Being a utility hero is core to her identity. Her last rework retained some form of utility with her teleporter (and it’s the driving factor in picking her in OWL), but it stripped so much utility from her kit to make way for more damage.
Moving her back to the Support role allows for room to amplify her utility and perhaps even bring back her old shield health capabilities. With OW2 possibly having a global healing nerf, this means there’s more room for low-HPS supports. This would fit a Utility Support nicely.
With that being said, she would still need some degree of healing. Lucio/Zenyatta levels of heals but with an emphasis on utility will keep Symmetra feeling like Symmetra.
She was originally a Support. Let’s put her back where she belongs.
I’m trying to remain open to the idea but I can’t think of a scenario where I would prefer to have a Symmetra over another healer, and I can’t think of any scenario where I’d enjoy solo-healing my team if a Symmetra is my co-support.
I think she has always functioned as a dps and should remain that way. She’s a dps hero with support elements, hybrid heroes are fine and to rework her as a support would change her to a completely unrecognizable hero
I don’t blame you when we have no idea what a healer Symmetra would be like
Utility is a way of supporting your team, yes? Utility damage heroes (Sombra and Symmetra) need to have low damage to compensate for this utility. Symmetra had most of her utility stripped to make way for more damage.
I’m proposing we go the opposite direction - embrace the utility.
Yes, but supporting is not the sole domain of supports. A good third of all tank abilities/ults are supportive but no one is claiming that any of them should be supports.
And we are losing 1 less tank which means supports have to pick up the defensive slack (if the devs want a competitive class shooter experience).
The possibilities of defensive utility for support Sym are very fertile. She’s make crap out of thin air, the devs have 0 imagination if they can’t make something work.
except the fallacy is in how they get uptime for damage.
sombra and mei can get uptime for damage AND their utility just about as often as the majority of the cast.
sombra has invis + translocator to be able to get into enemy lines, a good angle behind and/or above and close enough for hack and/or shooting in effective range.
mei’s icicles legit have good range on them to compensate her 0 mobility to the point of being able to be in her effective range often for icicle. her wall has longer placement range than tp which lets her isolate, block or use as a gap closer via block shots from afar. not to mention having the sustain to live reasonably long enough in effective range to get reasonable value from her sustain damage nature (i.e. lower burst).
for sym she will need to be made more capable of getting independent uptime like everyone else even when holding/applying the sombra/mei/“utility support hero” standard. of which (the making them more capable of getting independent uptime bit) is the solution to her current problems as dps.
so the resounding question is, why go through all the effort and trouble of reworking her into a support, which introduces much greater risk of failure (and very likely with a cost of the hero being deleted) esp with the extra bag of worms constraint of “can’t make her too good at dps as support, but good enough to be worth”, with no guarantees of fixing anything or improvements, when we can just fix her as dps without that bag of worms constraint, without as high risk of failure, without deleting the hero?
No. All of her kits (even the last one…despite having a different playstyle) scream “LET ME PROTECT YOU!” which sounds very much like a support.
And I don’t get why you think she should be a tank only because she zones with her turrets. Should Torb be reworked into a tank too? Or Lucio? He has a boop which is the definition of “get away”. Same for brig.
She literally heals in the comic.
And from your first post:
Yeah. The devs are looking at the utility DPS.
But if you close enough you’ll see they’re trying to remove this category.
Mei loses her freeze and gets probably more uptime. Sombra most likely gets her hack and EMP reworked to gain more damage.
There won’t be a place for utility DPS anymore in OW2.
What does this mean for Sym if she stays in the damage role?
She would have to lose her utility.
But Sym without her utility isn’t Sym anymore. We already saw that when she lost the ability to increase someone’s HP. And don’t forget: Early concept arts of Sym mention a shield generator. Giving shields to her team was supposed to be a big part in her kit.
The devs want the DPS category to feel more generic but Sym isn’t generic at all.
The only way to keep her utility is by moving her to the utility category aka the support category.
Or to the tanks but Sym isn’t fat enough.
I think they just went about her utility in DPS wrong. Having turrets that slow is great, but I miss protective shields and providing great utility to the team
I think most Sym players picked her as she was a unique support.
This argument always bugs me as I could apply the same sentence to Roadhog. Roadhog has no tanking “ability” apart from his large health pool.
Roadhog gets a lot of kills so he must be moved to dps.
Sym used to be a great anti flanker and a lot more fair then the menace brig was on release.
In regards to your point about her being “unrecognizable” she already is, almost all of her whole identity was removed when she was made into 3.0, shes now just a budget flanker with a barrier busting beam that is passable.
