Idk how you can view 2.0 as OP. Shield Gen, yes. Sym as a whole? Oh honey…
Personally, from everything that changed on the new rework, in order of importance, that’s what I miss the most:
- Shield Generator
- Piercing Orbs
- Six turrets
- Photon Barrier
- Autolock
- Teleporter
I don’t miss the autolock that much. It was good to keep flankers away in your nest, but in general, most of my work was done by spamming orbs, keeping SG uptime high, and maintenance work on turrets.
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Not much different from 3.0 not really existing outside of teleporter.
The whole rework increased her skill floor and skill cap significantly and made her viable on attack, but it deleted a whole playstyle for something that is so unoriginal.
And it didn’t even solve any of her problems she struggled since release…
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She had a very small niche and was amazing at at is a poor but still usable in the rest now she has a tiny tiny niche where she preforms poor and is a little more bad every where eles
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Idk I’d say she’s pretty original. No other hero really approaches combat the way that Sym does, especially not in a 1v1.
Or was there another hero that teleports turrets behind you in an effort to make you stop looking at them so they can get an almost guaranteed right click?
Touche. It pales in comparision to having another objective to defend tho.
Symmetra 2.0 was one of the three generalist heroes in my list. Ie, heroes that fit every single comp in a team of random teammates, which you can’t guarantee teamwork and quality (emphasis is important). The other two are D.va and Lúcio.
Why? Because of a few reasons:
- Symmetra was able to slow the speed of the whole match. Enemies would check corners for turrets before pushing, flankers would retreat while being in range of her beam, enemy team would lose time searching and destroying shield generator, orb spam would force them to facetank a lot of damage or look for an alternative path or waste D.va’s DM to push. All those minor inconveniences, by themselves, would not amount to much, but them all together would give your team plenty of time to react to an enemy push.
- Shield Generator was one of the most powerful ultimates in the game because it charged stupidly fast, was permanent until destroyed, and forced the enemy team to divert attention from the point to break it (which you would usually replace after the next teamfight anyway) or fight an extra tank worthy of HP, which was why she didn’t worked in coordinated teams (focus fire don’t care that much for 75 extra HP, unfocused fire need to chew through 450).
- Her combination of turret, barrier and autolock would mean harsh punishments on careless enemies. It was also a perfect peeling tool if you stood with your backline spamming orbs instead of trying to make her work like a weaker Reaper in the frontlines. That’s also why I don’t miss autolock that much, I always considered it a last resort self-defense on par with Mercy’s pistol. It always had more bark than bite.
- Photon Barrier was too $%#ing resilient (1050 HP). The only times I ever saw that shield breaking before hitting a wall was when I had to cross a large corridor (eg, Anubis B front door) and the enemy had a Bastion on the other side. If you could convince your team to trust the resilience of the barrier and simply use it to push into point, saving your main tank barrier for in-point fighting, it would pretty much secure the win.
- Old orbs were so freaking slow that too many people would underestimate them, or think they could evade any time they want, focus on something else, and then suddenly gets hit. I honestly lost count of how many surprise kills I got from random orb spam, and I’m sure many of those were simply because the enemy team thought the orbs would deal tickle damage.
Once you got a cohesive team, where everyone works together and cover each other as well as they can, Symmetra lose a lot of reasons to be played. You don’t need someone to peel your backline if the second someone threaten your Zen, three teammates jump into the backline. You don’t need alarm turrets if each player is looking through a different entrance and warn the team which path the enemy team is taking. You don’t need shield gen if your healers are on point on healing targets being focused. You don’t need TP if the whole team will regroup after every lost fight.
Same thing if this happens on the other side. If the enemy team is cohesive, the only thing Symmetra can do is hope they take a narrow corridor together and orb them all at once. The only thing the enemy team need to do is spread and converge at the time of attack. Focused fire makes shield gen benefit minimal, and don’t give her enough time to either charge a second orb, or ramp up her beam to be a close range threat.
Symmetra was absurdly powerful for ladder. She was extremely underpowered for OWL. She is still underpowered for OWL, and can work on Contenders because Contenders is a mixed bag, some teams are great, some teams have not trained enough to gain synergy between themselves. And it gets worse once you get off KR/NA contenders.
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Except that aspect, while fun, was not very good.
Short of a Dva literally sitting on your ult, there was almost nothing you could do about Tracer pulsebombing it. Everyone always says “ult4ultlol,” but Syms ults were pretty much all of her support capabilities, which made the trade not as fair as it should’ve been.
I never said execution of it was flawless, it was the idea that was great.
There was a lot of wrong with sym’s kit when it comes to execution.
Why the hell our team couldn’t see where our SG is? Why giving it on a character with no mobility to get to defend it faster? (Hi there teleport 3.0). Why there was almost no indication of it being attacked other than sym voiceline thay didn’t trigger half of the time? Even revealing turrets would make it less painful of a job.
