If I was to have a stab I’d say that the large increase in damage output that they claim has occurred due to the beam/tick changes is due to the way symms damage ramps up. Previously, reaching max beam damage didn’t occur as frequently or didn’t last for as long due to ammo constraints, but with the changes max damage was reached much faster leading a lot more damage per clip.
This goes out the window when the replenishing effect of shields in a meta where shields are everywhere. I dunno if they have a way of determining how much damage sym was doing without the side effect of the current meta. More likely it’s a result of their own internal testing where they may have run tests without using shields (of course I have absolutely no idea though lol).
Sym can literally afford a 20% damage increase. She’s the lowest-damage sustained damage dealer and only outdamages Hammond and rein by 2k damage. She only outdamages burst heroes that should have low overall damage. Just do the beam hitbox reduction.
and double barrier meta enables sym to damage and actually have a dps boost from that too rather than the other heroes ._.
moira: last 3 months = 7,250/game, last month = 7,867/game, this week= 8,686/game, ratio is ~1.2 i.e. +20%
winston: last 3 months = 8,710/game, last month = 8,827/game, this week=9,715/game, ratio is ~1.12 i.e. +12%
zarya: 3mthss ago = 12,366/game, this week = 14,679/game, ratio is ~1.19
winston didn’t see much change. But as to why they got such an increase I can’t provide an answer because I don’t play them as much as I do sym. At most I can pose questions for speculation:
how are these heroes being played in double shield compared to before?
are they being play more aggro to bypass barriers?
are moiras being more trigger happy with their ult to dps in double shield meta (because beam changes effect her ult too)?
is zarya sigma and df combo letting zarya charge up and move up more to play aggro
has there been a surge of dps moira?
sym doesn’t just thrive when put against double shield. sym also thrives from being in a double shield comp too. with orisa and esp sigma’s barriers that can be used to both hold down an area and move up, they naturally pave a safe catwalk for sym to w+m1.
and in double shield meta, both orisa and esp sigma deliver their shields closer to sym so she can get charge much earlier in the fight as she w+m1. i.e. things to charge off on are more available both in terms of frequency and in terms of location.
With rein, and orisa single barrier comps their barriers are closer to their team which makes sym need to get up in their face i.e. in the face of danger. will sym’s team w+m1 with her into that? double shield meta might because they have plenty of barriers and doing that anyways. the rest, no.
the question with ttk is are you counting ramp up time or simply counting when she’s charge up? Because the theoretical ttk should not have changed at all in either and that’d be the upper bound. Many people I see say “oh she melts in a second” which is theoretically about right if she’s already gotten lvl 3, i.e. intended behaviour. Yet when talking about individual balance, you can’t purely bank on always having lvl3 beam because the conditions of use are so niche.
You do realize that their telemetry is almost certainly more precise than the stats we have on overbuff, right? They almost certainly differentiate total damage output by beam tier which they can compare against themselves. Therefore knowing that her beam at level 1 did x% more damage than before.
but did they differentiate whether it’s because of the meta letting sym have plenty of opportunities press m1 more compared to all previous metas or whether it was the bug fix?
we don’t know because all we know about the 20~40% increase is on “average damage output”.
I think you’re putting far too much thought into the what-ifs. The devs have far more data than you do and came to a conclusion. As much as everyone here loves to criticize the devs, they’re not stupid people. They know what they’re doing and they know how to interpret their data much better than anyone here speculating based solely on a dev’s high level post.
it’s not a what-if. it’s literally pointing out the lack of context when people quote the stat to try and justify their claim of “omg sym OP bug fix OP” ._. literally what was said was facts followed by strings of logic joining those facts.
I want to believe. But tp cd nerf change and the spec of sym3.0’s primary on release makes me question.
You are, though. The things you state are dependent on things like “what if the reason is because the meta let’s her do that.” They have ways to look at the data that will almost certainly rule out that kind of what-if statement. For example, not every rank follows the meta, therefore you will have a wide spectrum of data to compare to both with and without meta changes.
yet when we check overbuff pickrate stats for this week, sigma’s consistently been high across the ranks along with the other barrier tanks and zarya. are they always playing double shield? probs not. but they are definitely having a significant chunk of their games are with 2 shield tanks on their team or against them, both situations which sym objectively thrives from esp when sigma’s involved in at least one of the teams.
But you act like blizzard has no way to coalesce data to show this. Most data backends allow you to query the data in any way you want. They don’t always require very high level reports like what you see on overbuff. For example Blizzard could easily just say “show me all data on matches including symmetra and an enemy team with zero or one barrier tanks.” This type of reporting is generally quite easy. And blizz probably has like 100000x more data samples than overbuff since they have private data and those who havent opted in to those statistic trackers.
no. I’m acting like they didn’t do what you’re saying, not that they can’t. I’m sure they can sql query their db for whatever stats.
But I doubt they got the right ones or that they interpreted them well. and obviously most people quoting this 40% aren’t using it properly either in treating as tho the bug fix is the sole factor when literally sym has gone from not often having 195dps in a fight to always having 195dps in a fight.
That seems pretty insulting to the devs to just assume they got it wrong. Like they couldn’t possibly be smart enough to make a database query that shows more than just an average damage increase across all games, and therefore must be incompetent in order to obtain a +20-40% damage statistic.
