Symmetra players, help me understand

I think the responses you’re seeing to the Sym rework are heavily biased and skewed towards the negative because the Sym players that like the rework aren’t as frequently vocal on the forums about liking it in comparison to the players that don’t like it.

Personally, I’m satisfied with this rework and excited about what Sym 3.0 will bring to the game - which I believe will be A LOT. Are there a few things that are disappointing with the rework? Sure, overall though I think it’s a step in the right direction.

I believe her new projectile sentries, agile teleporter, and photon barrier ult will REALLY help Sym shape the landscape of every map, and affect every engagement in a fun, fresh, and complex way. I will admit, that I’m not entirely excited by her new primary fire, especially since it seems to be either buggy or useless at the moment. Even in description it sound like it’d only be useful against tanks, and even then, only applicable against tanks with shields. I’m also not a fan of the fact that she lost her personal barrier.

Yeah, in the beginning maybe. Then once the enemy sees you have attack Sym on Hanamura it’ll be “oh they’re gonna come through the window” and boom. People thinking her tp won’t be as easy to shut down as the rest of her kit has always been is temporary. Wait for people to adjust and she will once again be considered a troll pick that sees virtually no use.

She can already make chokes pointless on attack, she just has to do it with an ult. “She can do it every 10 seconds now” isn’t a good argument either. If Sym is doing a backdoor TP on live, the enemy team doesn’t know it or that Sym is behind them until the TP goes down. By the time the enemy team collects themselves and goes to the point, your whole team is already there capping.

Tell me why I should be impressed by TP as an ability every 10 seconds when she can already move her whole team an infinite distance across the map from spawn.

She’ll still be niche. She still won’t be as useful as other actual DPS heroes. There will still be OTPs playing her exclusively despite being hard countered, and people will still consider her a trollpick and despise her as a result.

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Deliberately doing stupid things and hoping the enemy doesn’t notice, e.g. flank teles, car wash over the enemy spawn, somehow getting into the backline.

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Because Symmetra 3.0 is generally negative

Which will get shut down super quick when everyone gets used to it enough to shoot the giant glowing beacon that just appeared on the ground

A 15 second barrier instead of a hefty shield for everyone/ a way to avoid having to consistently walk back from spawn every death

Yay

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Actually, Hanamura isn’t a Sym tele map. Things are too open, ranges are just a bit too far, and approach options are too limited. Maybe on point B to take the entire attacking team around the left side flank, but that’s it.

Volskya is going to be, IMO, the Symmetra map. Both points have multiple approaches, and she’ll open up a few new ones that don’t usually get used very much and don’t have good sight lines from the normal defense spots.

Nepal is going to be another good one as all three maps have decent teleporter targets. In village you can use it to access Genji’s room and attack the point from the second floor with your whole team. In sanctum you can use it to access the middle outside platform and come in on the flank (with some heroes being able to easily flank around to the other team’s spawn approach).

Shrine is probably the worst map for Sym as the area around the point is very, very open. But there are still a few areas where you can use terrain to block LoS long enough for your entire team to dogpile a tele and come in on a flank.

Anubis should prove entertaining as a left-side flank with Sym opens up the rear point approach through the top windows if your pharah, hanzo, or widowmaker can clear any snipers or Genjis off of the left side rooftop.

The big point is that she has zero competition for this mechanic. If you want team-wide mobility that goes beyond lucio, you’ll need a sym. Most teams won’t be able to use her effectively. But the ones that do will win.

…and that’s not going to stop just after a week since it’s not just one approach that her teleporter opens up. If it’s a sym map, we’re talking 2-3 per map, per point depending on how coordinated your team is and how inventive you are.

If you are talking about the same survey I’m thinking about, there is two things you need to consider there before making that claim.

First, is that the survey asked more about each specific individual change that went through. So, there are people that dislike the rework as a whole, but is ok with some aspects of the rework. Eg, I myself am not found of the rework, but I like the new turrets (after they actually raised its damage/slow), and I think the ultimate have potential to be awesome.

Second, that the same survey was sent to the main sub, and that survey was a lot more positive than the one that collected responses from the Symmetra mains sub.