Heh … if you want the next best thing to auto-aim play Moira… not Mercy… that drain is about as close to auto-lock as exists today in OW. Just saying…
Simple, the devs are afraid of Sym becoming powerful. She’s not a hypermobile head-clicking Monster Energy drink teen boy dream character, so they don’t want her to be A-tier, ever.
They want her to be as niche as possible (even when she’s outclassed in said niche)
I could list a bunch of buffs which in TANDEM wouldn’t make her OP or even S-tier, but people would cry and moan if this was implemented:
-HP increased to 150 HP / 100 Shield. (Every other close-range hero has this AND an escape/panic button/self-defense ability, so don’t give me the hitbox crap. And no, having very slow projectiles doesn’t make her a long range hero.)
-TP infinite, larger interact, faster deploy (make it less bad)
-Primary fire damage from 60/120/180 to 90/120/180 (no dps hero should ever be doing 60dps at any point. She has no on-demand reactionary kill potential.)
You could literally give her all of this at once and she wouldn’t even approach the realm of being OP. Alas, unlike with Hanzo or Mercy, who they were content to make ultra-OP with their reworks, the thought of Sym being powerful is seemingly terrifying to the devs.
Also inb4 you know who says you know what. I see you typing.
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6 months? Try 2 years. “People dont know how to use Sombra yet.”
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Wha? Sym has always been a specialist. Generalist implies she was as versatile as Soldier, which she really wasn’t and still isn’t tbh.
She still does that imo. For a lot of similar reasons you listed, but her Teleporter also speeds it up on attack. Hanamura will always be the best example of that. Or Horizon. There wasn’t much Sym could really do to speed up the game on attack as 2.0 except for maybe suiciding into the backline, but even that took so much time.
There are many people, however, that would cite Syms control over game pace to be unhealthy or not fit for OW. I don’t, but they exist.
I agree with the first bits, but not the last. I don’t think it forced that attention. It was a heavy incentive, but it wasn’t completely necessary to destroy SG. Even if it was, pulse bomb. Right before Syms rework when Tracer got her pulse bomb nerf, sure it was a little more difficult for her…but she still made Syms constructs basically non-existant. And as I said above in another post, Syms ults were ALL of her value as a support, so Tracer Ulting it wasn’t just an ult for an ult, it was an ult for half of Syms kit.
Except carelessness lessens and lessens the further up the ladder you go. I think she retains the quality of benefitting heavily from carelessness and misdirection, just with a different method.
Idk, like you say, her beam had more bark than bite and there are people that knew that. Meaning, they knew they could probably kill their target in the backline if they chose to not respect Sym. Maybe they’ll suicide for the pick, but quite frankly, her current turrets in the backline are way more threatening than her old beam was.
Ya cause it was only a matter of time before it was going to meet a wall and destroy itself, so I disagree that it was really resilient. It could block quite a bit of damage, but that meant a long sightline, uninterrupted by map geometry, and that’s not how all maps are built.
But if the enemy team was smart enough to counter Sym, they’d have been running a ton of dps anyway, and I’ve seen her barrier shredded in many more scenarios than the one you describe. They usually involved Junkrat (Bastion too) or Hanzo.
I agree, but she is still like this and people still don’t respect them. The major difference is that 3.0 can force you to turn around and stop looking at her at her whim to create that exact situation instead of hoping they’d stop focusing you briefly.
Funny fact, Symmetra got a small bump in pickrate in the small time between Tracer’s pulse bomb getting nerfed to 300 damage and Sym3. And I totally credit it exactly to Tracer no longer being able to blink-bomb-recall Shield Gen regardless of how well you protect your nest.
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Other Sym players I saw would always complain about that, but realistically you have to know that almost no one would’ve actively defended it even if they could see it.
Plus, you were always able to see where (or at least the direction) of Syms constructs if she killed you and you watched the kill cam. Meaning, if teammates were given the ability to see it, you’d be able to see it in those killcams too.
Cause Tracer was pulsebombing it so there was no real indication or reacting to it.
I’ve never been a fan of this idea. Hanzo and Widow wallhacks are enough imo.
I mean, with turrets you would at least know you’re revealed. You’re damaged = you’re revealed. More reasonable than wait 20 seconds to move in LoS or “am I revealed or not” in Hanzo’s case. And it would help 2.0 a lot to determine whether you can get to your ult in time or not.
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I was masters rank during either 2017 or 2016, but as time passed and seeing nothing more comes to competitive mode. I just did the preliminary rounds and gathered points just in case something new goes into the rewards, but nothing did so I am sitting with a lot of competitive points. However the players became more toxic to the point I got banned from the games even with evidence to back me up, but that didn’t matter to those GM. I am glad they’re eating crow right now.
Eh I can climb if I am motivated to get something, but more importantly do you have a link for what you’re preaching about? I believe someone asked you that because otherwise you’re talking out of your end. I’m certain they play other heroes and not specifically playing Sym as a hard main consecutively.
