Can We Not Change Symmetra's Primary Fire?

Make it like Moira’s and most sym players will be fine with it.

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I would be fine with a Moira style beam compared to Zarya.

I also think it should have a passive similar to Brig wherein if you’re hitting a shield with it, it pulses a shield buff to all allies within a radius around you (in addition to gaining ammo as it has been described to work currently).

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I wrote a whole thread on that because I got tired of copy-pasting a long explanation on that. But tl;dr: It’s not a good idea to wait PTR to start complaining about what we think the dev team is doing wrong, in a conceptual level.

D.va has been, since launch, always in a good spot. Sometimes she got into mandatory status, but she never was a “bad” hero. So, you are right on that.

Junkrat, however, was considered a no skill joke character that couldn’t secure a kill, relying only in spam damage, and had the worst ultimate in the game because it was very easy to shoot it down. Just like Symmetra (and Torb, Hanzo, Mei, etc), he was relegated as unviable, and very often was at the receiving end of ally tilt on sight.

We had one PTR interaction in 2018 that give a lot of small changes to a lot of heroes: the one that is live right now, and that they trust so much it will not even be the patch on OWL Stage 4. That patch was an exception, and given that the current PTR patch is back to molasses change speed, it seems that they are not making it the new standard.

That is my guess as well. They are making her back from scratch in a try to salvage her terrible reputation within the community. My major problem with that approach is that:

  1. It feels like a slap to the face of her current fans, which actually like her current gameplay, and spent hours studying maps and turret/ult placements to benefit the team the best they can; and

  2. Unless they make her Brigitte levels of broken, I doubt it will work. Even if they do, see what happened to Junkrat and Hanzo, who got much better, but now they are salty because “a no skill hero is better than the hero I spent hours training”, and don’t notice the irony of that with my first complaint.

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I agree tbh. It’s iconic, one of the main highlights of her kit that is different from any other hero. It’s what makes her fun in my opinion; the high ramp up damage and the autolock but short range which makes it fun, even for flankers like tracer to stay out of range and try to outplay it. #keepsymleftclick

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Please stop being so biased.

1- It’s very hard to knowledgeably criticize something that you don’t even have test gameplay clips to watch. It’s like sharing your complaints with NASA because you don’t like a proposed plan to go Mars, and you think you have valuable input to provide. Odds are you don’t, and that the team in charge knows more than you. It is a very real possibility that this Sym 2.0 rework will play out completely differently than the future you already have laid out in your head. It is also possible the scrap this proposed plan entirely, and start from scratch.

2- Junkrat is considered a no skill joke, true. But let’s be real, he was never ever on the same level of infamy as a hero that can place a Teleporter off the edge of the map. Mei and Hanzo were also conisidered jokes, but no where near the level of Symmetra and Torb.

3- I literally have no idea how you came to the awful ‘one PTR interaction’ conclusion. You are just so incredibly wrong it hurts. I count seven PTR updates since January 4th, with the most recent one being five days ago. Every patch had some sort of a change to a hero, with some decently big changes occurring during that time. Your understanding of molasses is skewed.

They are reworking one of my mains. It’s impossible for me to write anything on the matter that is not biased. I try to be as objective as possible, but there is inherent bias in everything we write about stuff that matter to us.

That is a terrible analogy because you miss the scope of the situation.

NASA sending people to Mars don’t affect my daily life, and it’s very improbable I’ll be involved in the mission in any way. Overwatch is a game I play almost on a daily basis, and Symmetra is a hero I play a lot in all of my gaming sessions.

I’m not complaining about the future. I have other heroes I can play, and for what we read thus far, Sanjay will probably be a fun hero to play.

My complaint is on how Blizzard is dealing with the rework, not the rework itself. I had a similar complaint on Mercy rework because they created a whole new ultimate before trying to balance Resurrection. And I don’t even play Mercy!

It’s a problem with the method, not the goal.

