She was suppose to be a non-healing support, but I think think that idea just wasnāt implemented welll; because every single skill sheās ever had has been so niche, useless half the time, and ranging from ok to good the rest of the time. Taken alone a lot of her abilities were ok, but combine them and half her skills couldnāt be used that often without being wasted.
Healing turrets never even made it to public testing, I think. They said it was too inconsistent, and felt pretty bad. Honestly, I could see that being the case if you think about it. After all turrets rely on your teammates going to them, can be destroyed, unlike other healers who have primary or alt fire, and then we get into how they choose who was healed when half the team is dying.
Originally, her on launch āEā ability was to give an ally 50 (later nerfed to 25) shields permanently, until they died. That was situational, but ok. For some heroes that was nothing and didnāt help. But, then they had it nerfed because dive heroes like Tracer and Genji were a menace when they had that extra health.
Then we entered the Shield Gen and teleporter era. Neither was great, but neither was bad. They were still really situational. They both needed a team who could defend them and relied on your team being good enough to make use of them. The same build had barrier, which was honestly one of her better abilities because it was the only one she could use in almost any situation.
Now we have teleporter, which as it turns out, was a situational ultimate and is now an even more situational skill. It deploys slowly so it canāt be used to attack outside turret bombs. It has a short uptime, so you canāt place it in 2 locations as a shortcut for your team, because youāll have to constantly refresh it just to have the potential that your team will use it. On top of all that, itās still really buggy.
Finally shield wall. Which honestly, I donāt think is bad, but I donāt think itās amazing either. I guess itās less situational than the old teleporter, but it has a much higher margin for error as well and it relies more on what your teammates do.
So yeah, thatās quite the list. On their own, and with some tweaking I could see any of these working. But Sym had all of them at one point, and it just made her overall inconsistency worse. Sheās all over the place and never did any one thing better than anyone else. For all the pining over Sym 2.0, half the time Mei was a better option on defense maps, and Mei was also pretty bad at the time.
as ive never done something like this before there will be bad stuff