The Symmetra changes are a HUGE step in the right direction, and there are mathematical reasons why

General Discussion
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Symm’s Teleporter is now almost on par with Reaper’s Shadow Step in terms of distance covered per use. He teleports two meters further, and can use it from within spawn, but it’s a worthwhile trade for being able to teleport turrets and teammates.

Having 4 seconds before losing a level on primary fire as opposed to 2 means that Symm can ramp up to max damage, place a teleporter, and not lose a level while waiting for its massive cast time. Alternatively, it means that she can walk forward another 22 meters (a little under twice the length of her beam) before leveling down. This 4 seconds also overlaps with the time it takes for her shield health to start regenerating, synergizing beautifully: If you aren’t close enough to get a stronger beam, you’re likely far enough that you can seek cover for the 3 seconds you need to regenerate your health.

These are some great changes, and I certainly welcome them coming to live, but if the reduction in health for tanks and Brigitte don’t come with it, I feel like she’ll still need an extra minor improvement to supplement the aggression she has now.

I have two, mutually exclusive suggestions:

  1. Make her turrets do 50 damage per second each again (up from 40), and increase ultimate charge cost.

Brigitte is arguably the hero most affected by the change to her health, as she effectively dies 1.25 times faster. 1.25 used to be the damage multiplier for discord, so that’s the multiplier I’ll use for increasing Symm’s turret damage. Because turrets and teleporter can bypass barriers, that will give Symmetra a stronger niche in counteracting them while ensuring shield tanks don’t become even more unfun to play. She will however need a corresponding increase in ultimate charge cost since she has a barrier of her own. Depending on how the majority population adjusts to being even more dependent on walls for cover, I’d suggest getting rid of the slow effect. No one likes the crowd control it provides, but if if the slow effect is gone, then case turrets would definitely need to do more damage to compensate. I’m aware that increasing turret damage hurts console players more than PC players, so I would suggest increasing the delay they have before turning around to face their targets.

  1. Reduce teleporter’s cast time by 1 second.

I remember something along the lines Geoff Goodman saying they were hesitant to change the cast time on Teleporter because it would be too good for teleporting whole teams around. With a 2-second faster cooldown however, I’m guessing that fear’s been kind of reduced. So I’m thinking “Why not just lower the cast time”? Obviously the enemy should have some time to react, but if 1 second is enough to react to a 10-second cooldown (Sentry turret has a 1-second long “deployment” animation when it attaches), then a 1-second cast time for teleporter would probably be sufficient as well. The lower cast time would not only make it more useful as an escape option for the solo-queue Symmetra but also be more useful in a meta where shields don’t last long enough to cover it.

Again, these are some mutually exclusive changes, (as in it’s probably best to have one or the other) and I suggest them mainly if the nerfs to tanks and Briggitte do NOT go live.

Thanks for reading, and thanks devs for taking another look at Symmetra. Also, when do we get to see Jeff playing as her? I’m curious as to how a game developer with intimate knowledge of the level geometry would place her constructs.

7 Likes
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Reapers teleport is terrible and one of the worst movement abilities in the game. The fact that an ability that teleports everyone can be compared to it sort of highlights that.

As for the buffs, buffing the turrets is a terrible plan overall and would be one of those impossible changes that breaks the lower end of the ladder (where she is already VERY strong).

Realistic changes probably involve either buffing the damage to her primary fire or buffing its range by say 1-2 meters.

3 Likes
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I don’t really think she needs the extra length on her beam or an increase to damage on her primary fire, unless your only talking about her first charge. I think all she needs in a slight hit box reduction and possible 125 hp and 125 shield health, and possibly a faster deployment time on her teleport which I don’t mind to be honest.

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Hitbox reductions would not really help her much at the tier where she needs help. 250HP is a big change, but I am not sure it helps with one of her biggest problems and that is that in any meta where she would be considered good, Doomfist would as well and Doomfist counters her and still would with 250HP.

1 Like
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Symmetra’s teleporter doesn’t need to be better than Reaper’s teleport as far as self-mobility goes. It needs to be just good enough such that if she’s stuck on a team of people that don’t take teleporters (which are prevalent in said lower ranks), she can still use it in a similar way as Reaper. Control-wise they’re still basically the same ability.

