I’m going to steer away from the obvious hot-topic of her left-click in this post. That’s its own can of worms. I just want to focus on some key aspects of her kit that I feel confident that most Sym players can agree with me on.
Teleporter:
We were told it could be used to get teams out of grav. With its slow deployment time and very small interaction radius, this just isn’t a thing… Not unless the grav wasn’t going to kill anyone anyway. Add in the fact that Sym’s personal defensive capabilities through old photon barrier and shield gen are removed, she needs a reliable escape. Increasing the interact radius and decreasing the activation time would solve both these problems.
Turrets:
The impact these have, and their extreme vulnerability (being able to be shot down in mid air, taking time to activate) is NOT indicative of a 10 second cooldown. Sym either needs to be able to hold 4 or more with the 10s cooldown, or have the cooldown reduced by a few seconds.
Right click:
This is more of a personal one for me that I’m not sure how the community feels about. Having piercing orbs really gave Sym a particular niche and ability to counter bunker and pirateship comps.
I propose that the orbs be able to pierce barriers again, but at the cost of dealing half damage after passing through one, to compensate for the increased travel speed and charge rate.
I don’t think any official Blizzard developers stated that you could escape as a graviton surge. I think that was stirred up by the community after they made many assumptions before her changes came up into the PTR.
Her turrets IMO I think are fine. They do crap tons of damage and melt in a second. The slowness effect is also fine. However, since I do not play Sym i cannot tell if that often happens or not always. 50/50
Her primary sucks. All I see sym players do is spam right click. I think it’s good.
more specifically, her turrets do too much damage, her primary fire is balanced, she doesn’t need to pierce shields because they move at a quick speed, and her teleporter needs more of a cooldown
Orbs need to pierce shields again, she was strong originally in the sense that she is really good on tight controlled areas…now she’s just blasting orbs and doing nothing.
That’s the thing. They removed what was arguably her most useful functionality and specific purpose. She was incredible at blasting through chokes and countering the aforementioned bunkers/pirateships. Now she counters nothing and has no real niche.
not at all; in two seconds a squishy hero would die to the three symm turrets because they would do 50 dps, her secondary fire is too easy to fire and does quite a bit of damage so no it shouldn’t pierce a rein or orisa shield, those mistakes have been made in the past and that was the reason she got nerfed but has now acted like a buff
Sym used to wreck at a distance when she used photon shield then spammed mini orbs to get people to scatter instead of bunching up behind Rein’s shields.
Sym’s purpose was to control and separate stacking groups, she was awesome on first point of hanamura when attackers are trying to burst the group of defenders at the gate. Now Sym cannot do that, she can only hope for a tele on the ledge and hope that it won’t get destroyed.
People think that sym’s lock on was her biggest gain when it was her ability to crowd control.
Exactly. Her lock-on was, IMO, at the same level of Mercy’s pistol: They are good for a cheeky kill here and there, but the brunt of your work is based on turret management and orb spam. If you are using old Sym beam as your primary source of damage, you are either stomping hard, or being overly pocketed.
Photon Projector: Number of ticks per second reverted to 4. Range increased to 15m.
Energy Ball: The one part of the kit that is useful. Keep it.
Turrets: Increase the projectile speed and lower the cooldown to 7 seconds.
Teleporter: Faster deploy time. Make a tp automatically destroy edge railings and fix the indicator bugging out when placing on a edge railing. Also the teleporter still destroys itself sometimes fix that.
Photon Barrier: Add a secondary effect from touching the barrier. 75 temporary shields for allies or a 30% slow to enemies.
Survivability: Buff Symmetras health to 225-250 or give us her old barrier as a third ability.
The biggest problem is not having a primary fire in a fight. I hear people comparing it to Mei’s primary but Mei can freeze people with her primary fire. Symmetra just tickles enemies with it.
Overall, thanks for one of the more sensible essays on Sym 3.0.
100% agreed on the radius. Right now if you are standing on payload and it falls off the side, it is frustratingly just .05 meters out of reach during a Grav… aAAAAARGHHHT!!! It’s… right… there…
There are some other glitchies with TP, personally I would like it to ignore railings… failing that, Sym Alt fire needs to get a lot better at destroying railings (for some raisins it is not, currently).
Frankly I think that good Syms will get better with the skill of tossing turrets in a teamfight. IMO this is a player skill failure and not a failure of the hero design, atm. You HAVE to consider the situation when launching them. It’s not a good idea to fire them directly above the enemy team when heavy fire is incoming. I could say too much about proper turret launching during teamfights; it would be a whole 'nother thread.
I agree that piercing Orbs were mainly what made Sym 2.0 shine as an individual. I think that your ideas would be OP. But I don’t necessarily rule them out, it’s just my opinion.
As a Sym main both from 2.0 and 3.0, all Sym needs is one or more of the following:
Secondary fire goes through shields, but is slower or reduced damage.
Teleporter cast time is instant or increase the range of it while removing the auto-destroy (function like Torb turret)
Give her some survival with her old Photon Barrier back. She can keep the current ult or whatever, but she’s currently way too squishy with zero self defense and not nearly enough mobility or burst damage. Given how slow her turrets and TP are, this is her biggest flaw - needing to fight outside the range of her primary to stay alive, but having secondary fire and not enough utility at her comfortable medium range zone to be effective.
Sym 2.0 I used to have a K/D of 10+ typically, and a 68% win rate.
Sym 3.0 my K/D is down to about 2 and my winrate is a little lower (mostly because she’s less versatile now without her photon barrier so she’s more team comp dependent).
What Sym needs is pretty much everything the OP suggested, plus:
Shield gen back as an alternative to TP, though toned back from what it used to be of course
Debuffs to enemies that touch photon barrier
And a revert to primary fire. Say what you want, we need more heroes that don’t require aim.