Symmetra changes that would satisfy 2.0 and 3.0 players?

General Discussion
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Many Symmetra mains (READ: people that actually play the hero a significant amount of time) believe that something was lost in the last rework; an aspect of her identity was simply discarded.

Many of us didn’t like the move to make Symmetra just a DPS hero. Funny enough, now that Symm is a damage hero, she is even more team-dependent than when she was a support hero. I would rather have buffs to Symm 2.0 than buffs to Symm 3.0

I get it. I also enjoy how Symm is a bit more viable on attack. However, I don’t think there is anything Symm does better than any of the other DPS heroes. She’s simply OK at best as a hero taking one of the damage slots.
I miss giving people shields and I don’t want Echo to take what was part of Symmetra’s identity.

I had to keep Symmetra 3.0 but still recover some of her identity, this is what I would do:

Photon Projector: Have something similar to a Moira “Soft-lock” on her primary. I really dislike how her beam is now but I can understand how some players didn’t like playing against her insta-lock mechanic before. Hopefully, this is a happy medium that isn’t auto-lock, but doesn’t require perfect tracking either. Damage numbers would be adjusted accordingly.

Her secondary fire, the Orbs, should go back to being piercing. The orbs should move faster than 2.0 but slower than 3.0

BRING BACK PHOTON SHIELD!!: As a third ability, which some heroes have too. It was one of the abilities to separate good Symmetra mains from everyone else. Experienced Symmetra players were able to block CC and ultimates with the shield. It brought an aspect of skill to the hero.

Turrets: Leave as is mostly, except bring the total amount of turrets to 4 and a slightly better cooldown.

Teleporter: Leave as is mostly, except a MUCH faster cast time/deployment time.

Ultimate: Leave Photon Barrier as is. Perhaps a faster cast time.
–BRING BACK SHIELD GENERATOR as a second ultimate option, like in 2.0.
There would be situations in which giving every teammate 75 shields would be more useful, even if was only for a team fight. Should be able to deconstruct it for a percentage of ultimate charge refunded. And Symmetra would be able to put the SG faster and in locations she never could before with having TP available as well!

CONCLUSION: Yes, I’m a Symmetra main and she is my favorite hero. No, I don’t want her to be OP, believe it or not. However, I do want her to be viable in more situations and give her something that she excels in over another hero. Please be respectful.

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As a fellow Symmetra main, I would like several of the changes you recommended. But they’re never going to listen to us. Our opinions are valid but they’re just going to dismiss us as whiners. I want several aspects of Sym’s old kit back but look at how much it took to get that slight Mercy buff/revert. With all the Sym hate out there they aren’t going to spend any more time on her. At least not for another six months, maybe. The glorious Symmetra we knew is dead…

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Unpopular opinion but I found the old Photon Barrier useless most of the time.

Like in some cases it was useful but if you manage and use TP well you shouldn’t really need protection.
How the barrier worked was also pretty bad sometimes it went too far and blocked nothing, after a certain time it was useless.

Even to block certain ults you can use yours, wall charges really fast and is totally worth the use against other ults.

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Sym 2.0 > Sym 3.0

Sorry

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Sym 3.0 is way way better than old Sym.

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The line of thinking is that in order to showcase skill, you must have aim worthy of note. This was what they were thinking when they reworked Symmetra, mainly to get rid of the no aim, no brain mentality of those Anti-Symmetra. Unfortunately, that focus has now been placed on her turrets.

I don’t want any type of lock on to come back, even though I have potato aim. I believe skill should be the determining factor between a good, and bad player. Having a lock on negates the skill gap, and can have players positioned artificially high in their rankings. Look at the multitude of threads regarding Brigitte and her artificially high placements, we don’t want more of that.

If I were to change the Photon Projector Beam, I would change it in such a way that the ramping would be linear, rather than stepped as it is currently. The longer you hold it on a target, the more damage it does. It would start at 90dps, and over the course of 2 seconds max at 180dps. It would also scale down linearly after a set amount of time.

Photon Orbs need to be sped up a bit.

I believe the reasoning behind removing the piercing mechanic, was due to the teleporter. You can now place the teleporter behind an enemy shield, and attack enemies from behind by either placing turrets through the TP, or step through with a fully charged orb and release it, and then pop back through. I would rather the projectile speed be increased another 5Mps-10Mps, so they’re easier to land further away. As it stands now, once you get outside of 20m, they’re almost worthless aside from spam damage.