The lower ranks for that matter is rife with people that don’t have the teamwork necessary for a Symmetra to get the reliable support she needs as a team-dependent hero. Reinhardts will charge in mindlessly instead of shielding your teammates, Genjis will constantly beg for healing while solo Dragonblading in a 1v6, and Zenyattas will use Transcendence to try (and fail) to save their team from high noon. The least a Symm can have at ranks with this much chaos is more usefulness out of her own actions; if you can’t even get that, there’s no way to climb out of it.

Finally, though Doomfist has the HP to counter her, that wouldn’t be of as much concern if she had a fast enough teleporter to escape him or turrets strong enough to make him think twice about engaging. Even then, Doomfist shouldn’t be thought of as Symmetra’s biggest problem, as Symmetra can very well struggle against a team that doesn’t have him. Pharah, Junkrat, Echo, Mei, Ashe… really anything with splash damage does well.

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Huge step in the right direction

direction? yes and no.
huge step? defs not.

tp cd reduction was the right direction but doesn’t really do much because it’s still a really long time on her engagement AND disengagement tool.

for reference/perspective see below equations:

this literally means nothing and shows how little you play sym because you wouldn’t lose charge with the current live 2s before losing a charge level since you can use primary while tp is deploying. see exhibit A:

did he lose charge when he tp’ed behind bastion? no.

the main thing that’s preventing such a maneuver is legit the long tp down time infinite tp has making it unavailable to cast to do such a thing. unlike old 3.0 tp where you can legit get value out of tp as its cd is ticking.

sym maintaining charge was never a problem because she hardly ever wanted nor needed to take a ~3s break from m1’ing. when you got charge, you make a binary decision to fully commit or to back out. there’s no in between for breaks while sym is in 12m of the enemy and your team pushing for you to be that close in the first place.

adding another 2s to time to lose a level is like a change you’d see in those “give a hero a useless buff” threads.

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Can someone put in the J Jameson Spiderman guy laughing here for me? I was able to post links earlier today but not now for some ding dang reason. This forum is ridiculous lol.

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Eeeexactly. Symmetra doesn’t need a longer charge, she needs to either actually do damage when she’s tracking something in the first place - the fact that you need to tickle Genji while he’s blasting you in the head with shurikens for several seconds so you can charge your beam up to lethal levels is beyond ridiculous.

Just give her the damn noodle gun at a FLAT DAMAGE RATE and be done with it!

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While correct, these calculations only focus on downtime and don’t take into account the applications of infinite uptime.

Allow me to show you my favorite tele placement (how the heck do you embed stuff here): imgur.com/a/76AS2PW

From the teleporter entrance closest to spawn, you have very quick access to a health pack for when you’re darting between them, and from the teleporter farthest from spawn, you have a nice wall for you to use as cover as you peek and spam orbs down the hallway. This benefits not only you, but teammates that also know how to peek walls without getting immediately killed and want quick access to health recovery. On top of this, you can immediately throw a turret in this teleporter from spawn and it ends up on a wall that is NOT in your line of sight at the time.

And this is just one of many really good spots.

With the old teleporter, you would be replacing this setup every 12 seconds, meaning you’d have to get in position to replace it every 12 seconds. The infinite teleporter rewards this kind of thoughtful consideration for long-term use and is really only a disadvantage to people who rely a lot on automatic vs manual destruction. If the experimental changes to tele go through though, you’ll have a teleporter that’s better than either one of them.

There’s really no need for this aggression, but this points to a bit of a peculiarity. The patch notes explicitly say it’s 2 seconds, and the teleporter cast time is definitely 2 seconds in-game, but Steveo definitely didn’t lose charge in that clip, and in Training Range Symm seems to start to lose charge after 3 seconds (though subsequent level loss happens even sooner). So either there was some undocumented nerf to Symm’s beam (Probably likely since that clip since it’s a year old.) or the delay described in the experimental patch notes refers to the max level (which is not as testable as I’d like). In either case this is why I usually just advocate for a flat 156 dps on the thing.

Still, if the current experimental changes go through, that black-and-white decision now becomes more of a gradient and you’re given some wiggle room on whether to commit or not.

That maneuver can still be done with infinite TP, you’re just dependent on teammates taking the teleporter in a timely manner and you need to manually destroy it. Storming Hanamura point A can still be done with infinite TP; honestly it can be done better than that clip since the Teleporter’s range and interaction radius increased enough that you can just go straight to point instead of using two teles.

It’s not that the changes are useless, it’s just that they benefit a playstyle that’s different from your own.