I said one PTR interaction with lots of small changes.

Most of the time, the PTR will involve around 2-3 changes, the it goes live within 2 weeks. The current live patch was refreshing because it made changes to 5 heroes on top of Hanzo rework and a new map, and that was an unusual amount of changes considering Overwatch’s history with their patches.

We get around one patch per month (excluding hotfixes). They are not updating “quickly” compared to how they’ve been updating since launch.

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And what’s wrong about that? :confused:
She will gonna be DPS soon.You cant have auto-lock beam just becuase you are a support and dont need to focus about aim for dealing damge anymore.(Oh wait,I forgot about Ana and Zen LOL)
I dont want to blame players who can’t aim are brain dead but…
…If you really want to play support who good at dealing damage at melee range/dont have to aim/Have ability which can give extra health,go play Brigitte,she can even do everything better than symmetra now.

Well, your bias is the issue. Try to get passed it.

It’s not really a terrible analogy. Sure you may have more ‘experience’ with Overwatch, and Overwatch may have more of an impact, but as of now you can’t justify saying anything other than, ‘I don’t like the proposed rework’. Which is just not worth saying because it is so empty. Just like all you could say about NASA is, ‘I don’t like going to Mars’. You can’t provide any other grounded and fact based input, because you literally have no knowledge to base it off of. Making blanket statements like, ‘I doubt it will work’ just shows your personal issues and and readiness to completely write it off without anything being actually shown to you.

See how this works, ‘I doubt we will get to Mars’ Oh really? I didn’t know you could see into the future and also are an experienced aerospace engineer! Wait until you are actually provided something physical before you make constructive criticisms. Or else it is all meaningless.

Oh boy here we go, Sym is not a new hero just because she is getting totally reworked. You are doing this to yourself and putting up a mental block if you continue to think about this as ‘Now we have Sanjay’ and not ‘Now we have improved Symmetra 2.0’. So good luck to you with that closed mindset.

Again, everyone is biased. There is no way to bypass bias. The best you can do is be aware of your own bias, and try to avoid it as the basis of your argument.

But I think you are confounding “having a biased opinion” with “having an opinion”. My argument, the central point I’m trying to bring into discussion, is that…

That is not bias. That is the argument on itself.

The only time I said “I doubt it will work” in this thread is not about Sanjay being a viable pick. It was about the community view on Symmetra changing just because she get a rework to make her “better”.

We have data on how Junkrat and Hanzo buffs got received by the community. Even after becoming much more viable and fixing a ton of issues on their kits, people still don’t like to play with or against them. There is no reason to believe Symmetra will have a different outcome within the playerbase.

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These are my biggest gripes with the plan, but you put things into words better than I can haha :sweat_smile:

Alright, whatever you say, boss.
Not everyone is biased about everything. You can be neutral on a subject. And you can absolutely overcome this bias if you think about Overwatch objectively, which I do not think you are doing. I am not biased when it comes to this game, nor am I biased when it comes to Symmetra, which is why I do not immediately write off any proposition that I personally don’t like. And no, there is no confusion, I think you have a biased opinion. And I think you have a biased argument.

They are not deleting Symmetra and adding a new hero. You just feel that way because you are attached to the current version, which is totally understandable and okay. They are reworking and improving Symmetra. If you regard the rework as an ‘attempt to improve her and to make her more viable’ and not ‘a hostile takeover of everything I hold dear’ then you could possibly warm up to the rework. But the fact that you feel that ‘it will be a different hero’ is a mental block you have put up for yourself. And the rework will be rough if you still have the mental block up.

They are not making her ‘better’ because she was never ‘bad’, just tough to run in many situations. They are simply reworking her kit to make her exponentially more viable, in more situations, on both sides of the map.

Look, I really am sorry that they are reworking the hero you enjoy. It must not be easy, and I truly mean that, you have put a lot of hours into Sym. But I believe, that while people dislike the current changes to their favorite heroes right now, in the long term they will be very good for the game of Overwatch as a whole. If you don’t want to adapt then I’m sorry, this is a game about adapting. We must all do it at some point. Now might be your time.

