I primarily see Sym used as a one-time use hero. As soon as teleporting to point doesn’t (or does) work she is usually swapped off of. And that makes sense, she’s not great. She’s extremely reliant on her team, extremely easy to kill, and requires very very specific conditions to be effective as a DPS. She is a utility character, yet outside of her TP she doesn’t actually offer much utility to her team. In fact if you play Sym outside of this initial strat you will get called out for throwing in many games. Because the community doesn’t see her as a DPS hero. And rightfully so. She really isn’t. She can’t engage in fights without a tank with a shield. She’s a glass cannon.
Someone did a much better more detailed post here. But it seems that post didn’t do enough, because that was over a year ago and she is still…just… bad.
Here are the updates she received since:
Symmetra
Teleporter
Railings and other breakable objects no longer block teleporter placement and teleporting
Teleporter interact range increased from 1 meter to 1.5 meters
Now lasts an infinite duration until destroyed
Players can destroy their Teleporter with the ability 2 input
Cooldown now starts when Teleporter is destroyed
Maximum range increased from 25 to 30 meters
Teleporter is destroyed if the entrance is more than 40 meters from the exit
Photon Projector (Primary Fire)
Beam-type damage is now reduced by 20% when hitting armor
Primary Fire’s damage ramps up 20% faster
Players impacted by the primary fire beam should now hear a louder impact sound
Beam width lowered from 0.3 meters to 0.2
Beam DPS per level lowered from 65/130/195 to 60/120/180
Photon Projector (Secondary Fire)
Damage increased from 120 to 140
Photon Barrier
Duration reduced from 15 to 12 seconds
Health reduced from 5000 to 4000
Sentry Turret
Damage per second reduced from 50 to 40
I think all that needs to be changed is Sym’s tele, Make it deploy much much faster (0.5 seconds down from 2 seconds). It is her only escape and her best tool for survival and increases the amount of strategy needed to play her. Otherwise, buff her shields or her health. Give her a chance to duel and not just hide behind a tank.
I think Shield Generator wouldn’t go well with Symmetra. It’s a defensive tool that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the game, I think.
Why not give her 2.0’s Photon Barrier, instead?
That would be an offensive tool that allows Symmetra to be offensive, take duels, and cancel out very important abilities. It would be nice for her to have instead of Teleporter as well - it performs the same function as pushing forward without any of the annoying, game-breaking (overstatement) strategies.
Hmm, that’s interesting. I don’t think that would work well either. It’d be like if a spare Moira orb covered an entire large area and took time to find and get rid of.
I still think 2.0’s barrier would be the best replacement. It’s the most interactive, least annoying, and most fun of all of Symmetra’s tools. At least from my perspective - I’ve only ever played with or against the current Symmetra.
I see what you mean however she is mostly a one time trick because your team wants her to be. She is actually a fine DPS, but your team will never accept that.
Though I will be honest, very good Sym players can play around her issues. However they are still issues and a regular player playing Sym would have a hard time.
She and Sombra are probably the most unfriendly in terms of time investment. As she can be good, but you need a lot of play time to reach that point. As oppose to other heroes who can still work well even without a lot of time played.
They removed shield generator because it forced her to play on defense. There goal is to make Sym good on both attack and defense. Instead being very good on defense but useless on attack.
As a Sym main she was pretty much useless in higher level games. Good teams can easily play around her.
shfit: place sentry turret. 3 charges. max 6 turrets
E: Photon barrier, a 900 hp shield that slowly moves forward
Ultimate: builds one of two structures: either a Teleporter or Shield Generator.
- teleporter—creates a teleporter, other end appears in spawn, 6 uses
- shield generator—in a large area, gives allies 75 shields.