Third, that this survey was sent before we were able to test them out on the PTR. It was mostly a popularity contest with the description only. Many things changed between Geoff’s talking about the rework, and what we have on PTR right now. Eg, we were promised a “large and thick beam”, which is why so many people agree with the changes. I can guarantee no one was expecting a two feet increase in range, and requiring Zarya level of aiming (people were expecting Moira-level of aiming).

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Um, because on live the rest of your team has to die and you have to rambo a stealth mission alone. It’s difficult, risky, easy to screw up, prone to random flights of Genji, and can be easily called out by anyone with a brain who can count.

Why is the new teleporter better? Because you can use it from your team’s position without needing CS:GO Knife-Kill enabling level tunnel vision from the enemy team.

If the live tele was worth even a tenth of what you think it is, we’d see it in OWL.

We don’t, because it’s a cheeky meme strat for when your opponents aren’t paying attention. It’s not an actual strat that wins games.

I wanted to like the old Symmetra, back when she got her first rework. But I didn’t. And, as someone who likes Symmetra as a character, I won’t miss Sym 2.0 one bit. “She feels too much like a new hero”, you say? Fine by me. I’d rather have a good hero than a terrible-but-fun hero.

Also…

But… But Symmetra’s a Damage hero herself! Gaaah, this forum makes me angry!

(Not racist, but you get the idea)

I heartily agree that a lot of Symmetra effectiveness relies on the enemy doing stupid things. It just impress me how many stupid players are around, that she can be so effective when you properly read the match flow, and bait them on.

That is simply what you have to do as Symmetra on attack because Attack and Defense Sym are two different playstyles. Yes, normally you’d do Shield Gen, but if that’s not helping your team push the choke, the backdoor TP works like 90% of the time. I’ve played this hero since launch, and the only time it doesn’t work is when you’re spotted or when your team just funnels onto the point and dies.

At higher elos the people that have this competence and communication you speak of are people that typically dive the Teleporter immediately after it’s placed (usually a lone Dva but maybe with a Tracer/Genji), which forces the enemy to fight where your team has an advantage. Yes, to an extent it is a meme strat, but everyone is cocky when it comes to attack Sym. Of course you wouldn’t see Sym strats in OWL because Sym is terrible and not viable. How can you not see the “tp your Bastion/Orisa onto the chandeliers in Eichenwaldes castle lel” as a meme strat?

You listed many examples of “Sym” maps with this rework. You’ve noticed all of these spots that would be good for the new Teleporter, which is exactly what every Sym player does with every single map with both of her ults currently. And then the enemy learns them. And then they aren’t as useful anymore.

That’s what I’m talking about. That’s why Symmetra 3.0 is not as good as you really think she is. Teamwide mobility and Sym 3.0s kit seems strong on paper, but even Sym 2.0s kit seems strong on paper. In practice, she’s the weakest and most easily countered hero in the game. That is also what this rework hasn’t addressed. In fact, she’s lost many heroes she soft countered. No autolock for Genji, no pierce for Rein/Orisa/Brig/Bastion/Torb, no shield gen to counter Hanzo headshots or armor synergy to counter Widow.

I could go on, but people can’t see what is plain as day. Blizzard has given Symmetra a new kit that offers roughly the same amount of value and are expecting it to somehow save the heroes terrible reputation and place in the game and it probably isn’t going to work.

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That remains to be seen. She could require buffs and her tele could be useless.

However, I’m betting that there is an economy of attention that will be abusable at the highest levels, and simply won’t be present at the lower ones in sufficient quantity to counter it all the time (everything should be counterable and the tele is no different).

Enemy teams can learn her tele points? So what? People learned the Widowmaker nest points a long time ago and she still gets work done (hell, she’s OP ATM).

Knowledge is less than 20% of the game. Most of it is execution. It’s not going to matter if they know where you can put your teleporter as long as you don’t let them know which one you’re going to use before hand and your team is grouped up and spamming the “interact” key as you place it. I mean, the #1 benefit of the new teleporter is the simple fact that travel through it doesn’t expose you to the enemy which will allow for some nice flanking setup with a minimum of warning since they won’t be able to see you run across the intervening terrain.

