Can sym orbs finally be made more aimed?

General Discussion
1

Here’s the tea about sym orbs:

  • if meant to be aimed, why do they travel 25m/s which is so easily dodged in many ranges irrespective of how well one aims or predicts?
    • like even at 15m it gives enemies 0.6s to reactively dodge them. most heroes can travel 3.3m > than orb splash radius i.e. can completely dodge or easily just guarantee only taking splash damage even at 15m away
  • if meant to be spammed, why is there 1.25s between fully charged orbs (1s charge up, 0.25s wind down) preventing decent area coverage and simply being bad spam esp when comparing to junkrat or pharah who have like double the fire rate for similar damage per shot and same, if not faster, projectile speed?

If blizz is going ahead with the 140 damage to 120 damage orb nerf on sym, the hero that has been underperforming for a long time now, can we at least look towards compensating that with an orb projectile speed buff (even if that means reducing projectile or splash size depending on how fast you make it) to actually make it effective in midrange?

It’d be healthy for her and the game in that rewards aim with consistency and longer effective range. And such a condition for this reward is skill based i.e. not impacting lower ranks as much, and all those skill elitists, if they’re actually about skill, have no reason to not support this direction.

Aside
Also while I have your attention (hopefully), her tp NEEDS to go back to its old 3.0 finite tp cast frequency.

  • Revert it please or try out Arcadium’s “tp 12s cd starts on deployment, pauses cd timer when 6s left until destruction”.
  • try even lowering placement range to 20m (current 30m, old 3.0 finite tp was 25m) if team tp’s are a large concern for the above revert or suggestion for tp. tho tbh, objective past data for >1yr suggests this compensation nerf for the above is unlikely needed.

Her tp enables her burst combo enabling tool, as well as being her engagement tool AND disengagement tool. If we’re trying to make her “consistent with other heroes”, please keep your word in doing this to make her more up to standard for a hero with objectively low effective range and low sustain.

12 Likes
2

Yes.
The orbs are neither very good at spam or very good at aimed.
They should be more aimed, if we increase Rate of fire to 0.9s charge with 0.1s wind down, SHE STILL has lower fire rate than Junkrat and Pharah by a lot.

If you did this, increased projectile speed and lowered size, she might actually have decent midrange potential.

But I guess this post could not have taken into account her 225hp buff. Maybe she just needs a rate of fire increase or projectile speed increase instead of both now.

The 225hp buff really changes what the Devs view for Symmetra in the future.

3

What was the original CD of the teleporter for 3.0?

I could have sworn when they had made the teleporter stay up for an infinite duration that they tagged on 2sec to the CD. Which I was also confident they did revert.

Genuinely curious on this one because I was certain her teleporter is currently the same CD as when it would expire.

1 Like
4

Could I convince you to change the wording of your thread title to “Can devs finally make sym orbs target and seek the nearest enemy automatically?”

5

You’re right, at least as far as I can tell from browsing patch notes. It’s just that the nature of the cooldown starting on TP destruction makes it less likely to be available when you need it I guess.

6

She is a spam hero like Junkrat or Hanzo, using her skills to deny space. That is how those heroes work.

1 Like
7

Hanzo and Junkrat both have consistent means of damage though. The problem Zephrin is highlighting is that her orbs move too slow to be effective at actually duelling people.

2 Likes
8

Ohhhh wait. Did the CD traditionally start right after it was deployed whereas it’s now after it’s destroyed?

9

I don’t think Blizzard is trying anything, I think they’ve completely lost the plot and forget Symmetra exists; the fact that McCree got the same freaking buff as her when he doesn’t struggle to kill things like she does is proof enough.

They won’t let her be lethal up close, they took away her noodle gun and messed up her primary gun so it doesn’t so ANY instant damage. Good luck winning a duel with her unless you’re already all set up and in the exact right spot that YOU chose. It’s not like we have a ton of characters that boop, knock, bump and push you all over the place - oh wait, we do.

They won’t let her turrets do good damage because people complain about the auto aim, forget that their range is absolutely pathetic and you can destroy them by sneezing on them.

And they won’t let her self sustain, she’s got nothing that she can do herself to save herself- no overload, no proton barrier shield, nothin’.

Blizzard is full on herpin’ and derpin’.

1 Like
10

It’s always started after destruction, it’s never ‘stacked’. Aka you couldn’t wait out the cooldown, then destroy your tp and set it up again right away. It’s never functioned like that. They always make you wait for the full 12 seconds after the TP gets destroyed.

11

Because they have a humongous hitbox.

Because they do almost as much damage as junks grenades.

12

Yeah, I thought it worked the way you mentioned.

I’m genuinely confused now… What makes the current teleporter worse than when it had a duration then?

If the CD had always started after it is destroyed, it has the same CD again, but it’s got an unlimited duration.

I feel like I’m really missing something here because to say it’s currently worse than when it only lasted for X time sounds like user error.

13

I still say that fully charged orbs should retain the speed but be piercing to satisfy Symm 2.0 players and counter shield comps. Less charged orbs should move faster and reward aim & 3.0 fans.

