The problem is that I, a non-Sym main, non-pro flex player, can consistently get value out of her in high-MMR lobbies when I feel like playing her; however, I also know not to use her to try to attack Junkertown point A vs Widow and Ashe, for example. She is literally my hero with the highest win rate. If I can do it, why can’t they?
It makes me think very little of the Sym mains that complain constantly about her not being a boring, straightforward DPS as though she has ever been that. That tells me they’re attached to the character for aesthetic reasons, not the hero for practical or gameplay reasons. They want her to be something else entirely that she was never supposed to be, which is actually pretty emblematic of the OW community as a whole now that I think about it.
So yes, I have good reason to believe that they don’t understand their own hero just like there are so many OW players, especially on the forums, who don’t understand their own game. That won’t stop them from blaming the devs, matchmaking, and their teammates for all their problems, though.
Funny thing about “moving sym back to support” is that if blizzard initially put her in the defense role, nobody would have argued that she was secretly actually a support.
It’s not necessarily about usefulness. But about the fun of playing that hero.
If DVA got a mythic they aren’t going to net nerf dive and buff brawl so dva is having a hard time. They are going to ensure dive is at least very viable, if not meta… etc. You know what i mean?
This is my business assumption here. In marketing, the first thing you want to do is get a sale. Any sale. You get someone to purchase one time, they’re more likely to be open to purchase again down the line. You’ve gained their trust and they’re invested in you. Sell small first, then upsell later.
The way to do that in Overwatch is sell the best bargain thing which is the battlepass. So, make sure mythic receiver’s composition playstyle is is either meta or viable, remove what pain points you can around playing as, with and against them… have more people playing that hero, players see that hero more often… they start to see more players wearing the cool skin/s… players see the toy others are playing with, they want it. More of them buy it.
This is a big corporation, now owned by daddysoft and team 4 are likely afraid of not hitting $$ targets and getting more staff laid off. So i know they are doing all the psychological things they can try to get more sales to keep the big wigs happy.
If i were working there and wanted to ensure my friends in the office kept their jobs, id be doing the same thing. Imo it’s not evil or a bad thing. They’re doing exactly what they told us they’re doing, changing up the game and the meta to keep things fresh. The meta they choose just so happens to usually line up with the mythic receiver. Which is simply smart business.
So a support? Oh wait most supports have a lower TTK rate then the DPS character and don’t need coordination to get value from most of their abilities.
And tell me how many other DPS characters NEED team play to get value? How many other DPS heroes are centered around a single ability? How many other characters have as many stipulations as she does (Charged damage, damage reduced on initial tick to a character, one of the slowest projectiles in game with a laughable damage per second rate, an already large hitbox from her lock on days that never got reduced, technically got larger with S9 changes.)
Lets not forget how the original identity (1.0/ 2.0) had different play styles compared to her 3.0 rework. Every change they implemented was almost a direct F-U to her original player base. From lock on to aim intensive, from fairly independent to having to be a ‘team player’ with TP utalization, not to mention those of us who are indeed ‘yass slay’ (which your quip is quite frankly unnecessary and obviously targeted) don’t use chat in games because of how others react.
Lets also not ignore the fact that her win rate couldn’t possibly be accurate given she is one of (and often thee) lowest picked hero because most non sym-mains swap after not being able to hold down a point. Her metrics are as ‘situational’ as her play style.
I don’t want her to be an instant win hero, I want her kit to either directly benefit the player with actual agency or for them to admit she’s not a real DPS and let her heal. I’d gladly take TP and turret nerfs/ changes if she was self reliable.
Because no Sym main wants her to be a team TP slave bot that is broken in 1-2 maps (if her team uses team TP) and a throw pick outside those maps. There is a reason why more and more people have come to see the tumor that is team TP as something to remove.
Maybe that is fine for you that use her mostly in the one and half map where she is strong, but that is not a situation that any other hero has to deal with. No other hero is so beholden to team and map dependency at all ranks, much less a hero reworked to allegedly curb said issue.
Symmetra players have the right to main her at an equal capacity that any other hero can be mained. Your weird perception of Sym being pigeonholed into a team TP bot as her natural and only role is not really true - she was shoved in there through nerfs and a bad rework.
Personally, at this point I will just assume that anyone that is in favor of Sym being a team TP slave with no ability to fulfill her DPS role is just a bad player scared of Sym players having access to a hero that isnt doo doo garbage.
That’s true. And heroes power/value changes from rank to rank.
Reinhardt may be considered oppressive in lower ranks, but he’s pretty balanced imo above them. He doesn’t need to be buffed to be too strong to sell the BP to midrank players aka the biggest money makers for OW. Brawl just needs to be a little more encouraged to be played. Even need is a strong word when it comes to Reinhardt in midranks.
But mark my words, when a less played hero gets a mythic, the balance changes will ‘encourage’ a viable meta for them to be played more in. The more players playing that hero with the mythic skin, the more players will see that hero and be tempted to buy the battlepass. Thus converting them from a non paying user to a paying customer who can now be upsold to at a later date.
Selling the BP is step 1 and marketing 101 for Blizz. You don’t cold sell the $20 skins and $50 bundles, you get them to invest in you with $10 first. This has the added benefit to Blizz of ‘buyers remorse’, meaning you are more likely to keep playing the game when you buy the battlepass in order to complete it. So as to not waste your money, increasing player retention and increasing chances of upselling to the player down the line.