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they don’t focus on applications of infinite duration because hardly any team really wants nor needs a tp placed in 1 static spot for really a long time as the most valuable use case (as also their position) shifts frequently in the fast pace of OW.

you legit use infinite tp for the same use cases of old 3.0 tp but with shifted priorities and to a much lower frequency all due to how the down time got massively spiked up.

if there was a “1 spot fits all (purposes)” for every point/map to even justify infinite duration, we would’ve found it ages ago and been spamming them with old 3.0 tp for a long time now. but such a spot doesn’t exist because good uses and good spots are relative to the positioning and plays of both teams: something that changes a lot and is dynamic.

hard disagree because it suffers from the same issues as current live infinite tp. you can’t simply expect a squishy, shorter ranged (yes that include her slow orbs) hero to have good hero uptime when her engagement AND disengagement tool has a guaranteed >=10s down time.

according to some other sym mains, the buff on ExpC might be bugged (idk, haven’t checked), but the point stands.

The current 2s decay time doesn’t prevent such a maneuver because you can see in the clip, he had time to charge up an orb before tp could be interacted with i.e. clearly can have time to maintain charge. even if he did lose a level ever so slightly there, getting it back is demonstrated quite negligible to point that we didn’t notice.

and in fact, the thing that prevents it, is how tp is not being available to cast most of the time because it’s either stuck elsewhere or stuck on cd due to it’s massive down time.

old 3.0 tp, if placed from where current tp is usually placed from the choke door, gets you just outside of the front door of the point (on the wooden steps of it). the clip didn’t do that because 1) he was tping much further back 2) he saw the bastion and wanted to tp under them.

arguably infinite tp is also detrimental to your passive static playstyle as well because you can’t shift your insurance tp positions to meet where the team positions well either because you have to wait 10~12s whenever you do whereas with old 3.0 tp, you’d place it down more closer (in terms of time; if playing her well) to when you actually need to use it for that purpose allowing you more flexibility in what you can use it for and overall higher effective uptime as opposed to just uptime e.g. leaving tp up at spawn when no-one’s dead nor even close to dying is uptime for tp, but not effective uptime since there’s definitely other use cases in different positions that will more valuable.

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Disagreed. It is one of the most underrated considering how much quieter it is now, you can use it while jumping/falling (great for juking enemies who are persuing you over ledges and around corners) and can cover the most vertical and horizontal distance without always telegraphing where he is going (meaning you do not see him save for his starting point and his end point).

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The most valuable use case for teleporter is determined by context. If it’s overtime and you need to hold a static position, then infinite tele is great for allowing multiple angles of coverage and the low frequency of replacement becomes an advantage. If you’re attacking on some payload map where the point is constantly moving, 10 seconds is an appropriate time to adjust to whatever’s going on.

There won’t be a “1 spot fits all purposes” for every point or map, because it’s impossible to calculate all purposes or situations. There are some REALLY good spots that allow for clever tricks (I like placing a teleporter in the upstairs airlock on Horizon to utilize the doors as free protection), but most of these spots go unknown because for one, most people are just used to “fire and forget” teleporter instead of “long-term utility” teleporter, and two, they’re so situational that they don’t drastically improve Symm’s situation to the same extent as Lucio’s rollouts.

Whether it’s better than finite tele is subjective. However, it’s a hard truth that a 10 sec tele is objectively better than 12 sec tele. If you still disagree with that, there’s no point to continuing this conversation.

I already pointed out that he didn’t lose a level; that’s besides the point now.

Let’s break things down here. Stevo’s manuever basically boiled down to placing tele as soon as possible to chase down people while maintaining high charge. What the patch notes allow is for you to chase down people while maintaining high charge without any need for consideration of the downtime of your teleporter.

In some situations, there may be an opponent that’s just barely out of reach that you can chase down into a corner or similar. Something where you won’t have to go too far, but where you probably don’t want to bother waiting on teleporter. These experimental changes enable that.

The increased decay time just means more time people will spend avoiding you until you do low enough damage that it’s safe to engage again.

This is making a lot of needless assumptions of me that are largely wrong. I don’t use “insurance” TPs that stay at spawn constantly unless there’s a situation where it’s particularly useful (e.g. the aforementioned spot on Paris). I enjoy the flexibility afforded by manual control over my TP’s destruction rather than automatic. I don’t find myself in enough situations where I can rely on teammates to actually use the teleporter consistently enough, so I play in a way where I don’t have to care if they reposition. These are my use cases that make infinite teleporter valuble to me.

