Symmetra Survey Results!

General Discussion
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Introduction

Note: there will be a TLDR at the end.

Thank you to all that took part in the survey. In just one night, we got 100 responses! I wanted to leave it up for longer, however, the limit is 100 responses on SurveyMonkey.

I will outline the quantitative data (statistics) and the qualitative data (written feedback) and seperate them into sections.

Please read my own Summary at the end!

The Statistics

Note: Some of these numbers will be rounded to the nearest integer.

  • 44% consider themselves Symmetra mains.
  • 56% sometimes play Symmetra or do not play her at all.




  • 16% think Symmetra is currently fine.
  • 26% think Symmetra needs a buff.
  • 31% want to revert Symmetra back to 2.0 (Shield Gen).
  • 28% would like a new rework.

This means 59% of respondants would like significant changes to be made to Symmetra.



  • 20% want to see Symmetra reworked into a healer.
  • 15% want to see Symmetra reworked into a utility support.
  • 19% want to keep her a DPS hero.
  • 25% want to combine parts of her 2.0 kit with her current 3.0 kit.

Because most numbers are so close together, it’s hard for me to decide on a general consensus for what respondants want for a hypothetical Symmetra rework.

However, it seems most respondants would like to see aspects of 2.0 be combined with 3.0. We will go into further details in the next section.



The Written Feedback

In these section, I will outline the feedback given. There will be a section below with direct quotes if you want to read those.

  • 23% of the written responses want Symmetra to have healing in her kit.
    40% of these responses specifically mention healing turrets.

  • 20% of the written responses want Symmetra to be a support centered around utility, with some healing involved.

  • 17% of feedback specifically mentioned Shield Generator returning to her kit.
    Someone has even suggested Shield Generator returning to Symmetra’s current kit, but being a second option to her Teleporter.

  • 20% of the written responses want either a full or partial revert to 2.0.
    Shield Generator responses were not included in this number.

Several users have suggested Symmetra needs one of three buffs:

  1. Increased survivability.
  2. Increased damage.
  3. Increased utility.

Note: Many responses are either innapropriate or repeat answers given in the previous section, so I am not including them here. Some answers were also relatively vague, so I categoried responses how I felt was correct.

There is one piece of feedback I feel is very important to highlight.

I really want her old beam back. She was the only high impact character that didn’t need to aim. I have [disabilities I won’t specify on the forums] so now playing my favorite character physically hurts me. I keep getting told to just play mercy or rein which is invalidating and frankly rude. Overwatch profited massively on disabled players, parading about how inclusive their game is yet ignore their feedback entirely.

Direct Quotes

I would love to see healing turrets as a possibility

Combine 1 and 2.0 . Still dps

I think her current design is just really annoying so I’m perfectly open to reworks, but no particular suggestion on what. If she was to be reworked I’d prefer seeing her turrets removed and replaced with something new.

While I do think she’d have to heal to a degree, ideally a healing Support rework for her would still be heavier focused on utility and unify the most loved aspects of all her different versions together.

She should provide healing in some way but it shouldn’t be at Ana or Moira level. Even less than Zenyatta would be fine. It can work with healing turrets but I prefer converting normal HP into shield HP and photon shields that can heal a bit.

Low health support-tank, sort of opposite to Brigitte. Makes space by giving shields to allies.

Put shield generator as an alternative for tp by pressing the button again. And increase her range a bit

People thought old Symmetra was bad because she was too slow for the game, and even now her current version is still incredibly slow compared to everyone else. Long cooldowns on turrets that get instantly deleted, clunky teleporter cooldowns, a beam that takes ages to get to a respectful level of damage. There’s no point in picking someone that takes so long to do what other characters can do instantly, as much as I’ve always loved her.

The only aspects I’d like to see from 2.0 are 6 turrets and a second ult. I felt that was part of her identity that was just stripped away.

Shield Gen ultimate, Teleporter e-ability, 3.0 primary and secondary

Feel like pure [REDACTED] just want her back

To truly make her into a viable support in OW, you’d most likely tear down the core ideas and themes of sym or completely wipe out most of the ideas in her current kit. In OW, supports need an on demand heal. If you make healing turrets, her zoning purpose is eliminated. If you make her weapon fire heal, then elements of the cunning on-the-fly-planning get removed.

First two options aren’t mutually exclusive–I’d like to see her as an off-healer (basically, both healing AND utility)

She needs to focus on Support/Utility without being a Healer.