I really like Arcadium’s suggestion of tp cd starting the 12s count down like old 3.0 tp, then pausing halfway (at 6s) until tp is destroyed. It can mostly achieve old cast frequency while still needing commitment to a tp placement due to maintaining the minimum 12s devoted to a placement. It still punishes early destruction by enemies because the earlier it’s destroyed, the closer to 12s down time tp will have. if destroyed much later it’s still another 6s before sym can put down another which isn’t too long of a waiting period. it kinda doesn’t make sense to give sym the full punishment equal to early destruction in that situation because if it’s been up for >12s or so, most likely the value of tp has already been achieved.
more frequent tps --> more uptime and being able to switch gears between flanking, frontlining, backlining and supporting.
while I get how tp deployment can feel terrible, but idk about making it 0.5s. I thinking the really bare minimum it’d need to be fair would be 1.5s or so because of the need for counterability for teamwide tps.
I’d also like to add that a big reason why sym involves a lot of forethought, pretty much the defining thing about her gameplay, is really because of her delays. while yes I agree that her delays rn vs burst and sustain does not make sense much, I don’t think making her delays like 0.5s is the way to go if we want to maintain the strategic feel of sym’s gameplay.
terrible idea. you increase sym’s hero down time by A LOT without tp.
Or we could bring her back to the support category with healing rework like she should have gotten.
Examples are in this post: #Bring Symmetra Back to Us #More Supports!
For DPS sym, way more is required than a simple tele fixed.
IMO --teleporter and sentries got to go. period.
Sym needs 15-20m range on that primary ASAP. Why does echo get to have a way better Sym primary in her kit? No tick drops, consistant dps, 20m range! not hard to aim with.
RMB needs to travel faster, way too slow still. Splash is way too small.
Defense, she needs ether mobility or a Strong self bubble like in the comics. Current teleporter makes her immobile.
Also she can lay down mine traps in the comics too. Lots of potential here for dps just like SUpport.
She litterally can do anything – it all depends on her imagination>
Echo is litterally waht sym could of been.
Better sym RMB, better sym primary.
She can fly — sym could of created temporary light wings if she wanted too.
Sym could of easily created illusion construct of a NPC that fights with her as an ultimate – instead of this current echo ulti.
Litterally same thing happen with sigma. – sigma’s main design came from sym – -the shield.
Reason why sym can’t get her photon barrier back is because they gave it new and improved to sigma.
Jeff stated that he cares and talks about symmetra a lot, but all i’ve seen was having Symmetra’s design/kit been given to other heroes so far.
Sure, but you could say this about anything. “That’s just a big barrier”. “That’s just a shield generator”. This sentence serves no purpose.
So you’d place it somewhere that you don’t want players to go, like in range of the point or the payload. You don’t want players there, so if they’re not in range that’s a good thing for you.
The DoT is added tickle damage. There are roughly 50,000 sources of tickle damage. If those tickle damages stack then they might overwhelm the healing. That’s how the game works. Since you’re classifying Winston as requiring “0 aim”, I’ll say that lots of things in the game require “0 aim”.
Also, keep in mind that this is still an ult. Ults can wipe teams for barely any skill. Again, that’s how the game works.
People get their knickers in a twist about anything. If the devs never made changes because they might get knickers in a twist then they’d never do anything.
Sym used to have a shield generator and it created interesting scenarios where the flanker heroes (Tracer) would be called upon to seek and destroy the generator. A secondary mini-objective that threw a bit of a spanner in the works. If the team ignored it then fights would become more difficult because their opponents had extra shields. People didn’t like the defensive capability of the generator. A DoT version would retain the agency but in an offensive way. So, you either seek and destroy the DoT generator or you push ahead straight to the point and take that extra tickle damage.
Most heroes in the game will have range and could easily shoot it down from range, especially on stuff like control points which are very big and often have large LOS to spam into.
Keep in mind I’m not using this as a bad thing, after all, I main Brig and Reinhardt.
It more so leads into the point of.
Which is sadly true, but the aim crowd’s knicker are so twisted you’d think they’re expert contortionists.
People didn’t like it because while it was arguably one of the best ults in the game, it had little to no obvious value.
Imagine facing enemies with permanent shields throughout the whole match, all because your teammates couldn’t find it in time, that wouldn’t be a fun game.