The ramp-up effect in the beam prevents her from being a frontline DPS, but its good enough to allow you to peel for your team’s backline, or as an emergency last resort. I treat her beam the same way I treat Mercy’s pistol: It’s not bad per se, and you can pull some cheeky kills now and then, but you don’t want to use it full time as your primary gameplay feature.
On the orbs, I’ll just say that I agree 100% with Sir Swag’s definition of them, which is: I don’t know why it works, but it works much more often than it should, and I’ll abuse it until a consistent part of the players I meet stop dying to my random spam.
I don’t buy this argument just because there is no empirical data that shows Symmetra dominating low ranks. Her winrate is consistent through all ranks, from bronze to GM. This means she is neither a pub-stomper like Bastion (higher winrate in lower ranks), nor a high-skill/coordination hero like Sombra (higher winrate in high ranks).
There is more regarding her accessibility than her gun. Her whole playstyle currently relies more on predicting the next fight and setting your defenses between fights. That allow people with limited movements to use their brain skills to impact the teamfight, and the beam is a complementary damage source to that.
Her ult being a permanent static object means it don’t rely on precise aim to be placed, and it shifts the flow of the battle just by giving the enemy team a second objective they need to seek and destroy. Changing that to a wall that will probably be placed like Mei’s means they now have to properly place it in the right place and orientation, and not just “around this area”.
The orbs being slow is part of that as well, since they linger around for more time, and is relatively easy to “aim” at a small choke. Pinpoint thread the needle style shoots might be off the table for disabled players, but they can just play in big choke maps like Volskaya and hurl the ball through the main choke. It’s a lot more effective with a lingering projectile (like, also, Junkrat’s grenades) than fast-moving projectiles like the new proposed orb, that will work very similarly to Pharah’s rockets.
Turrets are mostly a lateral change, IMO. While any disability that gives people problems aiming will make the throwing turret feature less valuable, there is nothing preventing them to still place the turret the way they do today. So, turret changes don’t really impact the accessibility issues.
But the big game changer is her teleporter. We need more numbers on how the ability will work, but it can require a lot of fast-positioning in-the-fight TP to use its full power, and I don’t think I need to actually point out how hard this kind of precise placement under pressure is for people that have trouble aiming in the first place. Geoff gave the suggestion for us to use the TP to get allies out of a Graviton, and now imagine if you can barely make the mouse go where you want them to be, and you place your TP just out of reach from the allies in the graviton. It would feel bad for an abled player, but would feel much worse to a disabled one, because an able player can just move to another hero when they notice they are bad at Symmetra, but disabled players may have limitations on the heroes they can physically play.
So, yeah. i’m skeptical that Blizzard was considering the accessibility issues when developing her rework (not saying that they removed it on purpose, just that it never crossed their minds), but I hope I’m wrong.
I have true and pure envy for every Symmetra player that is excited about the rework. I simply can’t recognize Symmetra in the rework (and I agree it should had been better as a new hero altogether), plus all the other issues I see with the rework (orb changes being terrible, the already-mentioned accessibility issues, etc), and I’m mostly trying to play as much Symmetra while I still can before they remove her from the game.
I wish I was as optimistic as you.