Maybe a mobility or survivability

I am not a fan of her current version and I thought her 2.0 version was more fun to play. If they were to revert her then I would be fine with that but I think she still wouldn’t be great. I think another rework is needed and personally I’d like to see her as a support.

let her “suck up” energy with primary fire that can get used as an emergency shield when she gets damaged so she has more survivability upfront. more damage first stage less on final (lmb) remove infinite tele

I’d like to try a rework focused around healing and if that doesn’t work then keep her as 2.0 but with minor changes from 3.0 i.e (throwable turrets , shield recharge , current beam , speedy orbs , shield piercing orbs , 6 turrets with no slow and less DPS , new photon shield as ult along with TP and Shield gen , photon barrier from 2.0) there’s no reason she can’t have the best of both worlds especially since the best of both worlds was only meta for a combined 9 days

Teleported cd to 3 sec, before the inf teleporter change it had 2 sec downtime, now it has 12. Hp increased to 250

The game is obsessed with lower TTK now (wrong direction btw, less about strategy & more about lucky potshots) and Sym with all her ability delays is like a relic in this environment. Every single ability of hers has delay, yet the current game promotes fast kills. She either needs a flat buff or some other utility.

My ideal Symmetra rework would be to marry ALL abilities and aspects from 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. no deleted abilities

I chose “She is still a DPS hero.” because I want her to remain a DPS, but I’d like her to be a hybrid support dps.

Go back to 2.0 and then redisne her from there. They only improvement that I liked what the turret change from 2.0 to 3.0.

Dps, piercing orbs, limited tp

I’d like to see 2.0 brought back with the orb speed of 3.0 and the throwable turrets. The shield gen would be nice if it was place-able on walls/ceilings.

Disclaimer

This is my first time putting a survey response together. Though far from perfect, I believe the survey is a good source of information. The sample size of 100 is large enough to represent members of the community that care about Symmetra.

“Most statisticians agree that the minimum sample size to get any kind of meaningful result is 100. If your population is less than 100 then you really need to survey all of them.”

See here.

I will definitely be running more surveys in the future. Though, they will likely be about specific reworks/concepts that I’ve seen popularise amongst the Symmetra community.

TLDR

It’s clear that both the Symmetra community and non-Symmetra community agrees she needs changes.

Smaller changes like reverting infinite TP back to temporary and giving her an extra 50 shields are “bandaid” fixes for the hero. While these will help her feel better to play, they won’t satisfy the majority of respondants.

A large portion of responses want Symmetra to be a support. Some want her to be a healer with healing turrets, others want her to be a focused utility support. Others even want a mixture of both.

A significant number of responses want either a full revert to 2.0 or parts of her 2.0 kit to return to the hero. See Direct Quotes.

There is a love for Support Symmetra, and a love for her old Shield Generator.

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Syms got more problems than Paris Hilton.

There was a huge disconnect between the vision the Sym community had for her and the devs. We wanted a high utility non healing shield/barrier based support, They wanted a “techno mage”.

Despite the fact in her comic the most amazing part is when shes literally cradling a child from falling burning debris protecting her with he barriers.

She will never be truly accepted in her current form, 90% of the People that didnt play Sym and hated her still do, A large chunk of the Sym community fell out of love with the character they no longer recognized.

The devs did something truly and honestly disgusting there is no other word for it, They took a character with next to no aim requirement and made her one of the most aim reliant heroes in the game if you cant track even semi well your beam stays at 1 and you get flattened.

As someone with a disability that gets tired quickly and headaches from focusing on a single point for long periods of time having a character like Sym allowed me to continue playing even when i was 2 tired for a character like Zarya or Zen

Her overall design is just awful, A 200 hp hero with no mobility that has to be in close range to use her strongest weapon whos idea was that exactly?

Her rework gave her TP, Sym does NOT have the community image capable of using TP, By that i mean People simply do not trust a Sym player it doesnt help the ability is slower than an amputated tortoise but still.

All in all i hope for a partial revert.

Old beam without lockon but a wide frontal cone like Winston this solves the issue of unfairness of lockon and opens the gun up for buffs in range and bumping the numbers up from 30-60-120 to 60-90-120

REMOVE MOST OF THE TURRET DAMAGE honestly 2.0 had so much damage potential in her turrets they had to be made of paper to justify the mini star destroyers they contained. less damage more hp, more slow BUT make it so the slow cannot stack, smaller cd and let her throw/reposition them.

Give her a passive shield generation aura, Something as small as 14 shield points per seccond in a 20m radius capping at say 25 would of provided a constant buffer of shield hp to blunt enemy attacks allowing ur healer to catch up.

Let her pause her barriers flight, i maintain that if 2.0 had got this ONE change her pickrate and usability would of skyrocketed overnight.

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For such an in depth post with lots of Statistics, this really isnt getting any love. Feels bad man.

Btw, I am one of those who want Sym 2.0

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Funnily enough, she has a skin called “Technomancer” :rofl:

Absolutely. Hoshizora has left Symmetra for Mercy, and Luminum has left Overwatch altogether. They are (were) well known Symmetra youtubers back before her rework. I’ve definitely noticed a lack of Symmetra players myself.

One of the pieces of feedback in my OP expressed the same problem. I really feel for the disabled players that find it extremely hard/stressful to play their favourite hero now.

It’s okay, I was honestly quite worried about getting a lot of criticism like I did previously.

:hearts:

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Great post and results, enjoyed reading it.

Symm just needs anything at this point

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Needless to say that, just 100 responses, from a Forum mainly populated by Support mains, isn’t even close to an accurate indication/piece of evidence concerning absolutely anything about Overwatch and any game in that regard.

