Sym wont be viable as a hero as long as taxi TP is there

Regardless of how much you toy with the healing sentries AI, even a healer Sym will be reduced to a taxibot balanced around perfect OWL usage over everything else.

Even with the upgraded sentry AI, she flat out cant do anything to keep her team alive and said healing feels less like someone desiging a good and fun support hero and more like an excuse for a meaningless label change based on misplaced nostalgia about a hero that was never a support in practice.

This ExC is not fixing any of her issues and its in fact creating MORE of them.

Start by removing team TP and let her be a viable hero on her own that doesnt need to go around begging for extremely specific cooperation to not be a worse Reaper.

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There’s LOTS eay to see how can work the TP changing his logic. The shame is the no real testing on it and only “joking” balance.

Taxi TP cant exist in any capacity because ITP nerf while yes, a nerf, could still mean that the mechanic exists and OWL could abuse it.

let me guess zen is bad too because he cant keep his team alive?

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Zen has the strongest healing ultimate in the game and picking him is actually a valid trade off for his dmg.

Sym doesnt have a team saving ultimate (ExC barrier is a complete joke), nor does she have strong damage to compensate.

All she has is a taxi TP, which reduces her to be a taxibot at best.

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lol taxi bot is not a thing stop trying to make it a thing if you use tp to get back from spawn youre wrong

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that’s not the point. taxibot is a term used for picking sym and just having your team and yourself go through the tp to either the main point (hanamura) or to get ur team out of spawn faster.

“taxibot” is picking symmetra just for her teleporter. she mainly gets use out of KotH maps and some assault maps. “taxi bot” isn’t just used for putting tp
at spawn and leaving it there. the reason why people hate her as a taxibot is because Teleporter limits her power to be fun since she has to overall be nerfed around her teleporter, like how mercy is overall balanced because of Resurrect on E

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Sym suffers from the same problem Mercy does really. She has an ability that can be super strong in certain situations… and thus her entire kit suffers for it. Much like Rez the TP can cause a team to blind side the enemy team and capture a point in a few seconds. I mean if your entire team is on point I think you can capture the first point in about 5 seconds or less.

Add to that if your team further pushes ahead with ball or something and no one on the enemy team dies early… you can even double cap the second point before they respawn to contest.

Because of that one in a million potential Sym has to be kept weak. Much like mass Rez was nerfed and then removed because of that rare chance to save the match in a clutch last chance move… Sym is mostly kept pathetic because of her potential on a few maps like Volskia (sp).

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I mean that is how you use her kit…im not sure what the complaint is. do you now want people utilizing symm… next youre gonna tell me people play bap for i field

But sym is good. Taxibot isn’t a thing, people do use tp on spawn to rollout faster but that doesn’t somehow limit her. Sym is played a lot on control especially with rein comps, the teleporter isn’t the reason, the close-range environment of point brawl makes a hero-like sym with high damage at low range very strong. No matter what you do to her, she’s never going to be viable on like Gibraltar since the very nature of the hero is not strong for that map.

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tbh the usage of the tp might be a bit overstated here, but this:

This is bang on lol. People seem to really be going around thinking that the 25 shields made her the queen of OG supports or something.

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Wow if only said abilities were ultimates gated by ult charge instead of being cooldown abilities that involve near zero skill to use properly.

Mass Rezz wasnt removed for that at all. In fact its worst use was 5-man rezzes. It was removed because of no discernible reason other than paving the way for OWL.

Taxibotting refers to her entire impact being on team TP gimmick strats.

Taxibotting is strong… in OWL where people are hyper coordinated. But it does not translate to ladder, where in all ranks people will rather report you than support you if you pick Sym outside the 2 and a third maps she is considered viable on.

You remove TP taxibotting, something that Sym has NO control over because her team can perfectly ignore it even if the player is crying in VC asking people to take it, and Sym is literally just a gimped Reaper with terrible damage and made of glass.

