This’ll be a detailed post, so a TLDR will be at the end. But please consider reading the whole post before commenting
Primary fire takes too long to charge up.
I understand this is to offset the damage potential, but you’re unlikely to stay alive long enough to reach Level 3 and stay there. Please reduce her damage potential in exchange for more consistent, reliable damage. The primary fire range is also quite short, for a hero with only 225hp. It’s not uncommon to be facing the enemy tanks because her limited range forces her closer to the frontlines than other heroes.
Her orbs are too slow and take too long to wind up.
Again, another ability that is inconsistent. They’re still far too slow to be a good source of damage in a duel. The best use for the orbs is to be spammed down a choke point, with little mid-fight potential. The wind up time is painfully long, especially when combined with the slow speed.
Turrets are either useless or oppressive.
The turrets are destroyed super quickly by a competent team, or are super oppressive against lower ranked players. They’re very hard to balance and I believe they hold Symmetra back when they damage and slow the enemies. I’m not saying remove them, but maybe change their function?
Teleporter’s value relies too much on a competent team.
Having teleporter be a team tool means it needs annoying limitations. Such as a 2 second cast time (longer than resurrect!) which makes it very hard to be used as a flank or survivability tool. The worst part? Players outside of the highest tiers rarely coordinate a teleport. It’s so frustrating to teleport to point, only to find out half your team either isn’t in voice chat or isn’t reading the text chat.
Infinite Teleporter is infinitely controversial.
The infinite TP “buff” is extremely controversial in the Sym community because of the terrible cooldown mechanic. The previous mechanic where the cooldown began on deployment meant that Symmetra had a much larger TP uptime. You could stay mobile and make mini flank plays much more often than current. Infinite Teleporter is a buff for defensive Symmetra (where you are naturally less mobile) but has significantly harmed offensive Symmetra where you need to be moving around the map much more often.
Utility damage heroes just don’t work.
The role is called damage where your job is to be getting picks and dealing a ton of damage. As mentioned in my previous points, Symmetra’s damage is inconsistent. This leads to a “feast or famine” outcome when playing the hero. Too much of her viability lies in her utility, which has led to her damage capabilities being so poor to compensate. She’s like a utility support wedged in the damage category because “we don’t want sym to heal” and it feels awful. Either remove the utility and make her an effective damage hero, or move her to support. I don’t want to see my favourite hero trash tier for the rest of this game’s existance.
She is a TP bot in Overwatch League.
Take a look at this clip from the OWL grand finals. Symmetra is picked in the first 10 seconds to teleport the team, and then promptly swapped off. This is not a rare occurance either. She is often picked just to teleport the team at the beginning of a round and then swapped to a better damage hero. She was completely redesigned in 2018 for this?
With this being said, she is sometimes genuinely picked on certain maps. However, she is nontheless still highly situational which is something her redesign was supposed to address.
So what can be done?
Reduce her utility.
Utility damage heroes do not work and this is why Torb has been performing so much better after his rework that removed his utility in favour for more damage. Powershifting his kit away from turret/utility and into the primary fire was amazing, and something that could be good for Symmetra.
Make teleporter a personal tool.
This allows for quicker placement, longer range and any other potential buffs. Teleporter is just not consistently used by teammates enough for it to be valuable outside of a select few maps. Perhaps continue to allow objects to travel through. Such as torb turret, dva bomb, riptire etc.
Give Teleporter a better cooldown mechanic.
Such as start cooldown from 10s at placement, but halt the cooldown at 5s. When Sym destroys TP, cooldown begins again from 5s. If the enemy destroy TP, cooldown starts again at 10s. This is similar to Torb’s turret cooldown mechanic.
Make her damage output consistent.
Change primary fire damage levels from 60/120/180 to 90/120/150. Increase the range from 12m to 14m, and reduce level up time from 1.33s to 1.20s. Reliable damage.
I have no idea how to balance turrets.
Auto-aim turrets that damage and slow enemies will always be frustrating to play against, which is why they can’t be flat buffed. But they’re just so useless against people that can shoot immobile objects.
TLDR
Symmetra’s damage output is very inconsistent due to vulnerable turrets, long wind ups, slow projectiles, limited range, low base-health in comparison to other close ranged heroes and a clunky teleporter (her only mid-fight survivability).
Too much of her value lies in a team teleporter tool that rarely gets effective usage due to the lack of coordination in most ranks. You TP point with 3 people, but you have 2 standing at choke completely oblivious despite you calling it out in VC and text chat.
Reduce/remove her utility but buff her damage output (this was done to Torb in his rework) or rework her into a utility support with minor healing. She feels like a utility support forced into the damage category.
Edited to Add: I’ll be updating the post with suggestions or things originally missed out.
Frankly, all the more reason she should be able to easily and quickly replace them after they get destroyed - especially when you compare her to someone like Torb, who has a very strong turret that has a massive range, packs a punch, and gets it back basically faster than it can be destroyed. I’ve played enough Torb to know the ONLY time you ‘can’t put down your turret’ is if you’ve JUST put it down in a bad spot and it gets swarmed right away. 99% of the time, you have your turret on cooldown.
