Steve-O Says He's Tired of Symmetra Mains Complaining About Her Primary Fire. It's Better Than Ever!

General Discussion
231

Sure, he is someone with grate tracking. What about those who are disabled and and struggle with such things? It just isn’t fair for them is it.

232

I like challenges. If you want me to make Sym vids wrecking with primary fire, I can do that, and I’ll even show you cheesy ways to farm charge. To answer your question, no, I would not push a team with an uncharged beam, but I will farm their tanks and shields and THEN go in.

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That’s the issue, she didn’t use to be mainly attacking tanks but now she is. She was practically reworked to just go after tanks. And sorry but not everyone can hard track on smaller enemies. 50% or more of her damage is coming from her turrets rather than herself, she is reliant on them and too reliant on tanks to farm off. Hell a Moira can kill her pretty easily.

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Kigo is pretty much nailing it here with the arguments and data presented.

3 Likes
235

Little known fact: TPs hitbox disrupts Moira’s beam, so dancing around it and TP’ing makes it almost impossible for her to hit you with it. I usually throw a turret or two through each TP to deter her if I’m potatoing my orbs.

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Symmetra is currently terrible. Simply putting it.

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I actually know how to cheesily farm the charge. But I will take you up on that challenge video so here’s the rules of the challenge.

  1. Video coverage of an entire match (it can be QP, won’t make you do this in comp) not short montages.
  2. Never in the entire video may you use your sentries even once.
  3. Never in the entire video may you use your orbs even once.

I am aware that rules 2 and 3 are not natural for Sym. But we are not arguing whether Sym 3.0 is viable, we are arguing whether just the beam is any good. And that gets muddied when the orbs and sentries assist with kills and damage.

  1. Periodically throughout the video and at the match end show your personal match stats so players can see your total damage done just using the beam, and your average accuracy over the course of the match.
  2. If your primary accuracy is below 67% at the end of the match it fails because it means Sym 2.0’s beam would have been better for you.
  3. You can use teleport and the ult as much as you want and are able.
  4. Do not play in a premade stack. Solo queue only.

Final 7th condition I may waive if needed but feel a true challenge would include it.

If you can give me a video over 6m long instead of just a single 18s POTG clip of using the beam in a way that the beam actually is worth keeping around I will admit you were right.

If on the other hand you find the beam to be distasteful for using as a primary weapon. If the actual damage done is indeed inferior to what you would get with any other dps (and even some tanks and healers), or even just using the same rules but orbs only instead of beam only, then I will have won the challenge.

Is this challenge acceptable to you then?

3 Likes
238

Deal. I’m off for the next two days, so I’ve got time.

239

This is kinda dumb tbh. Literally use any hero and restrict them to m1 and they will be awful. The challenge is flawed.

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I am not trying to get him or her to show me a game where the Sym play single handedly carried using just the beam. What the challenge is about is proving whether this beam is better than the old 2.0 beam. Devil and Stevo believe that it is. My numbers say that it isn’t.

For the record, 2.0 could do this challenge of only using the beam not the sentries or orbs and still get gold damage and gold elims. I’ve done it a few times during the 2.0 stage. You’re right that using the entire kit is better, but we’re not discussing the kit just the beam itself. Besides it is only the damage dealing parts of her kit I restricted. The use of ult and teleport to help with the beam damage safely is still fully allowed.

1 Like
241

The numbers mean zilch. Know why? Because Sym 2.0s 7m range and 30dps start meant she died before she even hit the 120 dps.

Even if you did, you get met with exactly what every dps gets hit with these days.

slept stunned shattered etc.

Yeah, once in a while you killed the whole team with an m1 that literally bent behind you to kill someone. Should that really even be in the game?

On paper, yes, 120 dps that can’t miss on 4 ticks per second damage wise is better (if not equal tbh) than 180 dps with a broader tickrate with an aim requirement, but it is unhealthy for the game and was the result of Syms death moreso than the team wipe scenario. Even Winston is capable of missing.

