caught a renewed interest in ow as of recent due to the ow2 travesty, made a post, it got a few coughs and grumbles, thought i might as well throw my strongest opinion on the game/newly aborted franchise into the ring and see if it can hold it’s own in the ropes
symmetra is the worst piece of game design i’ve ever seen in an fps
i’ve been around block and have seen my fair share of lousy game design, from payday snipers all the way to our resident mei and pharah (poor man’s pyro and soldier respectively, the latter of which has been reduced to “plz stop blowing me out with junkrat”), but nothing compares to the tyrannical terribleness that is symmetra
i’ll try keep this concise so i’ll structure it on a set of 5 nice Ws, something i hope will keep the symmetra mains away considering they aren’t too familiar with the concept of a W
who?
who is symmetra? why do i hear noises downstairs? who is invading my home?
luckily, you only need to worry about one of these questions, lucky you!
symmetra is a damage hero, possessing a photon projector primary that fires a chargeable close range beam alongside an also chargeable orb long-range option, she can also call upon utility of both the teleporter and turrets in her kit, all of which she puts to use on the battlefield in pursuit of her own brand of global order, quite literally, as this comes in the form of a hard-light shield ultimate that seemingly spans the entire world, photon barrier
what?
what does symmetra do and why is she so dreadful? what are you doing with my wallet?
nevermind that! this is the biggest section, pay attention!
symmetra is a defensive-support hybrid to the very (rotten) core of her design, her projectile and turret’s spammability are good tools for locking down chokes, her teleporter supports her team getting to the frontlines and (more often than not) backlines of the enemy team, her ultimate provides both a defensive shield-dance and supportive fight-splitting ability
practically all of these abilities exist on this earth to make the game worse
her primary is a discount zarya beam without any of the nuance that makes zarya skillful, no tense quick-draw bubbles, no slow charge of damage, no resource management, just a mindless “if you beam the big bright squares and fat enemies long enough and they’re too stupid to press m1 at you back, you can ascend to 120 dps enlightenment”, her projectile is just off-time spam when she’s too far out of range to ruin people’s day more effectively, the only thing any of this ultimately really offers is it’s ability to tear down shield abusers, making the game slightly less painful for non-masochists
her turrets are both infuriating and pitiful, believe it or not, highly disposable low-effort, low-risk and low-reward turrets with slowdown in a game with exciting and dynamic movement are not fun, doesn’t matter if your a new player getting eviscerated by something you can’t see coming around the corner/on the overpass or if your a militant genji player being made to stop having fun to play aimlabs with 1-shot stationary targets so you can move again, it’s anti-fun design, there are better ways to counter the likes of genji and tracer
her teleporter may be the only redeemable part of her kit, it’s a fun ambush and support tool, it’s just too bad it’s stuck to languish on symmetra
finally, her ultimate is literally a massive, indestructible shield, eliminating any previous positive feelings you could harbor for her due to her anti-shield nature, it plays and is about as fun as it sounds, literally all people do from what little i’ve seen of this forum is eat, sleep and complain about having 3 high-tech walls in-between them and their next frag, so i can’t imagine how much they enjoy the addition of an indestructible map-wide shield, it’s just no fun
combine all of this and you have created a quite frankly talentless hero that only exists to make the game slower, non-dynamic and less fun, to make you spend an extra minute in a chokepoint before her lackluster light abilities fail to create a solid defence, or on the odd occasion act as a teleport cheese strat that only works so long as the enemy team has at least 3 non-functioning senses
when?
in that case, when has symmetra been changed and to what effect has this made her more effective/skillfull/fun?
the overwatch team, ignorant of okham’s razor, have tried to make the concept of symmetra work over the years
- they made her primary no longer auto-lock, a nice change but ultimately pointless considering her beam could still be aimed by the likes of an amoeba and still could be defeated by anything above the intelligence of a single-celled organism
- removed her discount zarya bubble, pointless change considering the ability was one of the least inoffensive parts of her kit, replaced by another obnoxious shield because overwatch surely needs more of those until the whole “shield” concept was scrapped entirely
- shifted her around the role compass a bit, this is the same compass that likes to tell me roadhog is a tank and i should expect reddit lucios to heal me
- moved her teleporter from an ult to a cooldown, nice change, but too little too late
- reduced her turrets, a mercy but not a mercy kill like it should’ve been
- removal of her personal ghost projectile, again, nice but little more than crum offerings
changes have ranged from indecisive to insifnicant and all the way to damaging, if this is the case though, that begs the question
why?
why does symmetra exist then?
symmetra isn’t fun to fight, she isn’t skillful, she doesn’t add anything and by god, with all the whinging symmetra mains do, she’s certainly not fun to play, so what does she offer?
the answer is sod-all nothing, symmetra exists because of a promise the overwatch devs made years ago to not remove heroes- these thin quotes, about as breakable as any other blizzard promise, are all that separates our hard light user from the open, dark void
where?
with all that said, where do we go from here?
you’ve read the title, just cut off the infected arm already
this doesn’t mean deleting her from the very code of the game- i would rather blizzard surprise us all by doing the very rare thing of keeping to their word- this just means writing off everything that has contributed to what she is now, dismissing sunk cost and starting anew with the character- maybe start from the basics by making her a support again like so many have suggested, i don’t know
tl;dr buff roadhog and add a dot flamethrower hero already, free hong kong, bliz can’t keep me down
edit- blizzard won’t let me include links because they’re fascists, just imagine a funny image with symmetras with trollfaces on them captioned “a world of fail”, it will make me very happy
!