People Play Symmetra Wrong

[Yin-1797]

@Zephrin-11143

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)

No, they didn’t anything about this. There was no expectation stated by Blizzard; you, however, are making this expectation for yourself.

@Zephrin-11143

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

No, they did not state this. They changed the teleporter to be able to have the option of controlled self-destruct, giving more control to Symmetra’s teleporter; this required a change to how the cooldown works.

@Zephrin-11143

• 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

More supposition and conjecture without factual evidence.

@Zephrin-11143

if they actually knew what they were doing and know what sym’s issues were,

Ditto here, too. You clearly make these stupid mistakes all the time indicating bias that you think you know better than what Blizzard, the game’s creators, do when it comes to their designs. You are acting entitled; and it is easy to dismiss this argument.

@Zephrin-11143

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.

You don’t have one bit of evidence or data-gathering to indicate what Blizzard did was wrong. This still reeks of entitlement bias.

@Zephrin-11143

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

Supposition without a basis of fact.

@Zephrin-11143

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

More supposition which concludes

@Zephrin-11143

then that’s inherently a bad design anyways in more ways than one:

false conjectures. Defense is a real element in the design of Overwatch. Keep targets out of your controlled space or objective is a benefit to you. If they can’t approach, that’s good for you. The more time spent fighting away from the objective, the less time they have to capture it.

Ignoring some of the obvious faults in map designs. Defense is oriented to stalling and delaying until the timer runs out. It’s a beneficial design element to wait it out or find ways of bring the enemy to you in the most dangerous ways possible for them. Offense has to take the risk, defense does not have to give chase or mobilize anything or anyone to hunt down enemy targets. At best, they can sit on the objective all game and stall until the enemy offense decides to move in. That’s beneficial to a number of defensive minded heroes, including Symmetra.

@Zephrin-11143

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

Irrelevant in defense; which is Symmetra’s primary design role. See above.

@Zephrin-11143

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

Irrelevant. Stay focused on here. Complain about the shortcomings on OW2 when OW2 is here.

@Zephrin-11143

the point of the rework was to get sym to be more dynamic too rather than static

And it did it’s job, but that doesn’t change the fact that Symmetra is largely going to be focused on defense, area and spacial control.

@Zephrin-11143

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

@Jeff Kaplan

this type of question is very hard to answer because we all now have the benefit of hindsight.

sometimes i wish we had kept offense and defense heroes (rather than merging them into damage) and only allowing offense heroes to be played on attack and defense to be played on defense. i know that idea might sound crazy and stupid but i think it would have allowed us to more “all in” on some “niche” hero designs like Torb, Symmetra and Bastion. much of the issue we face with the hero balance on these heroes is our player expectations that these heroes should be fully viable on all situations, and that really wasn’t our intent or vision for the game. we believed that with hero swapping, people would be more willing to adapt to “solve the problem”. we’re fighting some amount of human psychology and game design, i know.

the sombra arg is another standout… lol

Emphasis mine.

@Zephrin-11143

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

@Geoff Goodman

I touched on this in another answer earlier but the tldr of it is: We tried it once, and it didn’t work out very well. That said, the door isn’t fully closed on this yet, its possible we’ll re-try her as a Support (healer) in the future.