Symmetra doesn’t have any such luxury, AND her turrets are weak, and have VERY minimal range. There are times when I am forced to put them at a ‘mid high’ vantage point in an attempt to get Pharah and Echo, but this means that their height creates a problem where the turrets barely even hit anyone that come out of the doorway below them, and they’re incredibly easy to escape the range of and destroy. I’m constantly battling between their range and their ability, plus having to ‘put them up’ in a mid fight when they get destroyed with a sneeze is just laughable. Even if I have them on cooldown, it takes a miracle for people to not be looking at me when I try and send it to the enemy backlines. Most of the time they just get destroyed mid flight by some chip damage that wasn’t even meant for them, especially if it’s an up close and personal battle.
There’s really no reason she lost all her turrets anyway, they should be weak but plentiful, that’s like… their whole design. Reducing them to 3 with a 10 second cooldown a pop means it’s impossibly easy to bum rush her, force out all her cooldowns, and kill her before she can do anything.
add in renumbering/balancing orbs around being faster projectile to the “so what can be done” section (I think you wanted to but forgot :P)
I really don’t get their thought process for numbering her orbs. like they added a sniper charge time on them but don’t make it very aimable in many ranges due to how slow it is while the aoe radius and projectile size defs don’t compensate for that at all.
and I kid you not, even uncharged sym orbs are legit worse than mercy’s pistol.
High key, if anyone wants numbers for these conclusions, I can definitely provide them.
I’d take Mercy’s pistol on Symmetra over her piece of crap gun any day. That mercy pistol can FIRE, the rate is really good and it packs a wallop compared to what you can’t do with Sym.
I miss when they made Sombra learn pathing and use her invisibility… skillfully, I don’t know how else to say it. I had just ‘gotten good’ at her when they rolled out the changes, so I knew juuuust how long I could spend invisible and then suddenly… none of it mattered anymore! Now it’s just Slow Invisible Lady time where you better pick the right engagement moment OR ELSE.
I will say that the startup time on teleporter is offset by the fact that it is in fact a teleporter.
Other characters have travel time on mobility abilities, which offsets their instant activation. Symmetra is the opposite in this regard, like Reaper.
It makes sense
Also, her orbs aren’t intended to be used for dueling purposes. It is merely something for Symmetra to use at range so that she isn’t doing nothing while waiting on the enemy to close the gap. All characters have something like this, including Brig.
What would you suggest? The only thing I can think of is reducing their damage output or increasing wind up time (no thank you).
I did open up a custom game yesterday and tried 100 damage orbs at 35m/s. This felt bad because you had to completely charge an orb to two shot someone, there was no wiggle room to charge for slightly less like you can with current orbs at 120 damage.
Perhaps 100 damage, 35 m/s, but 0.7s wind up? That way you’re naturally charging for less time and so you’re unlikely to miss the 100 damage charge threshold.
HAHAHA Sombra post in disguise
I’m not a fan of this idea because it would make turrets more oppressive in lower ranks. She can already replace destroyed turrets quickly, provided the previous turrets were left alone for 30 seconds.
But how many times do you just sit there for a full 30 seconds after the game starts? You get basically ONE lull like that - at setup, at the beginning of the game. My point is that there literally isn’t enough physical time between engagements for her to reliably have them ‘up’ for every battle.
You will reliably NOT have them on cooldown to replace them, especially at lower ranks where trickling is more common. In higher ranks when teams group up, you, the Symmetra, will have that 10-20 second window to regain your cooldowns and get one or two turrets ‘back in the chamber’, but for the most part you can right now replace 1, maybe 2 turrets for every ‘battle’. That’s like saying Reaper is only allowed to fire 5 of his 6 shots every battle because cooldown mechanics are so lengthy - why is it so punishing on Symmetra? Most characters are balanced in a way that they can do at least one ‘set’ of their abilities for every fight. Even mercy is kind of tuned around this idea, that every fight is roughly 30-40 seconds, so you theoretically have one res per fight.
So why are we supposed to be okay with Symmetra basically reliably never being able to ‘do all of her abilities once’ per fight? Especially when she’s so weaksauce to begin with?
I haven’t tried workshopping a number set, but I’d imagine something along the lines of one of the following:
simply making current projectile speed 30~35m/s. it won’t fix the no charged orbs being worse than mercy pistol issue, but it’d be comparable to pharah rockets at least
30%~40% reduction in max projectile size, 50~60m/s projectile speed (i.e. somewhere around mercy pistol and bap nade projectile speeds), uncharged damage to be 25 damage if direct. charge time to max charge set to 0.75s (so that max orb firerate actually becomes 1 orb per sec rather than the current 1 orb per 1.25s). max orb damage still 120. leave aoe splash radius the same.
My personal problem with Symmetra is that she’s too damn slow at everything she does. Her primary fire needs ramped up, her secondary fire needs charged, the turrets take a second to deploy each, and have a 10 second cooldown each, and her Teleporter takes 1.5 to deploy. If everything on her kit was like, 50% faster she would be so good
Symmetra’s Turrets are focused on quick deployment and are meant to be expendable but the way they are now they require too much to be a, “throw away,” ability.
So:
Turrets
No longer go on cooldown when relocating Turrets. They only go on cooldown when destroyed
With the limit of only 3 active on the field but can now have 3 extra in reserve. Basically you get six but you can only have 3 active at a time.
Flight and deployment speeds increased
Turret HP increased to 40
You start with full Turrets ready for deployment everytime you spawn.
Best way to improve Turrets without being too, “oppressive,” for low ranks.
Bonus for burst damage:
Orbs
They start at 100% now. When fired, the Orb charge will immediately fall to 0% and climb back up to 100% over one second. You may fire at anytime.
The only change this makes to Symmetra’s secondary is allowing her to have a hi-burst option for any surprise encounters.