Yes, please, with sugar on top. I so miss this ability. I think if we could combine the ability with turrets, and tie it to the charges, it could be a really powerful tool, and make Symmetra players have to choose between a turret, or a shield when they need it. It would be another deciding factor over a good player vs a great player, knowing when to use that shield, and when to instead use a turret. It would also give her a bit of distinction on playstyles based on an offensive or defensive role.

Have it so that you expend a turret charge to launch the shield, and another turret charge to halt the shield in place in front of your character. The shield would basically face the direction you were facing at the range you set it at until it expired, or was destroyed.

Due to the change, I would prefer that she have 4 turrets in pocket, but only 3 deployable, so you’d always either be able to replace a destroyed turret, or utilize a shield when 3 are deployed

Sadly, they’re not going to do this. It doesn’t matter how much we ask for it, they’re removing the bolstering of team hitpoints. They don’t want games to drag on, they don’t want engagements to drag on, and they don’t want to put those characters in a ‘must pick’ scenario on defense. I get the reasoning, it’s not fun to watch one team bash their head against an impenetrable wall for 5 minutes after capping a point.

This… We need it. The TP as an escape tool isn’t very useful currently. As a hero with no escape tools, no get out of jail cards, I believe this ability should be sped up to allow us the opportunity to get out of an untenable scenario.

I’m a Symmetra main, and even I don’t want to see her get put into a spot where she’ll get nerfed almost immediately after she’s buffed. It would have been nice initially, but since we’re already suffering, I’d rather see her brought in line with where she should have been from the start.

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Yeah, I agree. But you know, you can easily spot good Moira and bad Moira, even aim wise. Let’s be honest here, not even pros have 100% aim on Moira. It is there because Moira has resource meter and self regeneration associated with her weapon. Making it pinpoint accurate would hurt her healing and survivability. It would make her healing inconsistent. Even Ana has a little more forgiving hitbox when healing allies compared to damaging enemies, just so that she can be more effective in healing. I bet if Moira’s weapon wasn’t tied to her healing potential, I am sure it would be much more mechanicly demanding.

When it comes to Symmetra, then I already said everything in my rework analysis.

What would get ME satisfied is to keep her original playstyle, and make her use off-healer slot in team, either with healing, or better, with a lot of shielding. Symmetra has no chance to win a fight for slots with 15 other DPSes. She would need to be OP to do that.

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I’m afraid you’re right. I mean, Symmetra was changed into her 2.0 and 3.0 forms, not just because of the statistics, but because of player feedback.

However, it did take them over a year to make such changes to the hero. I’m not holding my breathe that such changes will happen anytime soon, nor am I hopeful that Blizzard will actually acknowledge and respond to Symmetra mains’ concerns. But I do want to keep steam behind the Symmetra community because she is my favorite hero. I want to make it impossible for Blizzard to ignore us, even if they choose to never reply.

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It is there because it can only ever do a maximum of 50dps. That is why she’s allowed a cone shaped beam for her life leech.

Giving that to Symmetra but with a beam that could do 180dps would be OP. You know this.

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I actually assumed it’s obvious that if they made it more mechanically demanding they would make her dmg higher. And the other way around.

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But they did. They made the potential damage number higher. (Now, we both know those potential numbers are there just for the sake of offsetting the average players aim, to make it roughly equivalent of the beam it used to be)

Honestly, if they’d change the weapon to behave like Zarya’s 5.5 ticks per second, instead of the 20ticks per second mechanic it has now, we’d see lots more use against armored targets. Now, if they have shield health, I’m just going to orb them to death.

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I had a lot of playtime on 2.0 and wanted a rework every minute of it. I’ve played even more of 3.0 and see the rework as a clear improvement, and really can’t understand why people dispute that. There are still so many fundamental misunderstandings of 3.0’s kit - especially by 2.0 mains, seems to me.

For example, Symmetra 3.0 is not “just a DPS hero.” She’s a utility DPS (in that order) along with Sombra and Mei. “Support” these days just means consistent external healing, which Symmetra never had. Utility, by definition, has more potential with team coordination, but coordination is not “necessary” if utility DPS actively play around their team instead of counting on the reverse.

Moira’s so-called soft lock is just a visual effect to illustrate her beam being thicker than it appears. A thicker beam wouldn’t break Symmetra, but it’s unnecessary with good tracking against the correct targets — i.e. not small and mobile targets unless the beam is already charged.