Sometimes they ruin the game making players leave especially developers don’t listen to feedback and continue on their own path. Overwatch not so relevant to talk about besides negativity. They deserve it.
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Her speciality was zone control. And every single game mode is created around protecting a single point.
Sure, she worked much better on defense than attack (which isn’t an issue on itself. Eg, Widow also works better on attack than defense), but in certain conditions like Control and Escort, once your team get control of the point, taking it off from a good Sym player was hard. Especially because in those two modes any time lost into searching the shield gen was ground gained for her team.
It’s kinda like the D.va problem. D.va is supposed to be a bully tank, but she can do well in all terrains and with all teams because of how generic good her DM is.
She still do.
My argument is that Sym2 did that better.
That’s go back to the “random teammates” thing I pointed.
In a coordinated team, you all can make use of the TP marvelously, but if the enemy team is coordinated as well, it can also be you leading your team directly into a deathtrap. It’s a two-edged sword, and IMO, a high risk-high reward gimmicky move.
But in a random team, she is too weak to make use of the TP by herself (except by turret-bombing), and half teammates crossing it just makes the situation worse.
Also, players like me want the rhythm slowed down, not sped up. I have hand cramps and slow reflexes. I make use of every extra milisecond I have to think on the next move and execute it.
I perfectly understand high rank matches getting faster and faster teamfights, and that Sym’s kit was sometimes too slow to catch up. Which is also why I think her kit enforces to much breaking that rhythm down. She simply can’t work if she can’t control the tempo of the music.
It’s kinda like a Reverse Tracer, that needs fast-paced battles to do her best, because she needs to secure the teamfight before she run out of abilities to burn.
If you see someone attacking your shielg gen, you could also simply tell your team “push, we will fight 6v5 because one of them is not there”.
I was perfectly fine trading shield gen for pulse bomb any time of the day. Both ults charge stupidly fast, so I would get it back quickly. I had more issues with Tracer just gunning it down because this means she still had the pulse bomb to stick to one of our tanks.
I disagree with that, and I’m sure we discussed that at least five times before. So, while I understand your point, I’ll just expose my arguments in a tldr version for the people that didn’t read the previous threads:
- Turrets slow. Multiple turrets hitting the same target means easy headshots.
- Her barrier was clutch in certain moments. It was not as reliable as a tank barrier (which, IMO, is a good thing), but it had its uses, both for self defense and for protecting her team.
- Orbs zone really well.
- Beam zoned by creating a personal bubble that enemies had to respect, much like how McCree flashbang radius works, but full time.
I agree.
It don’t means it didn’t happened. Especially because Shield Gen was a good bait as well. I remember one match from Stevoo where he basically kept enemy Tracer running around the shield gen nest for two full minutes, until she passively got pulse bomb and blink-bomb-recall it down. Had one of his teammates move towards him between teamfights to help against Tracer, she would have died two or three times by fighting 2v1.
That’s why I didn’t listed the beam as the only tool she had to peel. Having 6 turrets allowed a lot of flexibility while building your web. You could leave 4 turrets helping the frontline while placing two around where your Zen/Ana usually stand out, so the combination of turret slow, autolock beam, your own protegé hitting back, and barrier to block key abilities, and it was hard to attack the backline if Symmetra was there.
Brigitte do a better job on this regard right now, but she is close range, and if she is playing backline guard dog, she isn’t helping with the frontline. Sym could spam orbs for that.
Every single map have at least one long corridor you could use Photon Barrier like that.
There is also the issue that current orb can be simply blocked. If you was spamming a choke before, the enemy couldn’t just pick a Rein and stand in place for a few seconds while his team unleash damage. Doing so would mean the orb will hit them.
That was also one of the best maneuver to break chokes before, because you would end with a nested Orisa with no backup DPS behind her shield because they all are moving out to dodge the orbs, not keeping their damage up. It was more a psychological thing than raw numbers analysis.
You would think they would’ve caught A LOT of problems with Valkyrie early on. HOW did they not get super insane resses per match? Most of my PTR resses consisted of 40%+ of deaths resses, maxing at 85% one of my games.
Not to mention, Mercy’s pistol had the following buffs on PTR:
Increased damage
Increased fire rate
Increased projectile speed
Unlimited ammo
HOW did they not see an insane amount of flaws with this rework before release and go, “Maybe we should continue working on this rework or try something else. This is a little broken…”
Ultimately, it feels like they were just in an extreme rush to get rid of Mass Res and didn’t even attempt to look at the repercussions of doing so before thoroughly testing a rework that actually works.
It feels like the same went for Symm, tbh. Oh, she can do these cool things that never actually happen in a match or is nearly impossible to actually pull off (TPing out of grav. Seriously… I’ve had Symm’s try this and it is either too far from the full team to use or it gets destroyed before it is even usable). Hanzo is another great example. How does this stuff even get through and they don’t see any of it as broken or bad???
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