Symmetra As a Support

What if her turrets not only could damage enemies, but healed teammates too? Would this be a good idea? Or if that’d be too much, they would only heal teammates. Enemies can still destroy them, though.

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They tried symm with healing turrets when they were making symm 3.0 it said it felt very gameplay flow breaking and as such they moved away from it

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That’s great! How come no other sym main thought of this tho??

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Omni stop being such a troll :rofl:

They didn’t say this. Geoff Goodman said:

“This was sort of fun but was kind of frustrating as a Symm player because Overwatch moves so fast…It ended up just feeling like a mismatch, but honestly i’d be up for taking another crack at it at some point. Maybe if she had some other primary way to heal and the turrets were just a way to provide auxiliary healing it might have gone better.”

Geoff even says himself that healing turrets could have worked better if she had another way to heal on top of that. Don’t dismiss an idea that even the Lead Designer has said may work out.


Geoff also says:

“we could have pushed harder to iterate on Symm as a healer instead of a damage dealer. Maybe we can still revisit her as a healer.”

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I didnt dismiss the idea of a healer symm, i dismissed the idea of a healing turret only symm, which they have tested and that same quote said it breaks the gameplay flow, stating a mismatch

additionally, that isn’t the only time Geoff Goodman has brought up the healing turrets

Again it broke the gameplay flow, healing turrets alone isn’t enough and healing turrets alone is what op suggested

a mismatch doesn’t mean breaking flow, it just means it didn’t work out or didn’t fit…

An example of breaking flow is how Mercy stops her fast paced, high mobility play style to stand still and revive someone.

Healing turrets would effectively function the same as current turrets, but in different spots. They would feel more or less the same to use as current.

when it comes to the pace of the game (aka the gameplay flow) yes it does.

And healing turrets only would cause someone to end their fast paced high mobility play style to go find the nearest turret stay in its range and get healed by the stationary turret

breaking the general gameplay flow and some characters breaking it even harder

Or, ya know, Symmetra could throw a turret over to someone to heal them. Or the turret could have long range so you just need LoS (which is a requirement for every healer).

There are many ways that they could have functionally altered turrets, but by the sound of the following quote it doesn’t sound like they pushed very hard.

“we could have pushed harder to iterate on Symm as a healer instead of a damage dealer. Maybe we can still revisit her as a healer.”

Saying they could have pushed harder doesnt mean they didnt push hard already, we could of pushed harder for a lot of the characters reworked in this game, does it mean we didnt already push hard? no

and now they not only have to wait for that turret to arrive and set up but than they still have to wait in that turrets range and line of sight while being healed by it

I doubt they’d ever go for that cause seeing a giant 20-40 meter yellow beam possibly multiple at once traveling across the screen would add so much visual clutter it’d be stupid to do so just to push for making some turrets heal, instead of going for a different route with symm like dps, or like they said have the turrets be a secondary less important form of healing symm has while giving her a more main form of healing that’s more easily applied/available

Yes there are a ton of ways they can functionally change the turrets, but just because they can, should they? Should healing turrets be the main form of healing? No.

Healing turrets as the main form of healing has so many fundamental problems that it isn’t viable to implement

Range issues? Increasing the range now has giant yellow beams majorly obscuring the screen

Easily destroyed? Increasing the health could easily make them last far too long

Target priority? Having them only targeting the lowest health (number or percentage) could have a problem with focused healing where even though someone needs to have healing kept on them for a prolonged period just to keep them full from chip damage, the turrets just wont because they’re focusing the ally over there

Make the healing aoe? Each turret would either have to be very low on hps further causing the flow break problem as they’d have to spend more time around turret clusters just to get healed at a decent pace, and would require a lot more investment in a single area for a decent effect causing massive cooldowns just for the main form of healing

or you would have to reduce the maximum deployed turrets so you could put more hps on each single turret to make it a decent healing amount

Healing turrets alone are unviable, there are too many issues that crop up with them

Healer Symm is possible with healing turrets as a secondary weaker source of healing but she needs to have a main source of her healing in her base kit she can actively apply herself

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Are you being sarcastic and/or fake?

Damn. I felt so proud of myself for a couple seconds. :rofl:

I’m serious…idk what vibecheck is on about…

Oh. Okay well thank you. You’re the best :heart:

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thank god it’s not just me who understands this on the forums.

exactly, and the problem with plenty of support sym suggestions when trying to do this is that they massively change sym’s gameplay to something completely different and boring to do so (e.g. wanting to turn 1 of her weapon fires to deal healing instead of damage or of the like)

and before someone says “but they did that with the 2.0 —> 3.0 rework anyways”, no they objectively didn’t because if you try playing current sym as if her tp on e didn’t exist, you’ll see gameplay that highly resembles old sym gameplay.

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Funny that they mentioned how fast overwatch moves so she would be a slow awkward healer, but then make her into a slow awkward dps – that can’t keep up with how fast overwatch moves.

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I’m not a fan of healing turrets.
Same for healing beam and healing orbs.

This.
Most people say that she should not become a main healer. But with a healing beam she would play like one. Just like Mercy. And I don’t want to look at my team 24/7.
Just lower her healing then
No. If her healing is like 15/25/35 there’s no reason to pick her over mercy.

And healing orbs are way too inconsistent. Imagine Sym trying to hit her team mates but they move around so she misses everything and then gets blamed. Sym/Phara…oh my god.

In my opinion the only way to make a healer Sym is by using her old photon shields and make them work similar like old repair pack.

Or have the old SG and use it as a healing generator instead, with adjusted time and range limits. And healing turrets would only be a form of secondary healing.

#deletesym.

As primary healing source - absolutely not
As secondary healing source - maybe

exactly. this is why I’ve said many times before:
we can’t rework sym into a viable support AND have her still be sym.

and even if we did go this route of “set and forget” heal ability while make her as dps-y as possible to make sym a viable support, i.e. the “zen route”. at that point why don’t we just make her into a viable dps then? because to go the “zen route” legit will involve having to make her have more uptime with damaging anyways which is a large portion of her core problems rn anyways.

Couldn’t have said it better.

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