😡 Why are Symmetra players Angry at the "Rework"?

Let me know how killing a Genji or D. Va go without using your ultimate.

Is she though?
area control is weaker with 3 turrets instead of 6, they deal the same damage of 6 turrets but without the map awareness 6 turrets give and the drawing of attention to 6 locations over 3 when trying to clear a deathroom, turret placement mechanic is beautiful and they could have put it in without giving her this uneven collection of turrets.

pierce ord replaced with high damage, high speed splash orb, is it better against barriers now? not really, the ability to completely ignore shields is more of a counter to barrier play then more trash damage spammed into them. the reason it feels stronger is because it plain is and if pierce orb got the same damage and speed buff there would have been better results against deathball comps like brigitte.

photon barrier removed as e abilty turned into “wall” Ult, everything you can do with “wall” a good sym did with a well timed photon barrier. It was also avalable at the start of match without taking the Ult slot from something more useful like 75 regenerating teamwide health or faster respawns. It was her only defensive ability to engage or disengage which she needed having such a short ranged primary.

pimary has had a nerf, on paper it looks like a damage increase but to break even with old lockon you need %67 accuracy and the best zarya player in the world has %56 so… good luck there.
feeding off barriers, if a sym is close enough to a barrier character she’s dead in the water, they can straight up out damage you for being in their range, the only exception is actually another sym who “walls” carelessly across the map to a safe place for an enemy sym to feed.
there is no reason to use primary over secondary now, secondary can deal roughly level 2 primary damage without the charge time primary needs.

teleporter, again great in theory but the execution is clunky and slow, the interact is there to stop trolls but most have it unbound and don’t see the point in reserving a key for the ability to interact with another character which may not be there.
teleport auto takes torb turrets leading to alot of griefing of torb players by syms moving turrets to useless locations (behind walls out of line of sight).
teleporter was also supposed to counter grav-dragon but the slow setup and interact makes it an ineffective to counter.

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Yes, it takes longer to ramp up but it also takes longer to lose charge so it’s more rewarding if you do get the charged up. Now you need to consider the enemy you are fighting not just the range where as before it was LMB all the time when they were close enough.
I’m so used to Zarya’s beam I often find myself shooting Symmetra’s at people just out of range but any longer it might be too good.

No, it doesn’t. Talking from experience here.

If you reach level 3 in old Sym, and stop firing, it would sustain that level 3 beam for a second before decaying. Also, while you reload, the decay timer was paused. It was a key aspect of good Symmetra players to use the reload as a buffer to reach another target before your beam decayed back to level 2 or 1.

New Sym, if you reach level 3 and release the fire button, it instantly* decay back to level 2. You can easily test that in the training grounds yourself. Also, if you do a manual reload, the decay timer runs while the reload action happens. And since it lasts for almost 2 seconds, it means you simply can’t reload and keep your charge. The decay timer only pauses if you uses all your ammo and trigger an automatic reload.

Tl;dr: the beam decay too fast to be useful.

* The decay mechanic is a bit wonky to explain, but in short, old Sym once she reaches a new level, the beam stay at that level for a full second before decaying. New Sym have a “buffer” that keep the beam charged for as long as you kept it charged by hitting an enemy. So, if you reach a new level and let it go, it instantly decay. But if you hold the new level into an enemy for a full second and stops, it will take another full second to decay. The buffer can be up to 2 seconds, so if you keep a full charged beam hitting for longer than 2 seconds, you can manual reload and keep the charge, but if you don’t start hitting as soon as you finish the reload, it will decay.

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Yes, she is. I wouldn’t even consider using her on attack in the past. The new teleporter and throwable turrets make setting up quicker.
56% accuracy is based on the whole match. If you can’t get close to 100% accuracy for a few seconds shooting at a tank or shield then you’ve got a problem. Engage with your tanks, the heroes on your team that have giant shields or barriers that allow you to remain close to the enemy without being shot. If you are running into the enemy with no protection expecting not die your doing it wrong.
You need to look at her overall damage potential, which is massive, not just her primary fire. Three turrets plus level 3 primary will melt any hero in game in around two seconds, that is a hell of a lot of damage coming from just one hero. Sure, it doesn’t work like that all the time but it’s far from impossible to achieve if you play smart and work with your team.

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I can definitely get behind that statement. It doesn’t work like that all of the time, or most of the time, maybe part of the time is where I’d put that happening.

Counting on turrets to do damage is like counting on a healer to heal you. The potential is there, but likely they’re going to be focused on other targets.