It is not going to be a copy of Zarya’s weapon. The damage value’s and behavior’s define a weapon more then appearance.

Zarya’s primarily charges off of damage she receives on both of her barrier’s.

Symetra’s will primarily charge off of damage she does to enemies and barrier’s, will recover ammo while hitting barrier’s, and have a much higher damage output at its max potential.

As for appearance we already know it is going to be a fairly large beam. We don’t know what its max range will be but I think it will be safe to say it will be much longer then the 7m it has now.

The differences in these weapons is night in day when you take a moment and consider the mechanical differences.

One of the problems Sym faces in current state is that her survival is very low due to the limited range and low damage she has for her only weapon she can use to duel opponents. This means overall her value is quite low. This is in part because of the limitations the auto lock feature place on her.

In order to fix that the OW team has opted to raise both while also giving her a secondary fire that can be used at range when her primary is not one.

The issue is that if they increase her range and damage they cannot keep the lock on in any shape or form as the disparity between effort vs value will grow to wide. So sadly it had to go.

Change is good for the game. Especially as the flow of the game changes due to the introduction of new hero’s and abilities. If change is not made to older hero’s they will simply just be left behind to the point that the overwatch team may opt to just delete them from the roster instead. An option that I think no one wants.

Changes can be off putting to some people and that is fine. but that does not make change inherently bad. I personally like the shifts this game has gone through. To the point that I wish they would happen even more often to keep things fresh.

They tried a previous re-work that changed her so drastically before and gave her a new ultimate, changed her shield deployment to projected barrier, extended the range of her primary to the limits of what a auto lock weapon with damage ramp up could have, increased the amount of turrets she had on cooldown at once, increased the health of her ultimates and etc.

If that drastic of a change was not enough it should be pretty clear that an even more drastic change is needed.

My final argument about the bias discussion

Citation needed.

All sources I have ever found about bias in discussions and debates is very clear that even if you are defending something against your bias, this don’t remove bias from your mind. There is dozens of links in that wikipedia article that express this.

Find me one reliable source that says its even possible to discuss or debate a topic with completely neutral bias, and that is not a False Balance bias or Argument to Moderation Fallacy, and you’ll have my ears. Otherwise, let’s stop derailing the thread into the definition of bias, and focus on the argument in hand instead of trying to just tell me I’m biased and thus, I’m wrong.

Not at all. As I said before, I’m ok with re-learning the hero and see if I’ll keep her in my hero pool, or give up on her after she is on live. Except for the orb change. That thing is dumb, and should never be considered an option. Her orb is perfectly fine as it is, and people just try to use it wrong, then complain it don’t work like they want.

And, again, my problem is not with the final result. My problem is with the path Blizzard is taking to deliver that result. I mean, it’s not like dozens of Symmetra players gave Blizzard solid suggestions and feedback to make Symmetra more valuable, and were ignored for 6 months until they arrived with such drastic changes.

I mean, you can check the responses in the thread where Geoff gave us the shinies. The responses from Symmetra players got increasingly worse as more details were delivered. The turret changes were mostly a trade-off between ease of placement and area coverage, but it was mostly well-received. Once he started talk about her gun changes is where the thread turned sour, because a lot of people actually believe her gun is the most balanced part of her kit. And since we already knew that the Teleporter was probably moving into a regular ability, that triggered a lot of responses that they were changing her too much. They removing Shield Gen and placing a new ult (no matter how awesome it sounds, and it do sound really awesome) was the final nail for a lot of Symmetra players.

There is more going into the arguments against Sanjay than simply “she is being changed and we don’t want her to change”. Please, give a proper read on all the links before replying. Context is extremely important on this topic.

