Has huge damage potential but never really reaches it due to numerous variables in her kit, namely her weak survivability and turrets being wet tissue paper. She’s practically only used for her teleporter on 2CP/ KoTH which even then only works when you have the surprise factor, once that’s gone she’s hopeless.
11 Likes
Bring back Shield Generator! 
10 Likes
Do you think maybe if they reduced TP cd and made her turrets a bit more durable then she’d be more viable all round and not need babysitting ?
Also what do you think about photon barrier
The problem with symm is actually really simple.
Symm: needs defense
Blizzard: gives offense
13 Likes
You wouldn’t have made this thread if you thought she was in good shape. This is just yet another buff symmetra thread in disguise.
Anyhow she is fine and just needs quality of life tweaks not buffs.
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I’m going to coach this with “I’m not a Sym main yet. I’m interested in her playstyle, but I’ve not devoted hundreds of hours into her as others may have, so my experience and viewpoint may drastically differ from theirs”.
I’ll also link my prior commentary on the issue from a different thread since it covers my general impressions of the character.
Some things I’ll add from my continuing playtime from her:
While stressing I do like the concept of all parts of her kit, I feel like the turrets will never be a truly worthwhile ability. They’ll never have the damage output, slowdown, health, or coverage to ever be meaningful and impactful in this game; the dev trends simply don’t point that this will ever be a thing. For the most part, these turrets may as well not even exist. There are individual, unique scenarios where they have helped out during a battle, but those are exceptions to a rule. They’re unreliable as damage dealing, area denial, or anything really.
Those turrets are so weak you could simply add them, as-is in their current state, to any other hero without nerfing anything about those heroes and it wouldn’t change anything. People would be upset on the principle of the matter, but it really wouldn’t change much.
As such, in my limited experience with Sym, I’d happily give up the turrets to just make primary fire more range, and give her a defensive ability. It’s probably a controversial opinion, but since Sym’s turrets aren’t allowed to be big and impactful, I don’t see that I’d be losing anything by being rid of them.
I would also like to see her ult buffed a bit. I’m not really a fan of her having a big barrier, but if it’s going to be there, and if it’s going to be an ult, it should block Mei’s Blizzard LOS on targets, and it should definitely block dragons.
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Reducing Teleporter cooldown won’t help much unless you bring it all the way down to like 4 seconds.
Pre-cooldown change it lasted 10 seconds with a 12 second cooldown and the CD started on cast rather than on Teleporter destroying. Made it have really good uptime so she’ll generally have a Teleporter when she needs it and most people would rather go back to that. A fixed 12 second cooldown is really bad for her when her survivability is already low.
Her turrets are a different story because it’s hard to buff them without making them really obnoxious. They’re useable as they are currently but mostly as a short term distraction, so I’d rather they gain some sort of additional utility like revealing damaged enemies through walls and fix the hitbox on them so it doesn’t stick to even the thinnest edges in range while trying to deploy them.
Symmetra’s ult is one of the few good parts of her kit but it just doesn’t make sense to me why they’d give her a barrier ultimate rather than a proper DPS ultimate since she’s ya know… a DPS now. It’s functional nonetheless though.
I made another post with an idea for a passive that makes her more sustainable where she gains temporary shields that eventually decay based on how much damage she’s doing with her gun (15% of damage dealt) so if she successfully manages to ramp up a shield she’ll be able to stay in the fight more effectively without being 100% reliant on a pocket healer.
4 Likes
i think shes like a zarya, just without 400hp, if you play her right you can actually melt $hit. her turrets are pretty strong when placed right. i dont see a proplem with her to be real. on hanamura first point shes a must pick.
Symmetra 3.0 has potential but with her current set up, she’s severely lacking. Her core problem is her slow start up in a fast pace environment. Other problems are a result of her set up nature:
Primary
It can work, but the ramp up/decay times are holding it back considering the range and lack of defenses Symmetra has. I don’t want a range boost or to have the attack numbers increase because the beam is meant to be risky. Instead, changing the decay rate to 3 seconds might be a step in the right direction. It’ll give the user time to think (and reload)
Orb
Glad they are looking at this but the damage buff it recently got was not the right change. If Symmetra was meant to be a Multirange heroine, the orbs should be more reliable. Increasing the travel Velocity when fired would be a thing to try. I would gladly revert the damage buff if it means Orbs can gain consistency. Her kit is leaning towards being an in your face style but she doesn’t have the tools to do so. Having a reliable range option will fix a majority of her problems.
Turrets
Where to begin? Weak in damage, durability and in combat capabilities. Unless the enemy is recovering from anesthesia or a Hangover, Turrets are only an inconvenience at most. I would favor removing them for something useful but in order to make these work, I’ll suggest from bare minimum to most radical:
- Increase thrown Velocity to match Pharah rocket and make deployment time near instant
- increase stock capacity to 6
- have Turrets capable of firing on Targets as they fly
- Have Turrets damage all enemies in range
- Turrets become mines that explode dealing their damage instantly and slowing targets down for a time
Teleporter
I wanted infinite TP but not the way it was handled. The easiest solution would be to revert the change so it functions like it did on 3.0 launch with the range buffs. Or give it Torbjorn’s Turrets cooldown mechanics, that would be nice.
