I think she was slightly overtuned (not OP) at all ranks, no exception. The only reason I never asked for a nerf in the forums was because she was my main and I wanted to feel strong she could receive a good bunch of QoL changes to make her a bit less clunky to play before receiving a nerf blow.
Even then, I’ve been always advocating for nerfing Shield Gen duration (instead of infinite, it would keep draining ult charge, requiring Sym to stay active to keep it up), and/or moving 25 shield from her ult to a global aura passive to mirror Sym1 old Photon Shield benefit without the annoying upkeep.
It don’t help that calling her “not weak” would be seen as weird from both your average player and Sym mains. As Jeff said once, the perception of balance is stronger than balance itself. Yet, statistics don’t lie, and she had good winrates across all ranks, despite there being a lot of players that would throw the match or get their morale down the moment a teammate lock her.
Then don’t balance her for OWL. Simple as that.
I really don’t understand that reasoning that every hero need to be “played at OWL” to be relevant. There is no problems having some kind of “gateway” characters that would shine if the enemy team didn’t covered a main part of the game.
For instance, Bastion is a lot more dangerous if the other team don’t know how engage together, and Sym idem, but from a different aspect of teamwork.
Bastion is usually the central point of any team featuring him. If you can disable Bastion, usually you win because everyone else was focused more on peeling for him, and not dealing with the enemy team. So it would encourage people to look at the match objectively and focus resources on taking Bastion down as soon as possible.
Symmetra, on the other hand, would empower her team in such a way to make everyone more resilient, while keeping flankers at bay because if they engage carelessly, they would melt away from turret fire and autolock beam without doing much in retaliation. But Sym’s defensive measures are useless against focused fire. If you get 3+ players shooting at the same hero, 75 extra HP will not save them. If they all move together, turrets aren’t that dangerous. And if you don’t hesitate jumping into her before she can power up her beam, she isn’t dangerous at all.
Neither Bastion or Sym will ever have huge OWL representation. And even if they never see pro game time, it’s not unexpected. Because the intention of having such characters in the game is not to elevate a sick Sym main to a star pro player position. Is to teach your playerbase about game basics. If everyone know those basics, then the character pickrate and winrates plummet, and that’s when you should start focusing on reworking their intended role in the grand scheme of things.
Sombra and Bastion reached that point. Sym was reworked while still sustaining 60% winrate across all ranks. The community as a whole still didn’t learned how to deal with a good Symmetra, but the pro players did, which meant she was in the weird vacuum where she was slightly OP on ladder and sheer useless in pro (which was not a negative, just reiterating). Which made a lot of people think she should be useless in ladder as well, and get surprised by how good she was when not kept in check by a coordinated team.