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I can agree with you if you mind explaining how it is for a big and slow woman with pink hair has the need of aiming while a stick jumping and moving around without any loss in her accuracy is fair.

Launch D.Va was a troll pick with an easily baited out DM, suicide ult that killed the player more then it killed the enemy, and was essentially stationary when shooting. Even with a 4 sec DM, even with her mobility from boosters no one wanted her.

So they took a slow approach of buffing her over months. They reworked DM to be on a resource system (then nerfed it cause the original .5 delay before recharge was too fast) and they made her immune to her own ult. That did not change her being a troll pick. So then they followed up with the +100 base HP and doubled her movement speed while firing.

Which made her viable, right on time to join the tritank meta where Ana made all the tanks overpowered and no one knew how to fight D.Va.

It took them 3 comp seasons (when comp seasons were longer then they are now) and a fair chunk of beta to make D.Va a viable pick. Then she went on a roller coaster of changes ever since then. Including a brief period where she was the worst tank in the game being abandoned in droves till they put in the DM fix.

So no, D.Va has not always been in a good spot.

You are right, I remembered when DM was on a cooldown, but somehow I forgot the time where Dva self destruct used to kill herself. But even then, she was, at her worst, a middle-of-the-pack pick, because at launch, we only had 4 tanks (Roadhog was much more “DPS-y” than tank at the moment). It’s the same argument on how Mercy never was really unpopular, even when Ana was at her peak.

(Now that I think about it, Zarya is pretty much the only tank that never got any buff in the game. But I digress…)

D.va at her worst moment wasn’t in the same place heroes like Symmetra, Mei or Bastion were at their best.

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Sure, whatever you say.

I’m on my phone so I can’t reply to your points as cleanly as you can, so I apologize :sweat_smile:

But, functionally, it’s the exact same weapon. A straight beam. Sure, the damage numbers are different, and to is the size. But they both, mechanically, feel the exact same way. No two heroes in the game feel like one another. Soldier does not feel like Sombra, Reaper doesn’t feel like D.Va, Rein doesn’t feel like Brig, Zen doesn’t feel like Torb, Moira doesn’t feel like Mei. Every single hero feels unique to themselves. But two straight beam weapons just feels uninspired and boring, frankly.

I know her limitations more than most players (all Sym mains do). But none of us, from the 6+ months we’ve been collectively screaming at the devs for constructive and healthy changes to her, wanted (or thought she needed) for her gun functionality to change. She absolutely has no reliable range damage, but her orbs always felt good against shield-heavy comps. There have been HUNDREDS of great threads on suggestions for them to improve her orbs and removing their “piercing” perk was never one of them. Hundreds of great suggestions on how they can improve her primary while still retaining its lock fiction AND feeling fair to use. But the approach Blizzard is taking just feels like a slap in the face to all the Symmetra players who gave valuable feedback, while catering to masses’ desires, who don’t even play her. Like a man making decisions about women’s health, it doesn’t feel right.

Change IS good, I believe that. But this is on a different scale. Her first rework really wasn’t that drastic. She has always been able to provide shields, so they just moved that ability to an ultimate, and gave her a shield. Along with slightly extending the beam range and a very slight reduction on turret cooldown. Nothing was really changed, and she got a new shield ability. This proposed change completely rewrites her conceptually. She no longer provides shields, something she has ALWAYS been able to do for her team since beta. Her turrets revert back to 3 (like in beta), her TP gets the Mercy treatment, her ultimate replaces the shield health she was always able to provide (as cool as it sounds), and her gun (something no other hero has had changed, mechanically) is getting a complete overhaul. It’s just not something Symm mains ever suggested, it’s what everybody else did.

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You don’t know that at all. You are assuming it will based on description. How do they feel the same way when you have not even tested it out yet?

Just because you suggested idea’s does not mean they are good or healthy for Sym. For all you know they did extensive testing with variations of suggestions people gave and came to conclusion that idea’s in theory sounded better then they actually translated to when in practice.

