. But how do you explain Bastion not having such high winrates when snowballing escort matches with Bastion on payload is stupidly common even to this day, but don’t drag him winrate even to the upper 50s?
I know, right? The first Damage Hero in a year and a half. How will Tank and Support players live? This truly is the end of times 
Even before they made that change and before the revert, they admitted she was not a support. They also admitted they did not expect games in OW to play out the way they did (which we can clearly see by the roster sizes).
Bastion is an interesting case, but one that you sort of answered yourself. First, before diving in, his pickrate is obnoxiously low and generally always (outside of 3 days of greatness) so small amount of play can skew it. So my question would be when does this play occur. He can also be used on defense in the same way as Torb and Sym, though he is not as good at it as them so it does not go as well, and, as you point out, he can be parked on a payload for an extended period of time which is still not a very good strat. Lastly, though this one is not THAT common but probably the best use of all 3, he can be used in a desperation hold in 2CP if you know you have a spinning WB holding down point. In scenario 3 you are far more likely to lose, in scenario 1 is he drastically inferior to sym and torb so you held less often thus not giving as much of a boost (he really is a terrible hero).
Then there is scenario 2. I do not get this strat honestly because its not good. You can get to a choke easily then you are held and you spent several minutes on Bastion to not really get anywhere and have to swap to a hero with no ult charge. It was okay on Junkertown before when certain heroes were trash but they are not anymore so its easily countered.
Source?
Because every instance I can remember of them talking about moving Sym to DPS happened after they announced reworking her to be more DPS-y.
In fact, I still vehemently remember the only time the devs talked about Sym in a dev update after her first rework, and it was summed up as “she don’t need any major buffs”:
Yes, I did:
I would love to dig it up, but they sort of deleted the old forums which sort of makes that hard.
As for the old data its not hard to know why Sym and Torb were good at that one thing and that Bastion is well terrible at all things.
Damage players already had twice as much choice as tank and support players.
Stop being facetious about it.
To be fair, I think that’s entirely the reason it’s cool she’s a dps. Not every sleek looking hero needs to be a support. Mercy is the nice, flying, graceful support. I feel like there would be a lot of overlap if Echo was a support. But that might just be me.
2 Likes
Still don’t explain Bastion having comparable tie rate with them. If he was as terrible as you say, he would not work that well as a hail mary option for a mandatory full hold.
I used to be a Sym main before her current rework. Trust me when I say the devs were absolutely silent about Symmetra 2.0 during her entire existence, except for that one video I linked above.
Maybe a citation here and there acknowledging some bug, like when Moira was released and her damage orb would damage buildings, and clean her turret nest without even trying, or when her ult was self-destructing out of nowhere because the devs changed some invisible walls around some maps.
But when talking about design, balance or lore? Sym was ignored during that year and a half.
1 Like
The DPS roster is large because the devs expected the DPS role-main (not a character-main) to use all of them whenever a situation called for it. Think of the DPS as a box of tools, and why its the largest role will start to make more sense. Its why we originally had niche heroes.
With healers its a lot more straight forward toolset. They launched with AoE, dedicated single target, and a healer for flankers/mobile dps (zen). They each did something the others were not suited for.
Tanks is the same case. D’va and winston were the mobility tanks, Rein was the anchor-shield tank, and roadhog was the punisher-tank. For all intents and purposes, these fulfilled what was needed at the time without being redundant. When they started adding more heroes to the smaller roles, they created redundancies and consequently nerfed things like barrier health and healing output to make up for the added redundancy that might make things problematic (such as barrier-watch and absurd amounts of heal stacking).
That’s not a fact you’re paraphrashing him. He said multiple Heroes at work he never EVER said what Roles specifically not even eluding or hinting to what roles
… Yes he did. He said tanks and healers specifically on Tim’s Echo stream earlier today.
Im doing it to prove a point. People are being overly dramatic over nothing. Sometimes that calls for a bit of humor and poking fun.
As for them having twice as many heroes, that doesn’t matter. They haven’t had a hero in over a year and a half. It’s not unreasonable for the role to get one. You cant just expect the devs to keep adding tanks and supports and nothing else.
So in other words, we should just keep satisfying DPS’ers that continues to contribute to the games core problems? Seems like a solution to me!
1 Like