Ultimate
I don’t like it as much but it has its uses. Maybe giving Symmetra the ability to readjust the Barrier by casting it again within the 15 second active time?
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Honestly check my profile, i main ana and mercy. This isn’t about me wanting buffs for a character i have like 7 hours on.
She is currently balanced, but would greatly benefit from her power being moved around in her kit.
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Maybe it’s because i play in Low(ish) ranks like high-gold/low-plat but whenever a sym is on the enemy team, her turrets are the most oppressive thing about the match. But they are pretty flimsy. They’re usually really easy to predict because most Syms would place them at the main choke but mid fight when everything’s a bit chatoic she could slip a few turrets down all without anyone noticing and pretty much cripple the enemy team.
But again, maybe it’s because i’m playing at lower ranks and we tend to ignore the turrets a lot more than we should.
I personally think syms turrets are what maker her… well… her
She is tragic right now. That is slight exaggeration, as my history with playing Symmetra is more personal, but she is really bad.
If you look at the pros of playing Symmetra, you have:
Good team based utility.
And her cons:
Low health
Low range
(On average) Low damage, determined on how much space you are allowed however
Bad ultimate
Cast/deploy times on every part of her kit
Shes slow
Shes clunky
(And the personal one) Her weapon is awkward af to use due to it being so skinny
I won’t go too in depth on the beam, as I’ve mentioned this on a few Symmetra posts in the past, but it’s not the fact that I struggle to aim cause I’m bad, I struggle to aim because of a condition I have that causes me to shake at random intervals, with no control over when and how badly this happens. But that’s just a personal matter, however the general view on her beam tends to be its meh at best anyway, it’s just complete garbage for me to use, so orb spamming away. Yay…
But I digress, Symmetra is pretty bad, and needs a proper look at. Not a 30 second, slap-dash job, a proper kit. A balanced kit. A unique kit. Right now, she’s just a cheap Zarya that’s worse than Zarya. It’s like if Zarya and Symmetra were sisters, Zarya’s the popular pretty one thag everyone adores and looks up to, but Symmetra is the one they look at as a disappointment that flopped in high school and is still living with her parents at 29.
In short, it’s not fun being a Symmetra player right now, more than ever.
3 Likes
She needs 250 health it’s non negotiable, if that needs to come with a slight hitbox size increase that’s fine but 50 shields needs to be added to her base health. Also the teleporter cooldown should begin when it’s deployed since it’s practically useless currently. Honestly they should just scrap turrets and come up with a new ability cause there’s no way to balance them where they’re aren’t broken or useless
My opinion:
Not as bad as some people make her out to be
But could definitely use some adjustments.
Ultimately I feel the concept of her kit as a whole is what holds her back- and she’d need another rework before blizzard ever considered having her be a strong “overall” hero.
She has the potential to get a lot of of value from entirely autonomous never missing turrets.
Yes yes- I agree they’re easy to destroy generally. I’m with sym mains on this. Entirely.
But if they ever buffed her to be strong overall without adjusting them in any way, lower / mid ranks would struggle with the autonomous aspects of her kit and she’d be loathed.
Yes- this is a “git gud” thing in these scenarios- Again I agree. but I also understand it from this point of view.
Imo I think to be buffed better they’d have to remove power from her turrets, or impose a more “appreciable skill” aspect to them (that is within the general communities eyes), leaving room to buff her personal capabilities outside of them.
Like I said, I know it’s a controversial opinion among those who play her.
And again, I do like them. But I never see them do the sort of damage that her primary fire can do in two seconds. To waste so much power potential on such a weak ability just feels awful. Your experience seems strangely at odds with my own. I play lower rank than you (low gold), and the turrets (either my own, my other teammate’s, or the enemy team’s Sym) get wiped out so quickly that there have been games where I didn’t know a Sym was on the battlefield until she ults.
There’s lots of good uses for turrets like keeping on eye on flanks, or just forcing situations at known chokes, but I’ve never witnessed them have any impact. So yes, despite the protests over the idea, I’d much rather have that power put into a defensive ability (temp shield?) or more range on that primary fire, so I can use my own skill expression to make her work.
Also I’m not really keen on any argument of identity. “What makes them, them” is highly subjective and ultimately doesn’t matter to the devs or good game balance. My go-to example is “and if mass rez was Mercy’s identity?”. When anything and everything is on the table for change or removal (up to and including complete reworks of the character), it doesn’t really make any sense to say a character’s identity is tied to any particular ability, cooldown, ultimate, or weapon.
I’d rather be more practical about such things. If we say that her primary fire is her primary attribute (a reasonable assertion regarding any hero, I think), then I’d like to see resources put into making sure that primary fire works and has decent fight impact and skill expression. If you want to argue it should be her turrets, then they would require extremely massive buffs. Even Trorj’s turret was apparently nerfed since inception, so again, I don’t feel the devs will ever move into that direction.
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She is ok, but very close to being as bad as Sombra. She needs tweaks and buffs to compensate for the nerfs they gave her. Double barrier is over, yet her nerfs still remain.
Sym is being left behind, just like Sombra. This game is changing and moving on, but without her.
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They gave her offence? Last I checked they nerfed her turret damage and primary fire damage and erased turret bombing as a strat
Well they did. I mean the buffs they DO give her.
That regaining temp shield idea is a good one. I’m assuming you mean something like doomfist passive ?