But they way overdid it with Widow last season. She was in most games even in gold/plat
One thing I wonder is, do they slightly manipulate map pools in favor of the mythic receiver too? I haven’t played much this season but I feel like I got more widow maps last season than usual. Could just be bias affecting my judgement.
Are people getting brawl maps more often this season? Are you seeing King’s Row a tad more often? Probably not but it maybe something to pay attention too
Since only meta, where Symmetra was even slightly viable, was absolutely annihilated very quickly, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
I think it’s more of a MMO-style balancing - basically, if you can’t make hero viable, you give them skins to artificially inflate their pickrate, creating illusion of viability. So technically you do fix low pickrate of a character, even while nobody is having fun with them in their games.
Especially if developers have zero clue on how hero is actually being used, insisting on buffs, that are largely irrelevant to hero’s viability.
Symmettra was literally a character fielded as a support hero. It was so underwhelming without healing she was moved into DPS classification.
However, she is still DPS/ support hybrid. Like how Mei or Venture are like DPS,/tank hybrids. Get used to it. You play the DPS/support hero without healing.
What is her specialty? It isn’t killing opponents. It isn’t gatekeeping an area. It isn’t providing anything useful to the team aside from 2 key things, that have absolutely nothing to do with ‘specializing’. In fact, I’d posit that the 2 things that she brings to a team aren’t all that ‘special’.
Teleporter
Shield Wall
So, Teleporter is unique, she’s the only character that can rapidly transport people 30 meters from the base location.
Shield Wall isn’t unique, in that other players have ways to shield against damage. Also, it can be defeated simply by walking through it. Sure, it protects against projectiles, AoE damage, etc… My previous point still stands though, all that is required to defeat it is to press up on the directional control stick of the gamepad, or W on the keyboard, and the ‘Ultimate’ is made completely irrelevant.
So, the only REAL thing I see her being specialized in, is being under tuned.
She’s for flexible area-denial and unique utility. She’s great for defending a static point when she has time to set up turrets.
If she can get into a fight (which TP helps greatly with) and get her damage ramped up, she absolutely has to be focused down or she’ll wipe the whole team.
Also, I’d argue her ult is the second best in the game. Dropping her wall on a point during a team fight is a massive, long-lasting advantage. Don’t place it somewhere people can just walk through. Place it somewhere you can move back and forth through it during a fight.
There’s lots that she does well. She just isn’t a good idea in big open areas or vs long-range comps, both of which are pretty common recently.
The turrets deny nothing. They make it aggravating, but they don’t keep anyone from going where a turret is. Even with all 3 turrets hitting one character, all it’s doing is distracting the enemy team healer momentarily while the player being affected either gets out of the way, or shoots them, which takes all of a second.
She has 3 turrets… “When she has time” it takes no time to ‘set up turrets’, they’re fire and forget.
Dude, you MUST be talking about Sym 2.0, cause 3.0 is a sneeze worth of focus and she’s taking a dirtnap. Focus? Focus is only required by 1 player of the enemy team to delete her.
Dies… She does that VERY well.
You mean, a big wide open area her Shield Wall would be the most beneficial in? Interesting how you contradict yourself.
Typically I agree with what you’re saying Goldlantern in most other posts, but in this, I must whole heartedly disagree.
Symmetra needs help. Her design is poor as it stands currently. Numbers tweaking might shore up gaps, but it’s not going to fix the character. Having to rely so heavily on team participation and babysitting in order to provide (best case scenario here) 3/4 the damage any other character chosen for her slot can provide, is not realistic.
What are you talking about. Sym is doing really well. The devs said so. Obviously she is doing well. Remember all those games you won cuz you had a sym and they didn’t? No? Well… shes still fine probably maybe
all 3 of them put together do 75 dps and die to quick melee. I have a question for you. What is more likely to stop you from entering a specific area. Are they turrets that you can kill and shoot down their owner before she charges her second orb or an area in the los of a hitscan player, any hitscan. Now personally I’m more afraid of crossing ashe or cassidys los then goihng into any space held by a hero who needs several seconds before she gets to my ttk and damage levels but that is just me.
So she has to get into a fight with a slow obvious deployable and ramp her damage up and then she will wipe the whole team with tutorial 76 bodyshot damage. Do you not realise that you just described a slower, even more obvious version of Reapers entire gameplay loop. Appearantly shadow stepping and dealing damage with an immo ability makes you F tier but slowly setting up the tp, waiting for it to deploy, using it and then surviving until the damage ramps up to that level makes her competent. Wow, do you work as an OW dev?
The Doom nerf was validating for so many reasons. The devs have slowly nerfed any legitimate Doom counter, and it became obvious he was running rampant in matches.
Truer words have never been spoken. I’ve never played Sym and thought,”I wish my TP had more health.” My team barely uses it as is, and the enemy largely ignores it.
Doom still has some of the most counters in the game and doom objectively is not “running rampant”. Dude is never even a top 4 let alone top 3 played tank, and every person who IS playing doom? It’s an otp with hundreds of hours on the hero. No non-doom player is selecting the hero because there is no point.
They just gave dude a QoL change to his rocket punch to fix the inconsistent niche situations where people slide, and then proceeded to butcher his slam lmao
