Symmetra rework rant

General Discussion
16

She is my favorite character and i have the most fun with her. Your descriptions are from the enemy perspective and yeah its probably not fun getting destroyed by a character that you think is so terrible.

SG is easy and has nothing to do with your team. TP is not that great except for clutch attack on capture and hold maps.

Actually its lifesaving for you and your team, and was one of the only things that makes her viable against character like Soldier, or even Dva with the new rockets.

…

Lets say they decided to make some changes to Overwatch. They change every character. They change the Lore. They change the potential compositions. They change all the abilities. And more.

Are you going to say… hey i love change this all sounds great. Or are you going to say… thats all great but now this is nothing like Overwatch. Cant i keep playing Overwatch and you offer this new game separately?

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17

They reworked her entirely because her kit and playstyle don’t fit in Overwatch. They could give her all the QoL changes and buffs they wanted, but there would never be a state of balance. Without a total rework, she would either be just as situational and non-impactful as ever, or so oppressive that she’s not fun.

They haven’t “deleted” Symmetra. They have given her kit a makeover. Big difference. Instead of being a lock-on beam, her beam will be more like Moira’s, where it has a wide and forgiving radius, but if the person leaves that radius, it stops hurting them. Her secondary fire is still a charged orb, it just moves faster and explodes instead of piercing barriers. It’s not like they gave her a shotgun. It’s the same weapon, just with a slightly different function.

All of her abilities are derivatives of her previous kit, just adjusted to suit the fast-paced style of Overwatch. The reason why she is so difficult to get value on attack is that the team moves up faster than she can set up turrets. With the new changes, she can set up forward turrets to start claiming space, rather than reinforcing already-claimed space.

I think you should wait to play her before making your judgement. I’d put money on her feeling like the old Symmetra, just with better reach and impact, instead of an entirely new hero.

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18

I felt the same way about mercy and how sad I was that they were ripping her apart.
That said, symmetra is trash and does need these changes.
Sending you positive vibes, I’m sorry this had to happen <3

19

I did. Its at the end of the post under “What they should have done”

20

Maybe they tried to just up her stats and it didn’t playtest right?

21

I did a big list in the proper topic:

Also, I literally do not care if she don’t get picked at OWL. I care about playing the game, and it being a fun character, not to watch other people playing it on twitch. And since we do have Symmetra players at top 500 in all seasons, that is more than enough proof to me that its possible to climb to the top with her.

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22

You haven’t played the new symm therefore your argument is invalid.

Also, heaven forbids you actually have to aim now… If you don’t want to put effort into aiming then first person shooters are not for you. End of discussion.

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23

You can give feedback on concepts before playing them. While some specific stuff like “this weapon numbers are too high” might be changed when we experiment them in the game, the main issue people are complaining isn’t relative to the power of each individual new ability. It has to do with changing every single one of Sym’s ability. There is no other way to look at this than they deleting Sym and giving her cosmetics to Sanjay.

I mean, Mercy have the harsher rework before this trainwreck, but more than half of her kit is pretty much untouched from that change. Symmetra is going to be three or four times worse than Mercy.

And all that is regardless if Sanjay will be fun and balanced. It’s about the principle of the thing.

Discord Orbs, Harmony Orbs, Tactical Visor, Deadeye, Mercy staff, Moira healing mist, all melee heroes (Reinhardt, Brigitte, Genji with blade), Winston… Will we remove all that as well?

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25

Why do you struggle against your fate?

26

This game is more like Chess than it is Call of Duty. If you dont understand that, you will never understand our arguments about Sym.

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31

That’s not “changing”, that’s basically making an entirely new game out of some old assets.

The truth of the matter is this: Symmetra is unpopular. The statistics don’t lie: according to overlog.gg, 0.65% of players choose Symmetra in their matches. That ranks in at 22 out of 27 heroes, right down there alongside the likes of Doomfist and Sombra (She’s technically ahead of Brigitte, but there isn’t enough data on her to make a judgment on where she’s at). She isn’t fun to play as (except for a select few people) and she isn’t fun to play against.

So, Blizzard is seeking to fix this. I’ve always wanted to play Symmetra, but I’ve never really felt like her kit was fun to play…and dealing with her was a chore.