Either way things go, Symmetra is getting buffs. Minimal teleporter downtime is back down to 10 seconds and if you have competent enough teammates to take it in 2 seconds, that team’s just as mobile as they were with finite tele. Why are you complaining about steps that are being taken in the direction that benefits you?

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this is the exact reason why a tp that can be more frequently cast with lower down time is better because you can move it and repurpose it better since the situation changes frequently and a lot.

Here’s an analogy:

No-one’s saying it technically isn’t an improvement, but it’s nothing meaningful.

wasd isn’t likely enough to chase the majority of the cast with mobility abilities. a 2s difference on a serially long cd doesn’t make it all that much more available to cast. having a serial long cd is always going to make it more unavailable than a parallelised long cd (cd that ticks as you use it/get value from it).

that’s a reaaaaaaally small set of situations you’re talking about here. like if you’re going to go chase someone just outside of 12m with primary, your team most likely won the fight and you’re just trying to clean up the last few kills with low hp in which case why not just go for spamming orbs?

??? many heroes don’t need to be in 12m of her to engage in the first place and many of the heroes with a similar effective range either can outsustain 180dps (to the point of outliving sym, not implying that they can come out with net 0 difference) or have enough burst to take her down before sym can take them down.

see my reply to someone else talking about the inaccuracy of such statements (please expand post or open link):

I said from the beginning regarding the tp changes: right direction, not potent enough to really change anything. treating it as if it did make a huge change is being disingenuous.

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Teleporter deployment time decreased from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds
Damaging barriers with primary fire generates 25 temporary shields per second, to a maximum of 50

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i just think its funny how you say that like Reaper’s teleport is something good in the first place… a game changer for symmetra would be simply placing the teleporter after higher CD without the need to destroy then wait… It would be like placing the 4th turret, the already existing one vanishes

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This nerf was honestly unwarranted but I guarantee the Bronze-Gold Players will whine if it gets reverted back to 50. Either revert the nerf or reduce the cooldown.

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  1. Consider a web service that allows you to trade stocks as long as it’s up, but only lets everyone using it do so for 10 hours before going down for 2 hours of maintenence. The paralell for this is finite teleporter.
  2. Now consider a website that can stay up indefinitely, easily sustaining 50 hours on average, and goes down for 10 hours of maintenence only when a DOS attack occurs (or similar situation that will lead to it being unsustainable). The paralell for this is infinite teleporter.

In terms of uptime:downtime ratio, both of them are evenly matched. An infinite tele that manages to stay up 50 seconds will have the same uptime:downtime ratio as a finite tele, if not a higher one.

The point of this is to demonstrate that it’s too easy to let confirmation bias slip into analogies; it’s best not to use them to describe measurable properties.

And I said from the beginning that if the additional changes to weaken tanks and Brigitte do not go through, Symm will still need some more changes on top of what she’s gotten.

I genuinely feel like the change is impactful and makes a big difference in my gameplay. It might not be big or meaningful to you for whatever reason, and you’re entitled to your opinion as it’s a subjective measurement. However it’s honestly kind of silly for you to assume that I’m being disingenuous when you can’t even see my perspective.

Maybe you’re willing to see that as the truth it is, or maybe you’ll just stick to treating your own subjective opinion as fact. Whichever you choose, I’m moving on.

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those are incorrect parallels because when you place a tp down you’ve invested in that spot with already certain use cases (or just 1) in mind for the duration of the uptime and down time (i.e. you’ve invested in an option, not having a window to start trading). e.g. if you put down a tp for spawn, you’re not going to be flanking, or using it to engage in any fights, or vice versa.

I mean I can see that in your attempt of an analogy where you completely neglect how in placing a tp you’re investing in a location for a duration whilst and how that limits what you use tp for.

you talking using objective measurable properties yet the objective fact is that

  • current live tp has an experienced down time of 12s + time not using tp whilst active i.e. in the interval [12, infinity)
  • ExpC tp has an experienced down time of 10s + time not using tp whilst active i.e. in the interval [10, infinity)

if you’re only ever considering the bug of immediate self destructions you get a ~16.67% decrease, and if you consider more realistic scenarios where you actually spend time using it and actually have a meaningful uptime to actually use it for whatever use case, the % decrease drops lower, i.e. objectively not making much of a difference.

to act like she no longer has a massive experienced down time in tp or that her cast frequency isn’t still really low causing low hero uptime is being disingenuous.