I might be (and probably am) giving it too much credit, but you are definitely not giving it enough.

Well I am a GM/Top500 symm main and these are my thoughts. Having to aim is offset by the increased dmg so im fine with that. My main problems with it are that shield gen is gone so RIP. Honestly loved that ability and thought it was really fun. My second problem is that I don’t like the ult. If they couldn’t walk through it I would like it. Honestly my only complaints.

I personally LOVE her rework. Only gripes I have with it are her M1 having little visual indicator of if you’re dealing damage/ within range or not and her ultimate being easily bypassed.

Luckily I have a solution to it; Bring back her old m1 animation where if you’re not hitting anything the energy sorta flails everywhere, which also allows us to pick up the basketball like old times.

Her ult is pretty good, however I’m up for a ult charge increase so we can make each panel of the barrier shatter and deal damage while slowing enemies to punish enemies for daring to walk through it.

they r mad because symettra has to aim now.

she used to be able to kill you with her crosshair 5 feet away from her enemy target.

it was insanely op and lets be honest didnt really require any skill or thought.

What I like about Sym 2.0 is trying to predict the enemy team’s positioning and setting up traps to get in their way. With half as many turrets that’s reduced and I’m finding it more rewarding to just try to throw turrets behind the foe from afar. There’s less reason to be trying to anticipate where the enemy will be compared to throwing them where they are.

What I liked about the auto-aim was that it dealt with intruders quickly but with the short range, it was very dangerous for Sym to get too aggressive. Sym 2.0 was a spider spinning a web but 3.0 doesn’t have that quality.

Plus, the new primary fire is terrible. It doesn’t give a visual input that tells you you’re hitting the target… which IMO is a problem because it looks like it has the range of Zarya’s beam but it doesn’t.

Huh. Interesting. Thanks for sharing that! Maybe that will change how underwhelming the ult feels among ults.

Alright, here goes. Four things.

Orderly, Disciplined Play

I’m a Starcraft player. One of the things you learn in Starcraft is the idea of playing “safely.” “Safe” play is play that seeks to avoid risks. You seek to give yourself some room for error, and win over the long haul rather than rolling the dice and hoping for a home run. If you are improvement-oriented, randomness is your enemy over the long term.

Symmetra epitomizes this style to me. I hear people talk about how she can’t carry, and I think, “Don’t you have a CoD game to go join?” I don’t want to carry, I want to win. In the vast majority of my games I’m astonished at how reckless my teammates are—trying to facetank chokes as Junkrat, etc. They’ll kamikaze Bastions, die, and then have the nerve to tell me that I’m throwing.

The autoaim goes well with this theme. “Who would want a gun that could miss?” Sym would say. “What kind of fool would take that chance?”

There’s a Magic:the Gathering card, Null Rod, that stops other cards from working. The flavor text on it is something like:

Gerard: But it doesn’t do anything!
Hanna: No—it does nothing.

Sym isn’t so much about “doing things” as she is about saying “No” to the enemy. No, you cannot go through this choke. No, you cannot dance around for twenty minutes killing my Mercy. No, you cannot stop us from coming through this choke. No, you cannot snowball one lucky pick into a teamwipe. No, you cannot sit there behind that shield.

Now, I’ll admit: she also says “No” to allies as well. No, I can’t dive with you. No, I can’t shoot down that Pharah. No, I can’t heal you.

Order and discipline? Who wants that? They’re playing a game to get away from that, right?

Well, sorry. Competitive gaming is going to demand that of you eventually.

What I wish they’d understand is that the stability and control Sym offers allows you to do much wackier things if you work within her framework. Want to leverage attack Bastion? Sym can make a nest for him. Want to go triple-tank + Reaper? Teleporter will make that extremely scary. Want to run three flankers with Halo shields? Photon Orb will keep the enemy separated so you can get 1v1’s, and Shield Gen will help you win them.

