People Play Symmetra Wrong

[Zephrin-11143]

@Yin-1797

@Zephrin-11143

@GeoffGoodman

You just need to be able to stay alive long enough to build it, which has always been the real trick with her

the expectation for sym to be able to do that WAS THERE.

No expectations there. The discharge time was also increased to the point that you don’t sit nuking a single target for 4 seconds or more. So, again…

here’s the bolded outright statement (AGAIN) of how they expected players to be able to somehow get sym into 10m of the enemy and live there for >4s to charge and utilise her primary despite the lack of tools in her kit to do so.

@Yin-1797

That’s your opinion in conflict with theirs. You can disagree with them and that’s totally fine, however, that’s not reality.

having an ability less capable of adapting to the situation IS OBJECTIVELY more restrictive. having the ability not change in how it’s placed nor it’s interacted with legit does not change what it can be used for. they outright contradicted themselves.

@Yin-1797

Symmetra has neither; low effective range; low sustain, low mobility (although it is limited), and low access to burst. None of this is true.

• weapon has low effective range (yes including orbs; and I’ve said this to you multiple times, no her turrets aren’t significant enough in her gameplay to make her considered to have longer range in that you don’t dynamically will turrets to immediately be in los and range and shoot enemies like a weapon would to say sym plays further away to be effective)
• legit where’s the sustain? at best it’s her wall which is an ult (infrequent) and her shield regen (no tools to actually utilise it)
• when her only mobility is on such a high down time to the point that you play like it’s not there most of the time, she has low mobility
• her burst is combining primarily combining tp with orbs and tp is on a really high down time so, yeah she lacks access to burst

@Yin-1797

They know their design better than anyone else here, they have access to loads of informational data which no one has here. They are unlikely to be biased against anything, since they created the character and the kit in the first place. The is specious reasoning.

please explain the unhelpful (and often detrimental) changes she’s gotten then and what her design is (and if you say she’s supposed to be some sort of extremely passive and static hero, please explain how that’s not an inherently poor design in a game environment where everything is heading in a dynamic direction)?

@Yin-1797

@Zephrin-11143

turrets and wall pretty much untouched for like the ~2yrs across various meta shifts from sym3.0 release and sym was underperforming.

Evidence to back this up?

see her hero stats that period, what was meta, and contemplate on why and how that happened. see patch notes to see how they weren’t changed in that period (aside from bugs about them going inside the map).

@Yin-1797

@Zephrin-11143

1 particular meta shift props her up and suddenly they gotta nerf them despite how their unnerfed states not being an issue for all those other metas and despite how other heroes got powercrept further since then

They’ve been clear on this bug fix, noted that there was going to be a huge shift in damage, and made subsequent changes. Believe it or not, patches take weeks to prepare and test, they’re more aware of how the changes are going to effect the game better than anyone else (usually), and created subsequent patches in follow-up to inevitably tweak the results.
…
A 40% to 70% increase in damage output needed to be adjusted.

1. the quoted value wasn’t even 40%~70% it was like 20~40% and they weren’t even clear on whether it was sym or zarya because they mentioned them together
2. they blatantly said the cause was primary and they nerfed primary to adjust/compensate. so again, if wall and turrets were fine before for ~2yrs across so many metas, why does that 1 meta, where sym was blatantly propped up, signal the need to nerf them at the base level and why does that 1 meta signal the need to net nerf sym globally rather than redistributing that power elsewhere in her kit?

@Yin-1797

No, that makes no logical sense.

If a character isn’t performing to their vision, they are free to change it so that it more closely matches it, and then fine-tuning it so that it performs well. This has nothing to do with whether or not the character’s usage or popularity is high or low. There are cases where a character can be reworked to be made more popular, sure, but that’s not a contributing reason for a specific re-tooling or re-work.

the point of the rework was to make sym more viable in more areas and to make her more flexible i.e. make her less narrow in niche and make her more dynamic. if that’s not making her more common to play, then please read the definition of niche.

@Yin-1797

@Zephrin-11143

which defense is better:

1. is completely static and has to wait for intruders to move into that static space before the defense can trigger to ward them off which inherently gives the intruders much free ground to have more options of attack from valuable positions? or
2. a dynamic defense that achieves the potency of option 1 and be more fluid in where it wards off (i.e. can prevent more valuable areas from being taken and earlier too) and can even be used offensively to claim new areas?

obvs option 2. esp when teams in ow move around A LOT.

not to mention framing it in terms of defense only isn’t even very valid because half the game is attack.

You’re making assumptions here about static and dynamic defenses which I never stated, nor implied. An active, aggressive defense is generally welcomed in Overwatch

reminder of what’s being argued here:

@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

@Yin-1797

@Zephrin-11143

this logic applies irrespective of whether you’re on offense or defense. it applies irrespective of role.

Except in the case of Widowmaker vs. Symmetra. The two don’t play in anyway similar. You need to compare Symmetra to Torbjorn, builder to builder.

so what, you’re saying sym doesn’t need to move to get in los or get in effective range at all and just needs to sit on point with her turrets, etc. and wait there until the enemy arrives? again, the notion of “going out to grab and/or create opportunities is more efficient and valuable than waiting for opportunities to come to you” applies irrespective of hero, role, niche, etc.

@Yin-1797

@Zephrin-11143

you: she’s supposed to be really static

devs: here are all these game modes with non-static objectives
devs: “so we’re going to nerf the hell out of static play by redistributing tank power from their shields to other parts of their kit to make them move around more” x2~3 to kill goats and double shield
me: points out how devs doing that inherently makes purposely designing heroes to be that static not fit in the game (in the sense that it’ll be designing them to be bad) and goes against where the game’s heading which leaves those heroes behind
you: “iReLevaNT”

Childishly irrelevant.

so game direction and game environment is completely irrelevant to determination of whether a hero design is good or viable. coool. turn based hero when?

@Yin-1797

No, however, Sentries are a limiting factor to how much Symmetra can actively go after targets. Teleporter also limits how much space you can control and deny; similar limits are placed on Torbjorn.

torb can move his turret around more and isn’t so reliant on turrets to be able to get opportunities to contribute (his primary is like a projectile version of mccree’s primary).

but that’s beside the point, because combining what you said with the fact that we had tp on a higher cast frequency for over a year basically shows that she’s not meant to be anchored down heavily.

@Yin-1797

@Zephrin-11143

and saying “it’s possible they can try reworking her as a support” is not the same as “she’s supposed to be a support”. no promises have been made. and heck, even if there was, it further adds to my point of they don’t know what they’re doing.

…
It has nothing to do with whether they know their character or not.

the uncertainty of whether to put sym in a support or damage role despite the fact that they setup OW to have really healbotty supports and despite the fact that they’ve been reworking the hero to switch between the 2 roles, is very telling that they don’t.