Change isn’t bad. Reserve judgment until you’ve actually had a chance to play it.

32

I can’t help but think people are taking the “Zarya beam” too literally. They said she would have a very forgiving hitbox beam. That makes me think more like Moira than Zarya.

Zarya requires pinpoint traking. Moira requires loose tracking. Symmetra requires very loose tracking.

I imagine they’ll just make a more forgiving Moira beam that doesn’t stay latched around corners/out of range.

Just wait until it’s on the ptr. The devs even said that these changes weren’t set in stone.

33

You know, that part I bolded in your statement made me think…

Symmetra, Mei, Bastion and Torb are all “useless” heroes that have one common characteristic, that goes against that statement. All of them forces either the enemy or their team to slow down a bit. And that may be the problem here, the conflicting points of view of those players.

When people pick Genji or Tracer, they don’t want to sit down and wait until Bastion is moved into position. They want to rush in as fast as possible, and that her team setup in the same speed, so they all can jump at the enemy team at the first possible moment.

However, when people pick Symmetra, they are looking at the long term game. Her orbs chip the enemy away. Her turrets hold the enemy at bay, which minimizes “unexpected” (aka, “exciting”) flankers jumping into the back for a surprise attack. And she only really start bringing her top game when she earns her ultimate and place it down. Granted, she earns it really fast if that Sym player knows what they are doing, but usually it take around 20~40 seconds to earn it. And that is a long time for a Winston to hold up on his desire to jump into the enemy team and wreck havoc.

It’s like comparing tournament chess with speed chess. Technically, they are the same game, but the way to approach both rulesets are different.

Some players want Overwatch to be a very fast-paced game (and OWL seems to follow that line). Some players want to play the strategic aspect of the game, and work with the ability match-ups, mind games, team strategy in general, and don’t mind taking their sweet time to study the situation and playing a patience game to win in the long run.

Heck, yesterday I was playing with my friend attacking Volskaya, and I asked them to regroup and actually said “wait until Soldier appear in the high ground to shoot at us, and let’s pick him”. And just as predicted, the enemy Soldier overextended, got picked, and we took the point after that. Had the Soldier stick with his team looking over the point, it would be harder for us to jump at the point and take it. We predicted that because he did the exact same thing the last time we regrouped to attack instead of trickling in.

Symmetra is a character that highly punishes when the enemy team play as a bunch of lone wolves, but suffer when there is enough coordination to focus targets. That is the main reason why she don’t see OWL time.

It have nothing to do with her turrets. It have nothing to do with her gun. It have nothing to do with her ults. It’s because once people get coordinated and play together, Sym’s kit is easily avoidable.

And the saving grace of the character for the people who play her for the last two years is that ladder is a wrecking mess, and will always be, if Blizzard don’t create incentives for people to form actual teams. That’s why she works on ladder. That’s why people hate her (usually those “lone wolf” type of players). And that’s also why I love playing her, because of all the shutdown potential she have when I win by outsmarting them instead of trying to win in the crosshair battle that I never will have hope of winning.

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34

Yeah… Tell me about it! :confused:

35

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Symmetra’s new kit actually enhances this strategic playstyle, thanks to her Teleporter as a natural ability: able to Tele-flank on a regular basis, get to creative locations for a surprise microwave, and coordinate ults to pull of creative victories.

36

And Jeff already pointed out that even if they rework her, they don’t expect her pick rate to highly raise, she is supposed to be a niche hero. Not someone that everyone enjoys.

Subjective.

For instance, I find Widowmaker and McCree to the two most boring heroes in the entire game, because of how flat their kits are. I enjoy versatile heroes with tons of moving parts, that can mix and match all the aspects of their kits into many formations. Symmetra is the most versatile one on this regard. Sombra, Torbjorn, Orisa and Ana are also close enough at the top of my list.

You have your favorite heroes. I have mines. Everyone else have theirs. As long as some players find the current kit of any hero “fun to play” (and its not literally bugged, like Doomfist rocket punch size at launch), there is nothing wrong with enjoying your hero, no matter how few people pick them.

Name one hero that is fun to play against that is not someone that your main directly counter. Do you smile in glee when you get caught into a Graviton Surge? When Red Doomfist throw you around like a ragdoll? When Surprise Reinhardt charges you out of nowhere? When Ana sleeps you? When Hanzo headshots you out of nowhere?