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A lot of work went into this, bravo :blue_heart::gem::sob:

2 Likes
243

I actually agree with you that it is better not having the lock on in the game. I am not part of the camp that wants it in the game. I have said that multiple times across many threads both here and in the Sym mains subreddit.

My argument is simply that the numbers that the devs put on the 3.0 beam were not well thought out, and then the “exploit fix” that the devs used made a bad situation even worse.

I have repeatedly stated across many threads that a far better fix would have been to simply remove ticks entirely and add an on/off variable that made it impossible to do damage while the variable is on and turned off at exactly .25s. This would mean that the damage values would instantly trigger whenever your beam made contact with an enemy if the damage preventing variable was off but could not be exploited by spamming on and off the weapon.

Presto! The exploit is stopped! No one can argue that a large chunk is bad because of missing the timing since it will always trigger whether the next contact is at exactly .25s later or at .37s later.

There was absolutely no need for this system that made Sym’s damage insanely vulnerable to armor values.

4 Likes
244

Thank you! You are quite correct. But it is worth it if I can make more people aware of just how bad the beam’s damage numbers actually are.

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245

I mean my accuracy is low but I spam that orb and try to charge my laser pen as much as possible, honest! I was top 35 on PSN this season

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Honestly I would not be too hung up by your accuracy levels. Majority of the high accuracy beam users I checked were pc players, while a lot of players near the lower ends tended to play console. It is simply far easier to aim with a mouse and keyboard than a console controller.

The same issue goes for Blasphemy using a trackball. You folks are all at a major disadvantage when it comes to aiming the beam. I also find no fault on anyone who is actually handicapped in some form that makes aiming more difficult.

Heck, even if there was no mitigating factors at all then I still would not insult someone for lower aim values. Although in this last case I would offer suggestions on ways for them to work at improving their aim that worked for myself. When I first started playing the game my aim was around 25%, and my oldest played heroes still show that in their permanent stats. The more I play heroes these days the higher my average generally is simply because of the practice steps I took. But because of the early play time it will take quite a while to pull up my career averages higher.

2 Likes
247

But you can’t use only her beam as a factor for her damage. Her beam is lackluster and her orbs are still inconsistent because her turrets exist. If her gun were allowed consistency in its own right while leaving her turrets as they are along with the massive utility provided by TP, she’d be too strong and do far too much.

Would the fixes you’re suggesting help? Probably. I don’t think they’re necessary, though. I’d rather her strengths be touched on, aka TP and turret cd. If anything should be done to the beam, it’s a range increase. My only real issue with it at this point are the many many moments I feel like old Sym, slowly lumbering around chasing an enemy with a fully charged beam that’s just out of range by a meter or two.

Not to mention her beam did receive a stealth buff that made it far less frustrating to use from cover or close to walls. Originally the invisible walls would block the hitbox to a ridiculous degree but its worked perfectly fine the last few weeks. Her turret bomb was also stealth buffed to TP turrets more reliably and it destroys itself far less.

I’d imagine there’s still things to come for Sym, but they’ll probably be small stealth buffs.

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I upped my sensitivity as well. I stream on Twitch too u see the same name. I also bought Kontrol Freeks, which were mainly for Widowmaker but I feel they help my tracking a lot.

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Except 100 DPS is literally a Zarya at 5 charge. Zarya deals 95 damage/second, base, +1% for every point after that.

Considering that Zarya has 4 additional meters of range, I don’t think it would be unfair to let Symmetra start out with at least 90 damage/second… especially when you consider that Zarya’s maximum damage output is 190/second, 10 damage/second greater than Symmetra’s maximum damage output.

3 Likes
250

I played Widow a lot when I played console (I play on an ungodly high sens on pc and didn’t want to get used to it for Widow and didn’t have to aim for Sym so I didn’t care) and I can attest those kontrolfreaks will help. It’s nothing drastic, but noticeable. Flicks feel weirder at first, though.

My sens on Widow was 90/45/90 with 95 aim smoothing if you want to try that out :slight_smile:

1 Like