I feel like ‘healing turrets’ has an unmitigated vicegrip on all conversations about symmetra as a support, and when that idea inevitably didn’t work in practice everyone gave up.
I’ve been a proponent of symmetra making a return to the support role as someone who applies a moderate duration overhealth to allies, in a similar fashion to her original function/zarya bubble/brigs old armor packs. This would gain ult charge for her when it actually blocks incoming damage before it expires. The net result, I would theorize, is a support that provides similar sustain in fights as a healer, but is thematically appropriate for someone that does not mend wounds biotically. It also opens the door to a core support gameplay loop around prediction instead of reaction.
However on review i notice that they have tried to get most support applied bonus health out of the game. Is this because it stuffs with the balance of squishy characters like tracer who are tuned around their own personal sustain?
(also would it be overloaded to give symmetra a scroll-wheel second weapon like mercy/torb to access her support abilities [yes, dammit])
Final question to people who want sym to stay dps, why? is it her unique way of throughputting damage? or do you think her kit will lose too much in order to facilitate the basic functions of a support?
Both. And even if she keeps let’s say TP, she would just become even more of a Taxi
(Oh and healing as sym would feel so out of place, like in that experimental)
This can easily be done by bringing her photon shields back and rework them into an active ability.
I don’t know why people rage about additional health but raw healing is okay. In the end it’s the same.
The concept of Symmetra as a support struggles in general with the fact that, by design, any support in the game needs a high-effective-range on-demand way to heal. I’m down for Blizzard to try tossing Overhealth onto that somehow, but that kind of healing is the bare minimum for a Support - everything else they do needs to exist alongside that.
The argument to keep her as a DPS exists for two primary reasons:
She’s always dealt damage. Reworks have just moved her further away from direct team-support abilities & she’s never gained proper healing such that she can’t function in the Support role.
It’s going to be extremely difficult to keep her concept functioning at all if she has to support on top of it.
Symmetra 2.0 was clever in the sense that all of her abilities could be used to enable and support her teammates, but they were primarily usable by her to enable her own functions. This is the only way that the relationship between Symmetra’s abilities and her primary weapon (with her extremely limited beam/orbs, which struggle to do much without her abilities working with them) can effectively function.
How is Symmetra going to keep that and be able to heal? Furthermore, how might she retain some of her core identities in her abilities alongside that? A shield, a teleporter, and turrets have existed in each of her reworks consistently. Shields can’t heal - only 1.0’s shield really has potential function for healing, but the fact that Symmetra can’t use them to help herself would make it hard for her to function. Her Teleporter is much too slow to heal, and we’ve already worked out that turrets aren’t going to be effective for the job. Something, essentially, has got to give to make room for healing. Whatever it is needs to be very cleverly designed.
This is plausible but ultimately probably puts too much in her kit. As much as I’d love to see Symmetra’s teleporter be cast right from her gun like a portal gun both that function and having a second weapon would likely be too complex for the game.
It’s because every time they rework her they never tackle her biggest issue being how slow & inconsistent her kit is. Honestly just revert the nerfs they gave to her Primary Fire & increase the projectile speed on her Secondary Fire from 25 to 30 & she’d immediately bump from a C-tier to a B-Tier hero on the latter.
Sorry, I think there’s a reason they took it out.
Overshields are reserved for the role of Tank now, as it should be.
Brig has it built into her kit as the tank/healer, but if you add another you’re going to start defining a meta.
In all iterations of live Symmetra, she has been support/dps. Her turrets are there to slow enemies to make them easier to hit, while providing ancillary damage at the same time. Her Teleporter enables teammates who lack vertical mobility a means to get to high ground. Her alt fire works as area denial, and her primary beam is meant to punish shields, and capitalize on out of position enemies.
This has always been the case, when the teleporter wasn’t meant to ferry teammates back into the action from spawn. The core functionality of her playstyle really hasn’t changed much from those fundamentals.
Putting her into a healing role would vastly alter her playstyle, which is why I’m an opponent of that, however I’m not against adding more utility to her kit in order to provide balance in other areas where she is deficient.
I think it’s obvious in OW2, the pace of the game is much too fast in order to allow for charge up mechanics. Delays are death in OW2, and those mechanics were necessary in OW1 to maintain balance. Now that there are no shields to hide behind for the most part, and fewer players, there are less distractions and less sources to get the beam to full strength. Charge mechanics need to be completely removed from her kit, or at least give her some kind of Sojourn treatment to charge alt fire off primary fire, or something similar.
Idk how a support sym would work. It would have to be yet another complete rework.
I’d imagine her providing bubbles/shields to protect allies from damage but that would just make her zarya. And she already has a zarya like beam.
She would still need some sort of healing imo. All the suggestions I’ve seen though from people have all just been weird awkward ideas and I haven’t seen anything I like.
I like her as a dps simply because I like to do damage and play aggressive. I can make it work but it’s rarely ever ideal. Tp for a dps is nice in theory, teleport around the map or into backlines and do damage. The problem is there’s no point in teleporting into fights if you don’t have the tools to survive it/get kills fast enough. So if they want to make her a more viable DPS I think a slight rework is necessary.
But I think the most important thing for me personally is that I like builder heroes and I want her to remain one. It’s just builders haven’t been able to get a proper balance/be good enough to be meta. Which is disappointing. Stationary constructs will be even harder to get value out of in the fast pace of 5v5.
Symmetra as a non-healing, Green HP support won’t work as having characters like Tracer have 50 or more on any standard ability will create Must-pick comps. We are trying to avoid that.
Symmetra works as a DPS because that was here actual setup since the beginning and it thematically makes sense. It seems obvious she was shoehorned into the Support role on release since the support Roster was abysmally small.