How have they been trying to nerf Hitscan?
Mccree, Soldier and Ashe have been straight buffed recently. The only “nerf” has been Ashe not being able to one shot with Mercy pocket.
Balanced doesn’t mean that “the more niche they are the more powerful they are in that niche.” That’s the opposite of balance, actually. The reality is that niche heroes simply have a small upper hand in that niche, and that’s all.
It isn’t a design flaw to have a hero that is niche. It just means the hero will see less use than others. When you have a large number of highly unique heroes, you will always end up with some that are filling a role that simply doesn’t come up often, and you can’t just make them absurdly strong to accommodate for that.
it is unstable on a day to day basis, but the point remains when we’re looking at it from an aggregated monthly or quarterly view. it may have variance, the monthly and quarterly averages have been that way for quite some time now :\
Oh crap that is a lot lower than what I remember it as, yea something is up. I’ve heard some talk that the lack of barriers on both sides is a problem but idk yet.
I’ve stopped playing her and probably won’t start again until shields come back/she gets buffed.
numerically speaking, “being proportionally stronger in their niche for how niche they are” is actually balanced. if every hero is balanced, then the underlying winrate for them (i.e. assuming all even pickrates) should be 50% aggregated/averaged across all situations.
If you make a hero niche, then their underlying winrate in their advantageous situations should be higher to compensate their lower underlying winrate in their disadvantageous situations. If not, then the overall averaged winrate across all situations is < 50% and it basically means there’s no need to bother learning them because there are other heroes that can just replace them in being stronger without being as niche, esp if they’re generalists.
which leads to my next point.
with that definition of “niche”, it basically means that you have an inherent “A-team” in-built into the design and balance of the cast and basically means that players are discouraged inherently from learning other heroes aside from those in that “A-team”. why learn and play a “niche” hero when you can just force that generalist and climb without ever hitting an in-built design hurdle in your progress? under that definition, the “niche” heroes would basically be designed to not be played… which is self defeating.
well they shouldn’t be making heroes with absurdly narrow niches in the first place.
to reel this in to be more specifically about sym:
i.e. they shouldn’t have neutered her core uptime tool (tp) which then made her much more reliant on team deathball pocketing,
- esp when they knew they had to further pump out tank powershifts and nerfs to kill static comps and team death ball pocketing.
- not to mention how legit every non-struggling hero actually has sufficient tools to enable themselves uptime.
heroes with extremely narrow niches, esp if it’s caused by overnerfing, simply is poor design and/or balancing.
imo as a sym main, the problems are the fundamental holes in her kit.
every hero is balanced out in terms of sustain, effective range, mobility and burst so that:
- they can get reasonable uptime opportunities through their own kit reasonably
- they can reasonably achieve their value within the time they have in their effective range.
sym rn has neither of 1 or 2.
- she’s got low effective range even when including orbs because of how slow they are
- her mobility is low because of how badly they spiked up the down time on tp with the infinite tp cd mechanic
- tho it’d be like medium mobility if it was like old finite 3.0 tp because it’s only mobility between 2 static points rather than something completely on demand/on the fly like tracer blinks
- i.e. can’t really get herself in and out
- her not being a tank means she will never have the sustain to just walk in and out of effective range
- her burst obvs is low with all the charge ups/wind-ups/cast animations
- meaning she can’t compensate her low time in effective range (because of sustain) with less time needed to get things done. not that she can get her self there often enough anyways…
The obvious thing to do to fill in hole 1 is to renumber her orbs to actually be aimable in midranged to justify charge time mechanics of orbs and fixing her tp cd mechanic.
What’d solve hole 2 is less straightforward and will need more trial and error.
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Symmetra is only good in deathball and at the moment deathball is not easy to run. Symmetra can spam, but it’s weak and her ult is situational.
Also, Hog counters Symmetra and people tend to play him.
I meant more that it’s why her winrate isn’t like 56% as it normally is even with a badly designed kit, but if we’re talking about the kit itself, definitely, though I do think enough of 1 would fix 2 in the process, especially if she were a tanky hybrid or moved to the tank class outright.
the thing is, even a 56% winrate (which is like the monthly and quarterly figures) isn’t actually high enough for a supposedly unpopular balanced “niche” hero i.e. supposedly having stats that’s really high in selective bias. This is because the 56%WR is legit about where the current more generalist top ~10 picked heroes are at with their winrates.
I agree that in fixing 1, it’d have some byproduct effects in improving 2. not sure about fixing it simultaneously, who knows. hence why I said it’s not as straight forward for 2 
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I am just quoting all of this I will answer it all here
to put it short and sweet symmetra is a glass canon
Do not buff her without Nerfs
Because Glass canons while being niche are technically balanced
high damage
low survivability
zenyatta is a glass canon and whenever his discord is at 25% he is balanced
anymore he breaks the game but at 25% its good
Now why don’t you directly buff glass canons? let us look at Mcree
he too like you was a glass canon then Blizzard came along and reverted his firerate when double shield ended because he didn’t need the extra dps
Mcree mains cried because their hero was balanced again and that is fine there is nothing wrong with being upset about your main being nerfed
NOW
Because Mcree is a DPS blizzard listened and buffed Mcree…too much
they gave him 25 health helping him survive
they made his stun almost a second and to top it all off he reloads almost instantly without roll
making FTH have 0 punishments and becoming extra anoying since his stun lasts a second
Sym doesn’t need a buff Don’t ask for it
She needs a rework
I would move her back to support and make her heal somehow so that way there are also more supports in the game personally
It’s almost as if her rework made her even more niche than before and solved none of her problems while also making her less fun
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Exactly!! Because pre rework she could actually do damage, turrets were more of a side thing. Granted, she was far worse on attack then defense, just due to her tp and turrets to hold a point. But now her turrets are her only source of like decent damage, as her beam is trash.
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Great rework … 
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Its funny because its an excuse to keep her weak. Suddendly the Sym haters that want ProPlay/GM-based balanced care about bronze.
In short, yes 
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Her ‘‘weakness’’ on attack was largely overstated and Shield Gen presented a massive advantage unless the enemy dealt with it - which meant either needing a flanker to waste ults on it, or to shift the whole defending team to Dive.
The real issue for Sym 2.0 was that she was weak to Dive - which dominated pro play and high tiers. Without Dive, her ult constructs were way easier to defend, specially with no/little support from her team.
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She is a garbage hero who cant fulfill her basic role as a DPS and only gets use a taxibot. When Taxibot stops being useful, she is just the game’s worst dps with no sub-role within the DPS roster.
Yes exactly, she was just very good on defense, just not as on attack, as it was weird placing turrets offensively
Honestly the 3.0 way to deploy turrets could have been nice for 2.0. Six 2.0 launchable turrets could have been great.
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