Thats not even to mention how it reduces Sym to be awful in most maps where taxibotting isnt abusable. She literally has 2 and a third maps where she is a passable hero. When pre-rework she was viable to strong in every single defense map, every koth and a couple of offense maps.

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Sym is viable, even good, RIGHT NOW. So this never nonsense is simply nonsense.

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Where? In OWL? Because I couldnt care less if hyper coordinated teams abuse E-TP in ways that the playerbase can only watch. Sym is the most blatant case of OWL performance and opinions not mattering for the balance and fun of 99.99% of the playerbase.

If you mean ladder then lmao Sym is awful in ladder. This is an uncontested fact. Cant contest as a dps hero in any way and depends on begging her team for E-TP gimmick strats to be a worthwhile pick. She has been nerfed for years to make space for E-TP.

ML7 even admitted that his rework was for Sym to be a taxibot over anything else. She has been effectively reduced to being a taxibot. So much for the 3.0 rework.

The actual would contest that fact and we have a nice top 500 leaderboard with quite a lot of Sym players to further contest that fact.

Top 500s are only a inch below OWL in how utterly unrealistic is to expect Sym’s performance with hyper coordinated teams to be replicated across all ladder.

Thats not even to mention that there are around 10~ or so Sym mains across t500. Top200 only has 3. I dont know where you are getting ‘‘quite a lot of Sym players in t500’’.

not really. because unlike mercy who’s pretty much a generalist, how good sym is in her “niche” isn’t so good to compensate how trash she is outside of that “niche” to consider sym balanced esp considering her “niche” is actually simply the most optimised comp that’s built entirely to enable/cater for sym w+m1 (literally any hero would be good if they had entire comp and strat build entirely around enabling them + only playing their good maps).

i.e. there absolutely is capacity to improve sym outside of “get team to deathball rush around her specifically to enable her w+m1 and taxi tp on specific maps” without making her OP.

namely

  • renumber orbs around them being faster moving projectiles so they’re more aimable in more ranges and thus have a longer effective range
    • deathball sym rush can’t benefit from better ranged orbs because they’re too busy trying to rush into the enemy for w+m1
  • make sym be able to interact with immediately upon placement
    • deathball sym rush can’t benefit from sym being able to interact with tp sooner because the whole comp + strat is built around moving as a singular unit, and to go alone before everyone else is engaged for most of their tp spots is suicide.
  • make sym tp have a better cd mechanic like “cd starts upon placement and pauses halfway until destruction”
    • deathball sym rush can’t benefit from this because they’re too busy trying to leave it perma somewhere to hold 2 entrances or just single use one way tps that they destroy near immediately after taxiing.
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I keep seeing people say that taxi Sym is why she’s kept weak, but what really happened is they instituted some beam changes shortly after the TP change that caused Sym and other beam heroes to be dealing way more damage than intended. This was during double shield, so to make Sym basically disappear from the meta with Doomfist, they nerfed pretty much every aspect of her kit. Including her total potential damage with her beam, beam width, her turret damage, and her ultimate, despite little in her kit having overperformed prior to the beam changes.

I’m pretty sure the sentiment at the time was the infinite TP was actually worse than the temporary one as it had a longer cooldown and made it 10x more difficult for Sym to reposition herself and her team quickly. I personally think it’s pointless unless you’re like leaving it up near spawn as a quick jump. It’s better to never use TP unless you’re using it for a reason, lest you risk not having it when you actually need it.

I feel like they could do more with Sym as a DPS even with TP the way it is, but she hasn’t had any changes go live since October 2020 when they gave her 25 extra shields.

For OWL the TP change was a buff. Cooldown doesn’t matter because they only use 1 or maybe 2 TPs per attack. Especially after the cooldown buff.
Buffed range allowed a lot more team plays on hanamura for example.

TP change only nerfed selfish Sym on ranked.

The range of the TP is too small. If she could choose where on the map to put the entrance and exit, probably some amount of minimum distance from spawn, then perhaps we would see more interesting ways for people to ignore it