Grand Finals exposed Symmetra

General Discussion
41

Ughh no she was a lot better than she is now.

List of changes since then:

  • Primary Fire hitbox registration fixed for both Sym and Zarya
  • Teleporter reworked to have an infinite duration and a long cooldown.

List of nerfs since then:

  • Primary Fire Hitbox size reduced from .3 to .2 meters
  • Primary Fire Damage 65/125/195 to 60/120/180
  • Turret Damage reduced from 50 to 40 per second(even lower on console
  • Ultimate uptime reduced from 15 to 12 seconds
  • Ultimate hp reduced from 5000 to 4000

but sure she’s exactly the same since then…

42

So making her from a bad dps broken taxibot to such a terrible dps that its not longer excusable to pick her for team TP after using it and even pros prefer to go 5v6 that to bring Sym along. Which is literally what I said.

Team TP needs to be removed and Sym balanced as a DPS hero, and at this point it takes a particular degree of either denial or hating Sym to pretend she is balanceable as long as team TP exists.

43

This is a video game played for leisure. Popularity of a hero - the pickrates, are the only thing that does matter. Win rates follow that, with heroes hopelessly underpowered losing their following altogether. And with that, the hero roster essentially becomes smaller, the various playstyles and interesting mechanics goes down, and the game suffers.

All heroes need some measure of viability. It’s okay to have a negative winrate - someone has to. But heroes that don’t see playtime because they’re just that bad are a liability. The work put into balancing them, rendering them, creating new skins for them, all wasted money by a company that would rather make it than burn it.

1 Like
44

Yeah, also in a game that has mirror matches… winrate is not a trustworth stat.

45

If it means buffing her every where else then fine. Make it to where only she can take it and buff the cast time and cooldown.

46

She will need higher HP, revert of all damage nerfs, bring back 6 sentries, delete construct TP, bring back Photon Barrier. Give her back utility that isnt ignorable and doesnt break maps in half.

Removing team TP and slightly buffing/reverting TP doesnt cut it and never will. Sym right now is afflicted by the very same design issues that afflicted release 3.0, except her mediocre damage was gutted into unusability.

47

Well I’d say it’s an interesting data point. But data points alone don’t tell the whole picture. Enter the fable about the blind men and the elephant. But data points do provide insight. With more data, we could have a much better idea of what’s going on. That’s why I say it’s incumbent upon Blizz to establish their own site with hero and map stats. And make it thorough too - like “GTA” levels of stats and data points.

1 Like
48

They never will, because who knows what mess is happening on the complete set of data we arent allowed to see.

Right now the lack of complete data about the game gives them a defense against any allegations of poor balance and lack of attention to some heroes. People cant call them out on it with 3rd party data, which I am 100% sure was at least one of the objectives of private profiles.

49

no, she was a dps, and a lot of the sym main community doesn’t want to accept that

as someone else who does want a support symmetra, but one that’s actually useful, please, just stop lying like this

2.0 offered nothing that supports do

shield generator alone will never be and has never been a replacement for a healer, or even something as simple as harmony orb

it really probably wouldn’t

we simply don’t know where they could take her

but given the logic that zenyatta’s already a support hero who only has 30hps to a single target, otherwise, he’s mostly only offering an incredible debuff, a powerful ultimate, and personal dps

symmetra’s ultimate is fair for a support ultimate, absolute worst case scenario, maybe add something else to it, but it’s more or less fine as-is to go directly into support hero

then just throw in some sort of debuff into something that she does, from her orbs, to the target she beams, to the targets of her turrets, anything, more slow, attack speed slow, discord, debilitation

heck, apply a special kind of shield on them that they have to break through in order to deal damage, or reverse zarya bubble

then, give something that helps allies sustain in combat, again, literally, just attach it to one of her other abilities she currently has, her beam buffing nearby allies, orbs phasing through allies do something, turrets puff something outward, or latch onto allies, teleporter is a beacon for some kind of buff, or applies something on use, etc

could be healing, could be temp shields like doom/hammond/lucio, especially ones that prevent ult generation, could just be damage reduction, really, could be a wide range of things without much lore other than “light bending technology”

then nerf her dps functionality as necessary

she’d maintain her current kit and playstyle, yet providing the team a form of sustain in a fight, while improving their ability to take out an enemy, with an ultimate to counter a big push or initiate a big push

basically, the same things zenyatta has, but… different

50

Learn to play Sym 3.0 first. Or just be honest, y’all just miss her easy lock-on primary.

