Pretty sure Blizzard has learned their lesson about EASY mode DPS heroes by now.
Bastion, Torb, Sym and Brig all didn’t work even after be reworked MANY times.
she’s being nerfed bcz she destroys every squishy and bringing back that cancer would just render then brig nerf meaningless.
i’d say remove both heros
I hope blizzard doesn’t listen to this incredibly poorly thought out suggestion considering that Tracer is not even oppressive in the rank you play at
2 Likes
They still play those heroes though. 🤷
I split your points up so that I could address each one. Sorry if you don’t like that.
It really tells me a lot that that is all you took from my response.
Sorry that I want to slightly lower the skill floor of Symmetra by making her less aim dependent. I highly doubt that a hero being slightly easier to pick up is gonna drastically affect the competitive scene though.
Yeah, I could live without autolock if they actually made her beam good. It’s not even high-risk, high-reward, even if your aim is perfect the damage isn’t outstanding. Right now her weapon is a crap version of Zaryas beam, and Sym is supposed to be the DPS. It’s stupid.
Let’s enumerate all the times Sym was adjusted before they changed her whole kit into the mess it is today.
- Dec 2016: Sym 2.0 hit live
- Mar 2018: Sym turrets don’t target barriers anymore
- Jun 2018: Sym 3.0 hit live
Symmetra was never tinkered in the PTR, or adjusted before the sledgehammer rework. Despite we giving tons of suggestions in at least two megathreads (one on this forum, one in the old forums) to deal with Sym’s problems while still keeping her gameplay the same.
It was worthy noticing that the patch before Sym’s rework also featured Reaper and Mei buffs that kept their playstyles instact, so we expected something similar for Sym. We kinda were expecting TP to become a standard ability (probably using the turret interface), but not everything else.
yea, that worked really well before when a half decent tracer/genji would absolutely dominate any good/better Symmetra
Great now toss in Bastion and Torb reworks who also have the same problems and we have a pretty clear pattern.
It is too hard to make these heroes good for high skill level and not be too strong at low skill level. Which is why they all get stuck in limbo no matter how many times they try.
Torb got a sizeable buff when he got passive scrap generation. As a Torb main, I still think the scrap mechanic should had been removed, and the armor packs should had been a cooldown ability with 4 stacks. His recent rework is weird, but still kept a good bunch of his abilities. He also didn’t got touched since the scrap buff.
Bastion at 35% Ironclad was broken (mostly for being able to stack with Nanoboost), and when they nerfed it to 20%, they forgot to give back some resilience to Config: Tank because those +150 armor he used to get was the source of the 35% damage reduction number. He also got no changes after that Ironclad nerf.
My point is not about what they should fix or not, but how those heroes got negleted for so long, just for them to arrive with a sledgehammer rework approach instead of making minor adjustments over time and see what work.
- Roadhog got a dozen hook changes before they decided to simply nerf his gun damage.
- Ana was adjusted 5 times during triple tank meta before they nerfed the biotic grenade healing buff to 50%.
- D.va got thinkered 4 times before they decide to give her missiles.
- Mercy received 14 nerfs in a row (that’s another problem, but she was getting attention regardless).
There is room for the devs to make more small adjustments for many characters per patch cycle instead of only making big adjustments for a selected few. That’s is the problem with off-meta heroes balance, because Blizzard don’t prioritizes their adjustments enough, and when they touch them, they want to fix all issues in one go and not look at their direction for another year.
Except all those heroes have actually been good at one point because they can scale with mechanical skill so it easier to balance them at more skill levels.
Mercy don’t require more mechanical skill than Sym2.
Most supports don’t so it sort of works for them. But they will have the same sort of issue as more supports get added.
If Mercy = Ana at GM. There is no reason to pick Ana.
I agree.
What was Sym2’s role, again?
I don’t know. That is the point.
I don’t know how they make auto aim DPS heroes work in an FPS environment. That is the issue because they need to be viable at many different skill levels without break the lowest skill levels.
Which blizzard has not been able to figure out yet
She should have been in defence. Her only means of support as 2.0 was in her ULTS.
I can tell you. She was a support character. So, by your own definition, a role that can rely on not being mechanically demanding.
People deemed her weak because in their heads she was using a DPS slot to deal subpar DPS, when the correct way to pair her up was with a main healer (Mercy or Ana), or an off-healer and characters that have some kind of self-sustain (Soldier, Tracer, Hog, Mei, etc).
Heck, in some formations (mostly on defense) she could even fit the off-tank slot, if she was focused on peeling for the backline. Just keeping enemy Tracer/D.va busy looking for a shield gen instead of harassing your healers was a huge relief of pressure for your team.
Ok fine, Change her beams from DPS to Healing and your problem is fixed.
Which helps me understand you took nothing away, but your ego in regards to what I said.
The scaffolding technique is less about babying and more about efficiency to climb at reaching an end goal. People place differently on things that might determine their grasp and understanding.
Symm’s auto lock wasn’t the same thing as Mercy’s, the player had to at least keep the tether on people and mildly keep tracking on them.
It might be hard, but I want you to imagine a player who has never really played an FPS game before. They want to first learn how to track the enemy. Symm 2.0 was great for that.
Now, if they were to move on… They’d then start to pick up Moira, who is a little more strict at tracking a target to hit, but still forgiving because it’s more like an aura of a hitbox she gets on enemies.
Now they get the hang of that, so they start with someone like Zarya, who they have to track on the hitbox to hit the target consistently… Then maybe they graduate to hit-scan characters with an autofire/bloom effect.
Now this process helps to getting to that end point of better being able to play characters like McCree, Ashe, Ana (scoped), Widowmaker, etc for a person who formerly had zero FPS experience.
TL;DR
Now that I explained what a Scaffolding Strategy is to you. the main point of it all is for me to say… That was my only problem with Sym losing her auto-lock was it provided that tool of progression for someone.
Considering how unlikely I figured it to be… I’m really not surprised that it’s gone. In my eyes, it had one use… which I just kind of said.
It wouldn’t have helped YOU, keep that in mind. YOU are not everyone, and in the same situation (Overwatch being the first real intro of an FPS game), just because you decided to go a difficult route to playing an FPS game that could have been avoided or done better, doesn’t mean others have to. Good job. I feel like that’s what you were ultimately fishing to read.
But a GM would have better positioning to use the weapon without dying, while the Bronze would feed more often while trying to use it - aka, there would be a difference in effectiveness. You can’t distill it down to one mechanic and expect that to represent actual gameplay while ignoring such important things as positioning and enemy reactions. You wouldn’t say Bronze and GM Genjis display the same level of movement.
That being said, I don’t think going back to her old beam is the answer - not because it was “easy value” that more often than not resulted in suicide (“value” ha), but because it sapped all the value from the rest of her kit because of its perceived power.
My filthy Sym main self who can barely aim, has to concour.