For more than obvious reasons, a revert to Symmetra 2.0 (and especially a complete one) isn’t going to happen, as it has been proven by the devs’ behavior throughout all these years. 2 years have passed, so to say that people should just get over this entire situation already would be an understatement…

Another rework for Symmetra is also extremely unlikely to happen, according to direct quotes from the devs a few years ago, who for some reason said that they would not go on with any more reworks for the foreseeable future.

Even worse, it also clearly seems that the devs don’t want Symmetra 3.0 as well for some reason to actually be a viable hero in this game overall, as they still refuse to buff this blatantly numerically underpowered hero and continue to unfairly and wrongly tarnish the reputation of the entire 3.0 kit in the eyes of many…

Therefore, for better or for worse, I think that as a community we should focus on actually plausible changes for the game, such as finally fixing the few design problems that remain in the 3.0 kit and actually buffing the hero. Or even better, the devs should just appease the grand minority of the player base that prefer Symmetra 2.0 by re - implementing said hero and all such old versions of now reworked heroes into Custom games, Workshop modes and even a special Arcade game mode.

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True, but while unreliable at best it’s still infinitely more valuable than the absolute lack of any shred of data we get from the Overwatch team.

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how

it’s been like a day

on a forum a lot of people don’t use, from a random specific post

again, like, no

people don’t show up to see others agreeing with how they’re comfortable, they’ll mostly show up to see who else agrees with their dislikes

again, this creates a bubble

she needs to be changed, but random surveys aren’t the way to go

also the link you posted to “prove that it’s valid” literally says right there

This advice is for:

  • Surveys that use random sampling.

This advice is NOT for:

  • Surveys that use non-random sampling, or a special type of sampling such as cluster or stratified sampling

this is painfully true, however

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I wish there were some actual official surveys by blizz in game after experimentals/ opinions on gamestate, I feel like that would make balance a lot better ._.

Good job organising this though, I hope one day sym will be in a decent spot :slight_smile:

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you forgot the part where she’s literally using tp to infiltrate the enemy then orbs to assassinate flank enemies, turrets claiming an enemy territory, get what she wants, then gtfo with tp which closely resembles sym3.0 BEFORE the :put_litter_in_its_place: infinite tp nerf i.e. the version of sym that was most capable in dynamically switching between flanker, front liner, zoner and utility with a requirement of being cunning and creative to do so.

imo that’s what sym is about.

rather than a passive turret defense hero that plays like a turret tower for most of the match time which is what heading towards sym2.0 will result in since that sym won’t have tools to engage nor disengage into/from her effective range that way.

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I feel like this was me :slight_smile:

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It’s a good idea! It’s actually one of my favourites due to how little it would affect the flow of Symmetra’s current kit.

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Any rework that involves her cancer beam returning or a non-healing support is a hard no.

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The sad thing about all this is that Jeff and the developers won’t care.

I wish they could bring back 2.0 elements and yes auto lock, but fuse it with 3.0 concepts. However will she still be dps, support or both? I wouldn’t mind them to bring back 2.0 and put tweaks on that since they haven’t touch the version at all throughout 2 years. Very sad indeed, but other than that my first choice 2.0 with 3.0 concepts.

I wish they could understand shield support properly.

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Sym is fine. People need to L2P or log another hundred hours on her. Taxi tps, choke turrets, and M1 dmg is completely underutilizing her kit. I won’t tell people how to play her, they are entitled to their opinions - just know that there are tons of advanced tricks with her and I rarely see anyone use. People barely scratch the surface for Sym and cry foul. Taxi TP? M1 dmg? LOL I haven’t played her like that in ages and I’ve basically otp/3main her.

Please direct your complaints at the 222 system - where Sym I mean any DPS main hardly gets any playtime to realistically progress and master any 2-3 heroes. Stop diverting dev resources to fix issues that aren’t really there, or are byproducts of a larger context - that of a broken ranked ladder system. Let’s get people fixing that, before we clutter these forums with the same old ‘I can’t play Sym well’ spam.

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while I agree with you on this bit, the caveat is that many of such tricks involve orbs and tp cast. the former legit not that great of a weapon fire for its costs, and the latter has been given a horrible horrible down time from infinite tp nerf consequently giving such tricks much higher down times too.

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Most Symmetra mains can’t aim tho, so i understand why they would want 2.0. 2.0 sucked, she was very slow and i don’t get how people think she’s better than 3.0. Sure 2.0 might have been more fun, but she was not better.

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Mmm data, thanks for doing this, it was fun

My perfect Sym would be 2.0 with current beam weapon

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I’d only start playing consistently
again if they reverted her, partially or completely. Heck, I’d even take just her old beam back. She’s not the hero we fell in love with. Revert Sym!

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No percentage of people who want to see Sym reworked into a tank? I know it would be very small but I think it would be interesting to see.

Still, good survey, though how would someone like me vote? I main Sym and would like to partake in these surveys.

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