2 Likes
51

Oh look, the ‘‘its sym mains the skilless’’ fallacy all over again.

52

You must’ve not been there when Hog was in Giga-Hog power if you think most of the roster was usable…

53

Not top tier doesnt mean unusable. Hog is perfectly usable in all ladder, and was meta in GM for a while very recently.

Unusable Hog could be that his healing can only be used if he is around 3 or more team mates and his gun deals full damage only on the last shot before reloading.

54

Roadhog threatened EVERYBODY, including Tanks. Shields were weak, hitscan was dominant (still is to an extent), and the only supports that were good at the time was Mercy and Ana. The game was in a state of Tac Shooter meta; it sucked so bad.

55

not really true tbh.

we had a better tp, better about everything else on sym3.0 for >1yr across various different metas prior to infinite :put_litter_in_its_place: tp where she was still underperforming and pros didn’t used tp any differently. BUT sym was still nerfed in tp and everything.

if they’re “balancing around team tp” all those nerfs would be unjustified. devs just either have no clue about what to do with sym or just hate her.

2 Likes
56

I support Symm 4.0 but only if she returns to the support role.

57

Other data exists if you’re willing to look for it.

And they would also be arguing just as poorly. Popularity has no basis in balance discussions.

And here come logical fallacies and bad faith arguments because X is popular.

"Symmetra is the most successful support hero. A 6-month glance at her win rating shows a 57% win rating. Her on-fire rating is 8.8%. Clearly, she’s succeeding in all ranks of play over a 6-month play as a Support hero. The most successful support hero in the game. Despite her low 1% pick rating.

This is false.

Ideally, you want to be close as possible to 50%, positive or negative. Given the tiny-population of Grandmasters or top 500, this is further skewed by close to five or six percentage points, if you solely want to rate GM.

Or it’s because they’re not meta. See GOATS success-rates. Nothing wrong with the bulk of the damage group, they just aren’t as valuable as a Tank or a Support.

Irrelevant.

She was placed in the Support group for the same reasoning why Torbjorn was placed in the Defense group despite the fact that he gave out armor packs for the team in the same way Symmetra gave out shield health. Their ultimates basically dictated where they would go.

Nowadays, Blizzard has hardened their design-elements for Support to include healing for every support hero. Every Support hero must heal their team, there are no exceptions to this, anymore.

False. Transcendence offers a powerful heal. and given that Zenyatta gets two-sources of ultimate charge, it’ll come up pretty often.

It’s about spacial control and denying area. It’s not much difference from Torb’s current Molten Core in terms of operation and what it does.

Hyperbole.

There’s a problem with doing this, and it’s same problem that a third-party site is doing too. Using data to falsely establish problems that aren’t really there. Arguments for pick rates and win rates are just bad faith arguments, and players will utilize them just as poorly as they would from official sources.

58

Other data means nothing if it’s not official other wise it would just be ‘another third party sorce’. With Blizz all we know is who is used at OWL nothing about ladder and usage.

Pickrate does have basis if a hero has a 0.5% pickrate and a 53% winrate that’s showing the hero is not being picked outside of scenarios.

On the flip side if a hero has a 15% pickrate and 50% winrate that shows that said hero is being picked so much that they are mirrored.

59

Nice strawman. My post actively refuted exactly what you tried to insinuate I said.

Well this is half-true. Ideally you want hero winrates to hover in the vicinity of 50%, and you want their pickrates to be around an even distribution for that role.

The part that isn’t true is what you said about GM or top 500. They don’t matter, at all, as far as hero balancing goes. You don’t balance a game for millions based on the extremes. The balancing that matters happens between silver and Masters.

Which factors into

Meta rarely matters in ladder as much as people like to think. You know that old saying, “you can make anything work until GM?” Well, if that’s true, you have a well-balanced game. But that’s currently not the case. Several heroes from each role are just that bad that it borders on gameplay sabotage to use them. Metas are an interesting novelty so long as they’re not overly dominant on ladder. If it’s just one meta or almost entirely one meta, that will show in hero pickrates, and that’s when you have to make adjustments.

You’re fired. Literally that easy. If you work for a company and are willing to trash bin hundreds of hours of work by dozens of people, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment…all because you don’t care about hero balance or gameplay experience, then you can flip burgers at McDonald’s.

2 Likes
60

Then what do u use? How u feel?