People complain about games feeling coinflippy and swingy. “How do I climb” is the title of every third post on /r/OverwatchUniversity. It’s not even that people are “bad,” they have no clue what “good” even looks like. Well, a big step in the right direction would be playing a few hundred hours of Sym, Torb, Orisa, or Ana and getting frustrated at how your allies can’t seem to just chill.

Vision

I’ve made Sym sound like a fairly joyless character to play, always saying “No” to people. But this isn’t the case. Sym is all about looking at the battlefield and imagining what it could be. In a way you’re not even playing a shooter, you’re building a castle of harmony. And, well, this is fun, just as blowing things up with Junk is fun, zipping around as Tracer is fun, and roleplaying Robot Invasion as Bastion is fun.

This “castle of harmony” business is one of the things I find sorely deficient about the rework. Symmetra lives in her head—in this intellectual, abstract, architectural, theoretical realm. Playing her is like designing a plane, or playing Factorio(h ttps://store.steampowered.com/app/427520/Factorio/), or writing code. Can you imagine if, while programming, several lines of code disappeared after ten seconds? What the hell? And this is how I feel about E teleporter and Q Photon Barrier. These are one-off tricks, not building for the long haul. They’re so…hacky. They’d feel more natural on Sombra. And the Sombra/Symmetra dyad is one of my favorite in the game—Sym seeks to create systems, and Sombra seeks to break them. I love playing both of them, for exactly opposite reasons.

Probably the best feeling as Sym is when your team has done well enough that the enemy team is under time pressure and starts throwing themselves at the point. It seems like she’s doing work at this point, but actually all the work was done 20-30 seconds ago, and this is where you’re reaping the reward. The time interval between the two explains a lot of the “Schrodinger’s hero” phenomenon where allies think she’s throwing and enemies think she’s OP.

Macro Power

All this “order” and “discipline” stuff is pointless if it doesn’t lead to some whammo effect. And TP/SG are definitely that. The last piece of the system, the part that makes it complete, is Sym’s ult. Powerful, subtle, stationary, and beautiful. It adds a strategic layer to the game, forcing players to think at a larger scale than a single teamfight. If they don’t—if they’re “trapped within their own minds”—then they’ll be unable to break through the forever regenerating shield HP, or they’ll fight endless waves of teleported enemies.

This macro level is a good thing. It makes Overwatch a deeper game, and opens up alternate styles of play.

A Principled Stand for Teamplay

Sym is an engineer. She’s not meant to be some 1v1 goddess. I have no patience for the idea that “her 1v1/mobility is terrible, therefore she is terrible.” FFA deathmatch is right over there for those who want to be 1v1 gods. By being the exact opposite of a “combatant” — slow, squishy, low-range — Sym is a, err, Sym-bol that Overwatch is about more than “Imma carry u nubs.” The talk I hear about “low-skill auto-aim char” and “low skill ceiling” only reinforces my suspicion that the main body of criticism she gets is coming from short-sighted, individualistic players. Why should I care what they think of her, except that somehow they seem to have gotten Blizz’s ear?

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Because I enjoy her being a more side line non-healing support, they’re making her too active to play. If I want to play active there are tons of heroes to choose from, but non-healer supports? Soon won’t even exist.

It’s nearly impossible for them to properly balance Sym 2.0’s kit without causing major issues. That’s one of the reasons why they changed her primary from a lock on to a straight beam, since they just couldn’t give her the damage buff she needed without changing how it worked. With that said, I feel like it shouldn’t have become a fully straight beam, and should’ve been changed to be similar to Moira’s, but that’s just me.

Four major, simple reasons.

  1. A lot of Sym players have hand problems. Even if they don’t, M1 requires too much aim (especially because of the tick increase) for what it rewards. Even high-ranked Syms that got to where they are using insane M1 tracking aren’t bothering with it. It’s simply not really worth using over M2. Dropping the tick rate drastically should help considerably.
  2. No Photon to protect herself. Effectively a melee hero with 200 HP. Second lowest EHP in the game (and everyone apart from her and Torb can survive drastically longer). Further pushes the point of M1 not worth using since it makes using it even riskier.
  3. The new ult is just hella boring.
  4. You can no longer pick up corpses.
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This is beautiful. Thank you for writing that.