People Play Symmetra Wrong

[Zephrin-11143]

@Yin-1797

You’re free to give to feedback and whether or not Blizzard listens to that feedback and incorporates in some way, is entirely up to them, not you. Arguing that “balance is trash” or “Blizzard doesn’t understand their own design” is worthless can easily be disregarded.

we’re talking about the same dev team that:

• somehow thought it was a reasonable expectation to have sym get in 10m of the enemy and live there for 4s (double <=2.0 charge time) to just charge up and then longer to actually utilise lvl 3 beam (yes this was how sym3.0 was released initially)
• somehow thought infinite tp would “make sym more flexible” despite MASSIVELY spiking up the down time of tp: her all-in-one engagement, disengagement and burst-combo-enabling tool i.e. her main tool to actively do anything meaningful as a dps
  • it doesn’t take a genius to know that changing a hero to have all of low effective range, low sustain, low mobility AND low burst is trashing the hero. it’s simply common sense
  • if they actually knew how to play sym, they wouldn’t have made this kit killing change
• somehow thought orbs should be buffed in damage rather than either fire rate or projectile speed
  • if they actually knew what they were doing and know what sym’s issues were, they would’ve done 1 of the latter rather than leaving orbs as inconsistent (i.e. not helping their issue) while also making it feel worse on the receiving end because it worsens the spam
• somehow thought that nerfing turrets and ult after the kit killing tp nerf and after compensating the primary bug fix in double shield meta, despite the fact that sym was already being replaced in the meta then and despite the fact that sym had been underpeforming for >1yr across various metas without the nerfs prior to double shield meta is balancing her “individual balance” (i.e. balance independent of the meta) right.

so either it’s blizz not understanding sym, or they biased against her. either way,

@Yin-1797

This isn’t to say that Blizzard is infallible. Rather, you need to understand what their design intentions were and where the intended shortcomings are and give feedback based on those intentions. It’s Blizzard’s game, and their intentions - whatever they may be - are what can be argued.

so let’s work through what they can possibly intend for sym:

this following point knocks out primary-centic (i.e. zarya-like) gameplay:

@Zephrin-11143

if she was meant to be beaming with primary for most of her gameplay, she’d be a tank because that’s how much sustain a hero needs to do that with a lower ranged, sustain damage weapon whilst having minimal mobility.

if they want sym to be really passive and static in only ever re-enforcing claimed area, waiting for team pockets all day for w+m1 to be able to actively contribute, then that’s inherently a bad design anyways in more ways than one:

• going out to create and/or grab opportunities for yourself is inherently always going to be more efficient and yield higher value than the above where you’re waiting for them to come to you and you have little control over that
• the whole game was initially really fast paced and is getting much faster with all the goats and shield killing patches to make tanks, and consequently teams, move around more
  • most game modes have moving objectives (heck even 2CP is 2 different points in serially i.e. you need to move) and we’re getting another game mode in OW2 with a moving objective
  • the point of the rework was to get sym to be more dynamic too rather than static

so that’s out. what’s left? oh right, what I was saying about being a dynamic flanking zoner.

@Yin-1797

and you don’t really have any evidence that Blizzard didn’t intend for Symmetra to be used more commonly.

see the receipts in the linked post quoting directly from the devs who also repeated in the reddit AMA:

Kinda sad that I may abandon symmetra

They’ve repeatedly said the opposite i.e. that they’ve moved into not having very niche heroes.

and to clear something up: no I’m not saying she’s fine. she’s absolutely terrible rn. but people tunnel vision team tps and primary both in gameplay and in her discussions about improving her yet completely neglect the parts of her kit that she uses most and has more opportunities to use over the majority of the match: orbs and individual tp uses.