TLDR Summary: The only people defending Sym 3.0’s left click beams are naive people who fail at math and critical thinking. Read the full post for an in-depth essay on just how bad the beam damage actually is in 3.0 compared to 2.0’s beam damage.
30-60-120 vs 60-120-180 by itself ‘seems like’ a buff. It probably did to the developer staff who I am going to have to call near-sighted or naive. They seem to be great at spotting trees but terrible at spotting the forest. So, yes, on paper a buff. But not when you take into account 3 things. Accuracy, Delay time, Damage Split.
Accuracy by itself is big. And hard to account for when applying damage buffs and nerfs. Exactly what damage do you need in order to get a good damage rate when taking into account lost accuracy from an auto lock? It takes time and mathematical equations to figure out a number that would be fair and keep damage stable while removing auto lock. Time and equations I am convinced the overwatch staff NEVER took when changing the damage numbers from 30-60-120 to 60-120-180. I am 100% convinced some staff member just threw numbers out and some person in charge just chose the numbers we were given as it “seemed good” without actually doing ANY actual math or checking.
50% accuracy means to get exactly the same damage as auto-lock you need to have 60-120-240 damage and exactly the same time of ramping and exactly the same damage split. 60-120-180 is already less than that. “Good” accuracy of 60%, which is not uncommon for pros with the type of ability we’re talking about with her, drops 60-120-180 to 36-72-108 this means that even with good accuracy and no other changes Sym 3.0 does very slightly more damage in early stages but quite a bit less damage at end stage compared to Sym 2.0’s 30-60-120.
Now let us talk about Delay Time. This is the delay to go from first tier damage to second tier damage to final tier of damage. Sym 2.0’s ramp up times were less than Sym 3.0. This means that while Sym 3.0 is still in tier 1, Sym 2.0 has already hit tier 2 for damage off-setting the so-called “damage gains” yet again. Furthermore, Sym 2.0 hits final tier damage significantly faster than Sym 3.0 does. Now considering Sym 3.0 already does less tier 3 damage than Sym 2.0 and also takes significantly longer to plateau up, you are talking significantly less damage.
Finally the nail in the Sym 3.0 damage beam’s coffin is Damage Split. Before I get into why this is the final ruination of Sym 3.0 with her current damage numbers let me explain something else that factors into this issue.
Armor in Overwatch is a significant factor. The way it works is heroes have health that comes either as plain health, shield health like Symmetra 2.0’s shield gen gave, and armor such as Brigitte gives. The significance here is that if a hero only has plain health any incoming damage is a 1:1 relationship. But armor decreases that down by a different rate. Furthermore, armored health defends better against slow but consistent damage than it does against spikes of damage also known as “burst damage”. This is why during heavy armor metas, heroes that do consistant small damage such as Soldier 76’s main weapon fire drop off the meta.
Now, knowing about what armor does and how it is very bad to have small but consistent damage in high armor metas, we need to discuss Sym 3.0’s beam damage split. Due to an exploit found of her beam on the PTR, that allowed flicking the beam off and on to get insane levels of damage, the developers took the quickest / easiest route of fixing which actually destroys any possibility of her beam being useful. Her beam was split into 10 separate small segments of damage instead of a large burst of damage on onset. In other words instead of 60-120-180 you are looking at 6-12-18 damage at a time with the beam but many more possible “hits” in the same time frame.
This absolutely destroys the beam against anyone wearing armor. But even without that limitation, it means you need to land 10 hits to get the same amount of damage you used to get with just 1 hit, which means you need even higher accuracy than you did before. So high armored targets get a pass on your damage, and high mobile targets get a pass on your damage as well. Even worse, you no longer have an initial burst of damage that could finish off an already injured enemy all at once before a healer could respond.
Any way you look at it, Sym 3.0’s beam is significantly nerfed compared to Sym 2.0’s beam damage. Even an aimbotting Sym 3.0 would get less damage than a disabled Sym 2.0 player just looking at the beam damage due to delay time and damage split without factoring in any other changes to the hero’s kit of orbs and sentries.
There you have it people. Hard facts that Symmetra does less damage on her main weapon than she ever did during her 2.0 phase of life.
Of course, people may argue that her damage from orbs or sentries make up for the loss, or various utility gains were worth the lost beam damage. That is an argument for a different thread. But when it comes to just the beam weapon itself pound for pound she was nerfed hard!
TLDR Summary: The only people defending Sym 3.0’s left click beams are naive people who fail at math and critical thinking. Read the full post for an in-depth essay on just how bad the beam damage actually is in 3.0 compared to 2.0’s beam damage.
or her primary is fine because it does “more” damage.