14

That’s how I remember it, but my memory isn’t exactly the greatest. Still, the patch notes make it sound that way:

Symmetra

Teleporter

  • Now lasts an infinite duration until destroyed
  • Players can destroy their Teleporter with the ability 2 input
  • Cooldown now starts when Teleporter is destroyed

There’s also threads like this:

With comments like this:

15

The difference is in how it plays out in game; for the entire time they’ve had this TP, people have been asking for better cooldowns on it. It takes 12 seconds I believe, and has the entire time, it’s a very long cooldown.

When the TP destroys itself, as it did in the first iteration, there’s nothing you [the player] need to do in order to ‘reset’ it. You use it, it lasts for 8 seconds, then destructs and the 12 second countdown starts again. This means that you often have it ‘up’ during engagements, because there’s nothing else you COULD have been using it for. It’s more ‘attack heavy’ in that sense.

Then they gave her infinite TP, which means you, the player, need to choose when to destroy it - but you still have to wait for that 12 seconds after in order to have it up again. This means that if you, say, use it to help a slow teammate come back from spawn because it took them a while to choose a hero, the game starts, and you’re faced with a choice - do you;

A. leave it up for your team to use because it’s ‘safe’ and it will help, once someone dies.

B. Destroy it but be aware that you probably won’t have it ready for this oncoming fight

You’re constantly faced with a timing issue with her TP where you can either leave it for a slow but steady ‘guaranteed value’ at the back, or you can use it offensively to maybe get some big value, but run the risk of getting nothing because it takes a while to set up and has a long cooldown so you really only get one shot with it, and if you whiff it, well… oh well.

With Sym she struggles to deliver any kind of consistency; consistent utility? well by giving your team option A utility, you’re basically playing without an ability the whole game. Imagine playing Reaper without wraith form being usable, or McCree without flashbang, because they had to set it up at their spawn to help their teammates instead. That’d be a real fun and useful ability, right? [that’s sarcasm]

When TP destroys itself though it FORCES you to play offensively, so some Sym’s like that because it doesn’t make them choose between utility and aggression, because they like that Sym is a DPS and want her to be MORE dps.

Then you have other Syms like me that remember how her utility could be used smartly to win games, and wish that her utility was actually good instead of half baked between one and the other.

1 Like
17

possibly. the thing is with just making firerate better, we’re still keeping the issue regarding “easy to dodge at around 15m” which is a big :thinking: as to mid range capability. and a firerate of 1 orb per second isn’t really spammy enough to compensate that esp for simply linear projectiles.

imo even taking the +25hp buff, the whole projectile speed, size, splash radius, firerate still needs to be looked at for balancing.

18

old 3.0 tp was 12cd starting on placement (really important here, with 10s duration.

so the difference can be visually seen here:

obvs now infinite tp has a 10s cd rather than 12s, but the effect shown in the above diagram is still there, i.e. 10s guaranteed chunk of hero down time minimum (because tp is basically the tool that enables sym to have uptime), which is very detrimental to sym which old tp wouldn’t have.

and you can imagine how hard it is to keep tp in valuable locations that move frequently (esp post shield nerfs) when there’s like a 10s buffer to move tp.

2 Likes
19

if it’s meant to be spam, then why have a sniper level charge time on them that prevents actual spam. it doesn’t add up.

as mathematically shown in the original post, evidently the projectile size doesn’t make up for the slow speed.

yet both junkrat and pharah deal similar damage per shot, have similar splash radii yet both of them have much higher firerate than sym orbs (legit around double the firerate). again, something doesn’t add up here.

idk if you’ve actually tried dueling with sym before, but she’s defs not one of the better duelists in OW. like even when taking out the fact that many heroes have better dueling tools, a lot of other heroes simply have better weapons to duel with. like the original post already shows how orbs aren’t good and primary’s pretty self explanatory in how bad it is for 1v1s.

20

I think it does make missing more leniant, currently you are a sitting duck for the next 1 second. No other hero has this much downtime. I think it would help if turrets cast and deployment time was decreased because it would allow a single turret to be a duel ability. Rather than a 30hp damage sponge on a long cooldown.

But yes you are right the whole size splash radius etc should be looked at.

Imo
Remove the splash (wasn’t that useful anyways)
Reduce the size
Reduce the fire rate
increase the projectile speed.

Make them more like Mei’s icicles rather than Pharah or Junkrat spam.

1 Like
21

tbh I don’t think that’d make much of a difference. it’d still be gone after like 1 shot anyways. :sweat_smile:

with 1s per shot she still will be a sitting duck for the next second tho :\

agreed. like if they want to make her orbs distinguished from the other 2, and if they’re going to put charge time on it, it better be aimable. otherwise it defeats the purpose of putting charge time on the weapon fire in the first place from what I can see. i.e. putting charge time/low firerate encourages the player to take more aim (because less shots —> need to make every shot count), so there the projectiles should be leaning more on being aimed (at the very least, more than currently).

not to mention how charge time/low firerate makes the weapon fire not as good in closer range too (see snipers).