If Turrets behaved with any kind of targeting AI that targeted what you were targeting, it would most definitely be overpowered. Because turrets have a mind of their own, and placing the turrets near enough to each other to attack a singular target is extremely risky, counting on their damage is poor planning.

Very rarely do I have 3 turrets up at once, unless I’m on defense and the team has yet to leave spawn. Shortly thereafter, at least one of my turrets has been destroyed immediately, and not long after that the other two I’ve placed will have been destroyed. I will attempt to replace them as they go, in new positions that aren’t in harms way. Sometimes they’re shot down, other times they stick just long enough for someone to take notice and destroy it.

Sometimes, I get lucky, and the turrets stick, deploy, do damage and kill someone. Very rarely are my turrets attacking the same target I am. I attempt to assist in their damage, but typically if I’m were my turrets are, I’m in harms way. I try to limit that, as the statement above indicated, regarding heals.

Quickplay is a whole different play style than competitive. Pocket healing happens way more often than I care to admit, and because I don’t usually play QP with friends (they don’t normally play at the same times I do) I’m at the mercy of the healers whims. I might get lucky and get an awesome healer, I might get unlucky and have to search for a health pack. In either case, I try to play it safe with Symmetra. She does far more damage when she’s alive :smiley:

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I don’t think anyone will argue against the fact that Beam 2.0 > Beam 3.0. But if you say it is useless, you will get arguments. If you say that this alone makes Symmetra useless, you will get arguments.

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Thanks for the info, that would explain why it seemed inconsistent. It makes sense though. If you always had that two second buffer you could almost keep charge indefinitely, as long as there was an enemy/barrier there, by just waving your beam across them provided you could do at least one tick of damage every two seconds. Better work on my reload timings, sounds like the key to keeping charge.

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Well said. I’ll agree the new primary is arguably weaker over all, but far from useless.

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Pesky D.Va’s tend to flay away as soon as you get decent charge.

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The way I see it is as if Symmetra have a 600 points “beam power” stat that starts at 0. Each second she gets charge equal to the amount of time she kept her beam latched, but it decays at the exactly same rate if you are not hitting stuff. Once the beam reaches 201 power, it goes to level 2, and once it hits 401 power, it goes to level 3.

So if you reach level 3 and instantly let it go, it decays from ~400 power back to ~390 power and back to level 2. If you latch the beam back, it will ramp up to level 3 again very quickly. If you keep the beam locked for a while, it will be at 600 power, and taking it off target will keep it at level 3 for a while.

However, OG Sym had a different bar. It didn’t went to 600, it went from 0 to 300, but had a different timer involved. After you reach level 100, you get it powered up to level 2, and get a “fake bar” that is currently at 200 points, and start decaying in the background. After one second, the “fake” bar fades, and your gun retains the level it should have with your actual beam bar. Ie, once you ramp up the damage, you were guaranteed to have at least one full second of the new level before it depower.

But the biggest issue that pretty much no one is seeing is that the ramp-up mechanic was there to balance the gun with the autolock. It gave the target some time to deal with Symmetra before she reached melting mode. Once you add accuracy to the issue, the ramp up mechanic have no reason to stay there. Give Sym a flat 120 beam damage, and it will become more useful because now she can melt a 200 HP hero in under two seconds, and she have a burst damage option available (start with a close range orb, finish the remaining 80 HP with the beam).

The complaints about the beam are not (only) nostalgia from the lock-on. It fails as a DPS tool unless Symmetra is heavily babysat by her team to let her stay at melee range of the enemy barrier for 4 full seconds before becoming weaker than a full charge Zarya, while still requiring pocketing to be useful.

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I find I really struggle with no Rein or Orisa, mainly on defense. Winston and D.Va tend to bugger off and leave you for dead, better of switching if they’re your only tanks.

I think we 'll never settle this discussion…

Of course it’s true; they changed kinda everything from her kit, so i guess that can be frustrating for players who spent hours and hours with her before. BUT… Even if i played her a lot before (funny turrets kills without moving) you symm 2.0 fans got to realize:

  1. These skills were not really difficult to master, like, at all… So stop crying you’ll get the new one just fine and you didn’t lose that much.

  2. She was super bad. Like, really awfully bad. The only time she could work was at low tier, with unorganized team. And don’t get me wrong i still loved her.

  3. Look at the overall feeling of the community. Most of the people love it!!!

I understand seeing your favorite hero being totally reworked can be scary, but boyyy how can you not realize it’s for a best??? The only thing i can see is that now the super easy sticky primary fire is actually gonna request aim… For the rest they finally made it an active and a bit skill requesting character. We should all be happy about it, and we are!

