Reminder: Symmetra has a 2.8% pickrate in OWL

[Zephrin-11143]

@Large-11605

She’s very strong on her maps. Not so much on other maps. But yes I do remember them using that reasoning. Is it safe to say the rework failed?

@Yourself-11293

Yeah and honestly she feels too good on those maps as well.
Like, if I pick sym on hanamurua attack and our team uses the teleporter… we’re going to win. On lijiang we’re most likely going to win. But then pick her on… idk… havana… and you have about 0% chance of winning. Just seems really unbalanced if you ask me.

I’ve said this many times before:

@Zephrin-11143

niche is only fine if the niche hero in question is proportionally stronger in their niche for how narrow it is, i.e. strength in niche actually strong enough to compensate weaknesses outside of the niche. otherwise the hero is by definition weak and there’s no point in making the hero have such a niche.

additionally, if a hero’s niche is so narrow that they can’t reasonably be stronger in their niche while being fair (e.g. needing like >=100% winrate in their niche to balance out weaknesses), then blizzard f’ed up hard and they need to expand their niche/deflate and make them more general.

when you look at this pickrate:

@OwU-21511

Blizzard world - 0.3%
Busan - 1.4%
Dorado - 1.0%
Havana - 0.5%
Ilios - 0.9%
Kings row - 0.3%

Lijiang Tower - 23.1%

Oasis - 0.7%
Anubis - 0.0%
Volskaya - 0.4%

in an environment where supposedly they are only picked when they’re worth it as well as the fact that she’s pretty much played in 1 comp, you can’t possibly deny that sym’s case isn’t the “niche so narrow that they need an impossible amount of power to be balanced” case.

Is this reason to call the rework a failure? not if you’re wanting to blame the design because very evidently when you look into her kit numbers and compare them with other heroes’, her numbers are .

like the only reason she has this “niche” is because she lacks sufficient uptime tools for herself. namely, her orbs (staple weapon fire) are legit one of the worse projectile fires in the game, and her tp got neutered hard despite her having lower effective range, low burst and low sustain amongst the cast.

@Zephrin-11143

Solution

If we really want to let sym have more independence for her own uptime (because she’s really low on that atm and that’s like 1/2 of her core problems), what’d really extend her range and mobility, i.e. the “must haves” are:

• renumber her orbs to be an aimable midranged bursty (but lower fire rate) weapon fire i.e. renumbering them around being faster moving projectiles
• making tp have a better cd mechanic like old 3.0 finite tp e.g. (cd starts on placement, but pauses when it reaches halfway until destruction)
• making sym herself (not necessarily her team) able to interact with tp sooner after placement

better mobility —> “getting in range” would take less time which is something sym isn’t doing all that well with rn esp post infinite tp cd mechanic implementation.

throw in also better range (and hopefully a better balancing of burst vs sustain too in renumbering of orbs), this would also reduce the time for “getting in range” and in terms of mixing with tp, provide a LOT more options as to how that’d happen (i.e. more positions for self tp’ing to that let sym be in effective range of orbs).

and this further works out even better as it further bypasses the “iT’s lOW SKilL aND oPprESsiVe tO lOW raNkS” the typical “skill elitists” and sym haters usually

@Saber-22958

It’s just more proof of how the rushed rework failed. Transforming her into a dps without raising her lethality by much was not a smart move.

I wouldn’t call it rushing given how long we had sym3.0. but rather complete incompetence to put decent numbers on her as blatantly shown by orb’s numbering (sniper tier low firerate that encourages aim, but they’re so slow that not even their projectile size can compensate how little aim matters in most ranges).