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37

There is a lot of stuff we don’t know about Sanjay’s portal before we can pass judgement on that.

If it requires Sanjay to cast the same base Symmetra do now, it will be mostly an out-of-battle repositioning tool, probably closer to a team-wide Shadow Step than something that people will use mid-battle. Especially because Geoff already said the TP base will have 300 HP, so its destructible. Leaving one of the entrances in the middle of the fight is not a smart idea.

If it is fast-casting, and maybe changed to be much more resilient (or actually invulnerable), it might works like Medivh’s portal in HotS. And if you have ever played Medivh, you know the most common criticisms about how his portal works.

I’m perfectly fine with testing how the teleporter would work as an ability, but you need to keep in mind it also have the potential to just be a glorified Mei wall. Remember that the pros usually start with Mei in Anubis to boost Orisa to the high ground of Point A, then rush back and switch. I can see it being used a lot like that. High ground is good, but the important part that makes heroes like D.va and Genji valuable at maps with multiple high grounds are their ability to drop down and go back to top pretty much at will.

As I said, we have very little data on the portal before we can say anything on how effective it will be.

But what I can say that will severely reduce her options can be summed up in three aspects:

  • She have less turrets to place around. Turrets were not really used for their damaging features, it was used to force the enemy to turn around to destroy them. A turret that deal double damage is WEAKER than two turrets split apart. That is true both for Symmetra and Torb.
  • Her current ultimates creates a secondary objective point for the enemy team to attack, and your team can exploit that. They are powerful enough that if you leave them unattended, they will turn the tables against your team very quickly. Even if you just force Tracer to hold into a pulse bomb to break it within 20 seconds of you placing it down, that is a pulse bomb that is not going into your Winston mid-fight. The Infinity Wall lacks this characteristic by design.
  • Without her Photon Shield and Shield Generator, she will have a hard time approaching the enemy team to actually make use of her new thick beam. That is pretty much Reaper problem all over again. Especially if her teleporter behave like Shadow Step, which is one of the possible outcomes for it.

Vis-a-vis, Sanjay will be still a complex hero, but he will be less complex than Symmetra. And that is one of the key aspects that made me love her gameplay.

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38

I am anxious to see the nuances of her new kit, but if it is fast-deploying, couldn’t she find creative ways to teleport herself and her team behind the enemy instead of having to approach with her barrier in the first place?

Replace “Press E and walk forwards” with “think creatively, and outsmart the enemy”.

Might make a Reaper that actually works. If you can teleport your tanks in first, you can walk right through easy-peasy.

39

Maybe. As I said, we have only the barebones of Sanjay portal. It’s all theorycraft over that thus far. But remember that the exit will have an HP value, and breaking either side, close the path. Those are things we know because Geoff said so to us.

When you add the point that Sym need line of sight between both portals, if you are on the defending team, and hear the TP forming behind you, it might be possible for them to focus fire on the TP, and maybe break it after only one or two people from your team crossed it. And now they are trapped behind enemy lines, and probably lack mobility options, or they would have no reason to take the TP in the first place.

But just to make it clear again: The issue is not with the Teleporter as ability. It’s not that her gun is being changed. It’s not the loss of Shield Generator. It’s not the Infinity Wall. People are reacting to everything combined at the same time. That the the problematic thing. They are leaving nothing left of OG Symmetra (Sym 2.0, aka, current one, basically gave us a new ability and changed an old ability into an ultimate), and that is making us feel like the character is being deleted.

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40

Symmetra is a trouble character for blizzard because she’s so hard to balance. She’s binary. Black and White. All or nothing. Nondynamic. She’s either tweaked to be op or not tweaked enough. There’s no middle ground because of her design.

Sentry placement slow removal? Ok? That won’t do much. Hooray we can walk faster. If an enemy was after you, you’d die anyway. Also you’re still unable to attack.

Photon barrier slowed down? No longer good on attack. Can run with it. Won’t keep up. Change shape? Wooptydoo! Enemy can run through it and bulk damage you while you ramp up from 30dps.

Etc etc. She needs an overhaul. Her current overhaul isn’t even that drastic. At the end of the day she’s still sentry lady.