Feeling good and being good are two very different things. Firing a piercing orb every 2 seconds at a snails pace is functional worse then firing two explosive orbs in that same time that moves at 30m a second (Pharah’s rockets move at 35 just for perspective). In addition firing smaller orbs in current iteration was rarely a good idea so the only real option was doing a full charge. With the changes in place you can opt to change up your fire rate for more difficult dodging but a little less damage.

Her piercing orb had only one feasible use and that was against pirate ship comps. All others could simply avoid by stepping to the right or left. Even then there are far better options that straight up shred the barrier instead. Having a niche ability that is only good against a niche comp is not worth having just because of how it “feels”.

Everything about Sym was changed outside of her secondary fire. Not a single thing remained untouched in her first rework outside of that. She was even the first hero (and only so far) to have two ultimate options. How is this not a drastic change?

The very fact that the only thing that remained unchanged was her secondary speaks volumes as to how much they wanted to retain her original weapon type. Which should tell you all the more clearly that they just could not get her weapon to work as it does without seriously breaking her balance.

It doesn’t.

This is the only truly big change for her. But considering how useless shields are in comparison to any other health bolstering effect in the game it is not that big of a loss.

Stronger turrets that are now deployable at range. How is this a conceptual change? It is more like a quality of life change that allows her more control of the battlefield she is on. Something Sym has lacked up until this point. Which is sad considering that was kind of the point of having her.

The “Mercy treatment” is another debate entirely so I am just going to focus on the matter at hand instead.

Teleporter is an ability that depends on your team and the enemy team FAILING in order to get value. At least with Res that failure is removed without waiting for a respawn timer. A respawn timer that leaves more then enough opportunity for enemy team to push in with superior numbers.

The only real way it gets value is if the enemy team is dumb enough not to assume that sym has a teleporter and lets it sit hidden nearby for a retake. Which does happen but an ability that requires monumental failure on the part of your team AND the enemy team is neither a consistent ultimate nor a good design philosophy

Which makes it not worth sacrificing a slot for on demand defensive and offensive ultimates which can prevent failure in the first place.

It’s new iteration is much better because it has the potential to synergize with the team and operates on the assumption of success rather then failure. It also means that teammates will be far more willing to working and roll with a Sym player. Can you imagine how stoked an attack bastion player would be at the opportunity of being teleported onto the archway on eichwalde first choke with a rein along with him? Turning the choke point and highground against the defenders in a flash!

That is what I call value and a design philosophy based on success, not failure.

Which as I said brings her ultimate into an on demand defensive option more tuned toward creating success instead of depending on minor and catastrophic failures to draw value. The potency of being able to setup a barrier between you and a ulting roadhog and then shield dancing side to side with your team would be amazing.

Which I have explained has been determined as needed as Blizzard already tried to preserve its original design and it met with lack luster results that just cannot be overcome while preserving said design. Her weapon is so bad that it actually WARRANTS a mechanic change.

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Changed, yes. But there is a difference from number adjustments and adjusting how an ability works. The only actual “changes” Symmetra got in her first rework were:

  • Photon Shield removed, substituted by Photon Barrier
  • Shield Generator added as a second ultimate.

That’s it. The rest was simple numbers adjustments (ie, “buffs”) to her existing kit:

  • Photon Projector range increased by 2 meters
  • Initial and max Turret stash raised to 6 (from 3), and turret cooldown reduced to 10 (from 12).
  • Teleporter (and Shield Gen) now have 50 health and 350 shield (from 200 health)

None of the above “changes” effectively changed how you play Symmetra in a conceptual level. You still place your Teleporter in the same places, you still place your turrets in the same place, and you still have to be basically melee range to attach the microwave.

She was not conceptually a different hero compared to her launch state. This new rework? That will be completely different. The gun works differently, the turrets will be used in completely new ways, TP will require a full new mindset and map study, and Infinity Wall need entire new placement learning.

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