So quit these arguments like “it’s not her anymore!!!” And try her, you’ll see, it’s symm… In better shape! Really

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I just think it would be boring to have just a set damage. What if they took out the levels and it ramped up a tiny amount with each tick. then it fell at the same rate. The base damage would need to be higher than it is now but then the max damage could be lowered to compensate.

That statement makes no sense, if you apply logic to it.

If I took away a core, defining mechanics away from a character, and gave them something else, they are no longer the same character.

If Soldier 76’s rifle were taken away, replaced with a grenade launcher, his heal taken away replaced with a shield, his run taken away and replaced with a roll, would you still consider him to be “Soldier 76”?

Lets take Roadhog, take his hook away, his right and left click tweaked so that they were different weapons, and behaved differently, replaced the core defining abilities with other abilities, would he still be Roadhog? Sure, the character model would be the same. The name would be the same. But it’s not the same character.

Sure, Symmetra still has turrets, she still has a teleporter, she still has a shield, she still holds a weapon in her hand, but functionally she’s an entirely new character wrapped up in the same character model and name.

I know you’ll probably argue and say that “Oh, she still has turrets!” but they have been changed in such a way that they don’t feel the same.

“She still has a beam!” Yes, but it’s mechanic has been completely re-worked and is no longer the weapon she once had.

“She still has her orbs!” and again, they’ve been completely reworked and behave totally different now.

“She still has a teleporter!” yes, but it’s not the point saving teleporter it was before.

She lost one of her most beneficial ultimates, the Shield Generator, and it was replaced with a shield wall. She lost her “That death didn’t matter as much” card, teleporter, which I’ll argue she likely used more than anyone else.

So, to tell me that Symmetra 3.0 is still Symmetra is like comparing a Chevy to a Ford. Yeah, they’re both vehicles with engines, tires and a steering wheel, but they’re not the same vehicle.

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I’ll just say that I disagree, because there is tons of posts in this very thread explaining why this is false.

Emphasis mine. Because that’s the main reason why Symmetra would never see any pro team play at the same time she was perfectly viable in ladder.

Comp is a mess. Even in high tier play, comp never was and never will be a fraction of what a bad Contenders team can achieve in a tournament. That’s a reason why I don’t use pro play as a benchmark for balance, because they play in a completely different game environment, for different reasons than we play ladder.

Also, her winrate was stable in all tiers. She didn’t had 60% winrate in bronze and 40% winrate in GM. She was pretty much as good in every single tier. So no, your claim that she only works in low tier is simply false.

I bet she will be considered F-tier again before the end of Season 11.

And I honestly hope I’m wrong, but I think as soon as she can be used in comp, people will notice that she don’t work as well as she do in QP when people are seriously trying to win. Especially at high tier, where people will be more aware of both her turrets and her TP being placed in advance.

Heck, even in QP people already are learning how to break her turrets mid-air, and how to look at her TP to gun down anyone coming out of it to the point that I’m actually using it as bait to distract them on purpose.

I didn’t wanted that. At all.

We have more than 20 options when we want to play a twitchy hero. I liked her specifically because she had that methodical gameplay where you had to analyze both teams full time, and counterplay not the enemy hero, but the enemy player, predicting where they would attack from, and how to get into their blind spots or lure them into traps.

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It depends who you ask. Some people will look at car and be able to to tell you the make, model and year of manufacture, others will say “It’s just a car”.

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Sure, in the same way that all different characters in the game are “characters”.

You know what I mean, stop nitpicking :slight_smile:

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Something being boring is subjective. Eg, I don’t play McCree or Widow because I find boring as hell to play with their point-and-click guns.

The matter is that a flat damage would make the gun feel better. Making it recover ammo from barriers is cool. Maybe add a passive that the beam deal extra damage to barriers to establish its niche as a barrier buster and encourage her to go into that unsafe melee range to eat an Orisa barrier within seconds.

When a hero have close range and long range options at the same time, you need to give them an incentive to use that close range option in the first place. That is done either by giving the close range option a lot more damage (Torbjorn), or carry a good CC ability (McCree, Mei). And currently, Sym beam lack that. Even at melee range, it’s better to spam orbs unless you expect the fight to last more than 6 seconds.

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I fail to see how this is not still the case. Also, you’ve not only described Symm but many if not all heroes to some extent. No heroes are simple point and click if you want to use them to their full potential.