“We expected the changes to Symmetra’s Teleporter and secondary fire projectile speed to be the primary solutions, but we overshadowed these with other nerfs. One of these nerfs was no longer gaining ammo from barriers, which we removed to put power back into her ammo capacity since barriers are much less prevalent.”
I just dont get this reasoning for why they nerfed her secondary so hard. So you really thought that increasing the speed of the projectile was so strong that you reduced the damage, firerate, size, and invalidated your point of increasing her ammo by making her secondary fire require the same percent of her max ammo as it currently does in OW1.
And that’s just focusing on the nerfs given to the secondary itself and nothing to do with the others given to her to “compensate” that buff. And I know they also mention the “buff” to the teleporter but honestly taking something that has an infinite uptime and placing a timer on it just to reduce the build time just ain’t worth the trade.
And these changes
Secondary Fire projectile size increased from .4 back to .5
Secondary Fire charge time reduced from 1.2 seconds back to 1 second
Teleporter cooldown reduced from 16 seconds to 12 seconds
Still result in a net nerf for the hero. Making her beam charge faster, although saying it might not make it in, is a better trade off but I would much prefer just giving her a flat damage value instead of doing this charge mechanic. It was to compensate the auto aim but that’s gone now, we can move on from it.
Also I dont know how you can go from
“Take Symmetra, for example. She consistently has one of the highest win rates in both the beta and live game because people tend to play Symmetra in situations where she is more likely to win, like defending the first point of a map. Players who utilize Symmetra are also more likely to swap off her very quickly when they suspect they may lose the game, further pushing her win rate in a positive direction.”
to
“Our reasoning for some of the other nerfs was that Symmetra is already a statistically strong hero, and we feared these changes alone would push her over the edge.”
You acknowledge she is a situation pick with an inflated winrate but then use that inflated winrate as justification for the nerfs.
It is not confusing, it is actually very enlightening.
It just shows that the dev team just looks at Data, they dont actually FEEL the experience of playing the heroes in a normal match.
They might not even play or like the game. The important thing for them is to look at spreadsheets with numbers and base all balance changes solely on those numbers without looking at the big picture or what those numbers represent given the situation.
Everything was made quite clear with that statement.
Honestly I would believe it but the devs themselves are the ones who pointed out after the last beta that her stats are inflated. So they do understand, they just dont seem to know what to do with that information.
Yea i don’t really understand their logic either. Niche heroes tend to be played by players who specialize in those heroes so the win rates can be higher than heroes that are played by a larger portion of the ow playerbase. Win rate can be misleading so its probably not the best stat to use when justifying nerfs or buffs.
Blizzard still seems to think balancing the game is like balancing a spreadsheet. The game is more nuanced than simple numbers.
This is simply incorrect, if you listen directly to the devs they talk about playing quite a bit and even have ranks and favorites. The problem is they see the game just through a different set of lenses, part of it is the same play-testers (mostly golds/plats by their own admission) and they look at data we do not see. I believe that most of them do like the game but I am sure they need a change of pace from it. Many devs have admitted to playing anonymously in live servers just to see exactly what the feel of the game is. I suspect we have all been in multiple games with them at one point or another as well.
I think they are scared to make any wholesales changes to Sym since she’s been reworked two times already and doing reworks is _very _expensive and they need to be “done” with PVP by Oct 4th so they are desperately seeing if they can twist the knobs some way to make her work in her current kit form. Honestly, just let her place her turrets like her teleporter, do away with this flying nonsense, just aim at a point, then click and build it, this would do wonders for her.
Its just so ridiculous to go down this path. Like they aren’t putting these things into a testing environment to literally get a proper feel for it. It buggers belief to totally skip over the obvious
Its not even that, it just hilarious that they actually typed that. Because “statistically” without presenting said stats, means absolutely nothing. Nada.
That word means NADA without the stats to back it up. The fact that they don’t want to show what are those stats just made it seems even more shady or they are afraid of looking dumb by showing them.
By the way, didnt they just say that they dont base balance changes on Winrate? When the Buffs to Mccree just came and people were like “WHAT?”… So… If its not winrate or pickrate what the hell it is? Is it a roll of a dice?
What diabolical, alien glyphs manuscripts of data numbers are Blizzard looking at up to make those changes? Its no wonder sometimes random buffs to already well-performing heroes just happen or nerfs to underpowered heroes suddenly appear out of nowhere.
It is like they are interpreting those numbers on a vacuum, on a cold .xls file, its just… I cant even… This is too good, it continues to be blast to follow the OW2 development. Hopefully we have more statements like that.
I assume they’re talking holistically, as in, after taking in account the inflation of her stats due to low pick rate or w/e she still seemed strong on paper
Sym is just one of those heroes whose data is very wonky since in theory her damage could be insane if everything goes well for her but more often than not that never happens so the margin for error is huge
i’d love to see the hrs used in match, kills/healing/blocked healing for DF, sym, and ana.
i guarantee if they looked at the data in those 3 views they’d see something different.
smaller playerbase & playtime will naturally have better than average stats compared to a hero who is more popular (and thus more ppl/matches to lower/raise the stats)
Oh no, temporal TP IS a massive buff, if it had come without that insane cooldown increase. The cooldown starting on deployment was how it was before it was infinite. And 10s cooldown.
Here is the thing about TP. It doesnt have sustained value no matter its duration. The lower the cooldown and duration, the better it becomes a movement ability for Sym.
The Infinite TP change was a literal nerf, and they admitted this in the patch notes. It was an attempt to make team TP more usable in the real game, while nerfing Sym’s personal power for it.
Oh they don’t. But they’ve taken their input into consideration.
BELIEVE ME, I know OWL pros have not gotten their way with the game and it’s far from catering to their wants and needs. But they are factored into the equation more than the general playerbase outside of stats.
Mind you , if sym beam charge buff goes through, they gonna end up nerfing her beam dmg or length lol, I’m fine with nerfing beam dmg for faster charge but then orbs should go back to 120
uuuuh if anything it shows that they don’t look at data.
I mean case in point with orbs:
like anyone looking at the numbers and actually understanding basic physics + how the game works, should be able to see that those numbers ain’t right for sym orbs from the get go. esp when you consider how we had those terrible OW1 orb numbers for years and when they try to do something about it, they managed to overnerf their solution making it worse. and even with their attempt at a rectification, they still didn’t get it right because they’re evidently not looking at the numbers.
Ahh but this data is probably not on their spreadsheets to be shown on their boardroom reunions about balance changes.
What matter is… winrate? Pickrate? Kills? assists? How many times Sym’s teammates used the teleport? OWL shows? Character wardrobe? Twitter followers?
We dont know. Remember how recently on OW1 they just buffed McCree when he was already in a fine spot. And they KEEP buffing him because… DATA! People confronted them and they said they dont base their changes on % winrate, but from their magical Data they saw that McCree needed buffs because he was underperforming.
There is no way to know what the DATA is. Their way of balancing Overwatch is a huge enigma, maybe for us who actually played the game can understand that 90 dmg-charge-up plinky projectiles are awful and a 60 dps initial close-range beam is pathetic, even in OW1 slower pace and +1 tank, and its even worse on OW2 faster, low-ttk and more aggressive enviroment…
…but from Blizzard Ivory Tower of data and whiteboard full of numbers those are amazing changes that will certainly bring Symmetra to the pace which OW2, it is us mere mortals who havent been enlighted by the truth of their data who still dont get it.
