Reaper PTR fix > Sym PTR fix

[SandyK1LL-2429]

Devs: “Oh no, we’ve accidentally nerfed Reaper! ”
“Battle stations. Write a statement. Sweet Prince we will save you ”

Community: “So there seems to be this exploit with Symmetra’s Primary fire that’s allowing her to do a ton of damage.”
Devs: “Who, uh yeah whatever, look at this cute dog on my phone, oh I dunno give her 20 ticks.”
Community “But Zarya’s is 5.5?”
“Look at the doggo!”

[PVCPrincess-2622]

It’s kinda astounding they have left it this long

[EdgeLord-21425]

yea but it’s not really the same thing?? reaper was supposed to be a straight buff that ended up as a nerf and symmetra had an exploit that the devs badly pathced??

i dont think we should bash and say reaper is more important that’s not fair!!! because reaper is also in a bad spot

[Xeiom-2558]

A little unrelated to Sym but does anyone know what Zarya’s tickrate used to be at launch?

5.5 sounds kinda low because that implies it takes 181 milliseconds for each individual instance of damage to register but I remember in December 2016, they increased Zarya’s tickrate.

So if they increased it and it’s 5.5 now, what the hell was it before?

[PVCPrincess-2622]

The change from lock on to pinpoint aim was supposed to be a straight buff aswell and look at it now sees about as much action as a freezer in Antarctica

[EdgeLord-21425]

and the team is working on it… we are receiving small buff to symmetra to make sure she doesn’t end up like spamzo - the overpowered “sniper” that puts more damage than all other dps.

they didn’t touch the tickrate but they did change other things and we might get to a point where we must change the tickrate, but for now other buffs are welcomed.

[Doomfish-21368]

You do realize it took 3 years for them to rework Torb properly.

[SandyK1LL-2429]

It’s a joke

[Star99er-1436]

Her tickrate is fine, it’s her TP that needs improvements.

[SandyK1LL-2429]

Her tickrate is not fine. What planet are you on?

[Scotty-21533]

Can someone explain the Sym tickrate situation to me pls?

[EdgeLord-21425]

it used to be 4. in symm 2.0 AND symm 3.0 (on the PTR). but there was an exploit that let players charge her beam above the 3 charge limit and do like 1000 dps.

so instead of actually fixing the exploit the developers just extended the tickrate to 20 with out taking in consideration the consequences of that decision

---

it’s like 20 ticks per second i believe. which means you divide her “damage per second” by 20.

so her 60 dps (level 1 charge) does 3 damage per tick (DPR)
her 120 dps (level 2 charge) does 6 dpr
and her 180 dps (level 3 charge) does 9 dpr

and armour works like this: “Hits that deal less than 10 HP damage will be halved their damage instead”.

so every DPR symmetra does against armour-health basically cuts in half her damage. and with the extremely high tickrate it makes it hard to charge your beam because you need to be hitting something consistently

[SandyK1LL-2429]

Could not have said it better myself

[TTraw-2252]

@Scotty-21533

Can someone explain the Sym tickrate situation to me pls?

Taken directly from my rework analysis thread:

@TTraw-2252

So, to answer, why is it bad?
Well, when Blizzard first introduced it it was actually good, even a little too good.

When I first tried it on pts, I was astonished by it’s damage and that it wasn’t really that difficult to aim. I was telling myself that she is a dmg hero now, and she is squisher now, so making such powerful melee would make sense. In reality, what i experienced was a bug. Allow me to explain.

Initially this beam weapon when snatched to enemy dealt 4 ticks of damage per second. Each successful tick increased the charge to next damage level by 12,5%. What that meant in theory was that, once you touched enemy, you had 0.25 second where it did not matter whether you properly tracked enemy or not, and you would only be penalized by how much of a delay you made before snatching the enemy again. That meant that not only this weapon was slightly more forgiving in aim, but also meant that you had almost guaranteed level up in damage after 2 seconds.

Unfortunately Blizzard forgot to give some sort of next delay damage lock out on this weapon. What does that mean? It means that snaping to a target and then off the target reset the damage snaping and you could damage person again within the 0.25 frame window. You could do this by quickly tapping the primary, or shaking the camera to quickly snap on and off target.

If you managed to do this 8 times within seconds, you not only dealt 8 ticks to character, dealing double the damage, but also charged your weapon 50% faster, which is something than most people did not notice.

It was obvious that Blizzard would fix that eventually. But they fixed it in a freaking newbie programming student kind of way. Instead of preventing target to be damaged by the beam within the window frame again, they simply increased tick rate, apparently to 1/20 of a second, so that no matter how fast you click or shake camera, it will not be effective nor resulting in bigger damage. And that alone caused huge problems.

Firstly, this made this weapon more aim intensive, which might not be that kind of a deal for some people. But it is, since you need to have 67% accuracy to deal the same damage as before. That’s a Seagull level of accuracy. However this also made the charge level up rate depending on your aim!

What is the problem?
According to data sites, average primary fire accuracy on sym is 35%.
So let’s say I am just above average. Let’s say, i have 50% accuracy.

Suddenly the 4 seconds to deal maximum damage become 8 seconds. 8 seconds. In a melee range. I already mentioned before that 3 seconds was problematic for her, let alone 8. And Symmetra is EVEN MORE squishy, she no longer has her personal barrier nor 75 shields from shield generator.

Double Clap Clap

It feels as if Blizzard thought that the only problem with this weapon was that it had lock on, so removing that would somehow magically sweep all its problems away.

There is one more problem. The tick rate increase means that symmetra deals now half of the damage to armor, compared to simply 20 damage less per second before the fix. This makes her underperform against tanks, as well as against torb and briggite. This is a problem, since people considered her to be a tank buster when they announced that she can now refill ammo from shields, which is probably only good thing about this weapon. In fact it takes her longer to kill D.Va with 100% accuracy on this beam than with the previous lock on one.

[Creati-11923]

I don’t disagree her tickrate is bad and needs changing, but this change feels separate from that particular issue. Even if her tickrate were lowered she’d still charge up over 2 seconds which is pretty bad. the 1.6 second charge speed feels amazing, even if she still does trash damage against armor.

EDIT I read the title, not the post. Oops, yeah. Still though, the 1.6 buff is nice lol

[hensoldt-11741]

Reaper’s PTR 2 change probably reverted the change they made in the first place. The spread patterns between current “fixed” PTR and live look very similar.

Also, Symmetra’s gun is helplessly broken because they didn’t bother to fix the fact you can spam left click faster than the gun’s recoil animation lasts.

The “tag” issue that TTraw mentioned is a separate version of this bug, but even with the hacky solution they came up with to fix the 9000 DPS LMB PTR Symmetra, the ammo consumption can still be blown up by spamming left click because there’s no recoil “cooldown” that prevents you from sending new “send bullets” commands.

If you try to reproduce the PTR bug on live, the only that changed is that the damage is “flattened”–you still burn ammo at the same rate as it did on PTR when it was bugged.

ps, Zarya’s gun doesn’t have any of these bugs. For designing a gun that’s supposed to work similarly to Zarya’s, I don’t know how they managed to introduce so many bugs that don’t affect the parent properties they’re trying to copy.

[Dat_Boi_Wut_Up]

Yea reaper is pretty crap even I have to say it
When will blizzard just give him a buff like one of the cancelled prototype ability for him when he steals the souls of so mercy can’t rev them or just a new buff to make reaper actually usable again.

[TRIHEXSUB-1381]

We’ve had 2 new things for Reaper and that’s already overwhelming compared to the year of silence we’ve had for the edgy boi