Lowering orb speed for barrier pierce is a bad trade. The orbs need their speed to continue being the best combat tool Symmetra has ever had at close- and mid-range, and remain usable at long range.

The turrets are already strong as hell. If anything, they just need a better deployment system for which ones get replaced.

Teleporter does not need to be faster. It’s fast enough for escapes and preemptive repositions with any foresight at all, which is a skill requirement. Symmetra does not need a reactive escape tool on top of all her peeling tools.

If Symmetra is underpowered in the first place, she is definitely not so underpowered that she needs a whole second ultimate, and Photon Barrier is more engaging and useful than Shield Generator.

Symmetra excels at creating and exploiting positioning advantages for her team and restricting the positioning of the other team. This is useful in every matchup unless the entire enemy team has high mobility. Last season I practically one-tricked Symmetra to upper Platinum with a 70% winrate, and matchups only forced me to switch in maybe 1/5 games. I have yet to see compelling evidence that she’s underpowered.

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The problem is, the charge up time worked somewhat decent because it was lock on. Now it’s not lock on and still charging up. And that is just insane. They even made this problem bigger because they made the difference in damage between levels even bigger AND made it take longer to level up. It’s like they never saw the problem this weapon had, outside of lock-on.

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Infinite loop forever

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Agreed.

I would have been much happier if they’d just settled on a median number and left it a static damage rate with no ramp up at all. At least then, it would be useful in all situations in which it was designed to be used, within 12m.

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Projector needs a buff, not a lock. Moira’s attack isn’t a lock either.
Orbs you want the best of both worlds. Having an orb that damages over 100, pierce and a good speed is unviable.
Photon shield was… Interesting, but not ideal. I like more the ideas of shield recovering with her primary over Photon Shield.
4 turrets will make people just spam them even more instead of thinking carefully about their placement. Also 4 turrets would make enemies pretty much unable to move.
Teleporter needs a fix on placement. Deploy time is fine.
Ultimate don’t need a change.
Shield Generator was nice, yes, but 2 ults is too much.

You say you don’t want her to be OP, but asks the opposite of that by asking her to have double ult, one skill more than all heroes and a buff in basically every aspect of hers.
She excels on creating alternative paths, on making a push little by little, by making your enemies turn back to deal with turrets OR ignore and keep focus on the enemies, on forcing alternative routes for the enemies, on fully blocking the long ranged foes, specially Widowmakers.

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One of the things that I most like about Symmetra is the new Photon Projector.
I would prefer a nerf to the damage and a buff to the biuld-up time, but still being a beam.

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Beam is what makes me puke about it. I dislike how I can’t tell its range or whether I hit something or not as clearly as before. Also where’s my picking up stuff function gone.

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Ohh that picking up stuff function I DO miss… Now we only have the slow attraction of Moira attack.

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Yudae, I entirely disagree. And no, I don’t want her OP. Tell me, what does Symmetra do better than any other hero? I can answer that question for every other hero.
I have played Symmetra since day 1 and had to deal playing with her during Symmetra 1.0 days because I loved the hero.

Some players love the way Symmetra is now? Fine, that’s your opinion. I don’t bash people for liking her now. However, as a long-time Symmetra main, I felt that something has been lost in Symmetra’s current form.

ORBS: I didn’t want the BEST of both worlds. Orbs in 2.0 were garbage outside of choke spam because they were WAYYYYY too slow. I just wanted them slightly faster.

TP: By most long-term Symm mains’ assessment, TP DOES take too long to deploy for the quick escapes and plays it was remade for.

Turrets: The cooldown is too long to be useful during a teamfight.

PHOTON SHIELD: Was useful…if you were a capable Symmetra player. Symmetra mains were able to block CC, ultimates, spam damage, etc. It worked, if you knew how to use it and not just spam it at the enemy. -_-

BTW, Actually a few heroes in this game have 3 abilities, so…wrong?
Ultimates: 2 is NOT too much. Having two ultimates weren’t enough for Symm 2.0 to be super viable. And no one complained that Symmetra’s two ults were OP. Quite the opposite, actually.

Symmetra doesn’t excel in anything right now. Good Symmetra players make her work (because they like her and they know how to use her kit), but she is never ideal is a specific situation over annother hero. TPing your turrets is fun and gimmicky sometimes, but not a viable playstyle :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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