God I really don’t see how anyone can defend this horrendous ability. She’s even more “niche” than she was before. In no universe is this okay.
Just remove TP and give her the old shield. Boom, you have a decent melee hero who can actually protect herself.
Teleporter is quite good and very viable. The problem is that, being it on spawn is so good and as she cannot summon another one when its active so you are simply running and gunning most of the time and has no scape in a bad scenario like grav or something she could easily scape. Just give it a much higher CD and allow it for replacement. Destroying it should ease the CD too.
I agree she doesn’t need tp considering it just ruins the hero’s playstyle.
But I do think the shield is a problematic ability as well…
As a front liner she needs some sort of survive ability similar to cryo freeze or overload to help her up close against brawlers while keeping her weak to divers.
Her secondary fire is pokey so she needs less focus on ranged damage but rather more on the medium range damage…
It’s kind of hard finding something dive is good on but brawlers aren’t up close so it has to be something that either punish brawl for attacking from one side, or punishing brawl’s low mobility. Either way, she needs to be able to stand longer near brawlers without being better against dive in the process…
this is the worst take on tp I’ve ever seen. like consider the following questions with your proposal:
how do you think she’s going to get in effective range?
how do you think she’s going to stay in effective range long enough for how long her TTK on others is?
how do you think she’s going to get out of her effective range when she’s done her job?
her old photon barrier doesn’t provide a solution to all of that. at best only one of the 1st 2 at a time.
tp at least takes care of the first and last one and addresses the 2nd one in allowing certain combos that have lower TTK.
blame the balancing of it, not the design. because they very clearly balanced it poorly with the infinite tp nerf and by simply having poor numbers on her kit all-round rather than the design being inherently bad.
burst, effective range, sustain and mobility are all the parameters for heroes’ uptime for their job.
what makes you think that removing sym’s mobility for a barrier, that’s only good against static distanced enemies like a torb turret or only providing about like 0.5s of cover in effective range, is going to make her better when amongst the cast she’s got low burst, low effective range and absolutely no way in hell having enough sustain with such a barrier to compensate all those lows on top of absolutely 0 mobility?
With her team…
Orbs are still there. She doesn’t need to be in melee range 24/7.
Basic awareness? Good positioning? Not feeding?
Just go back to Sym2.0
The only correct decision moving forward.
so like right now? 
that’s why she’s currently so niche and bad rn: incapable of getting uptime for her job reasonably independently unlike many other heroes that can and needing to drain out her team’s resources for to get that uptime.
current tp (as bad as it is) at least leaves some opportunities to let sym get some uptime for herself. but removing it straight up leaves 0 for herself.
orbs rn are objectively bad. sure it was worse before 3.0, but doesn’t detract from how bad they are now:
literally a sniper-tier low firerate (encourages aiming) but they’re so slow that aim physically matters very little in landing a shot in most ranges despite the projectile size.
If you want a numerical proof of that claim, expand and see the numerical proof section of this post.
no. a sym without mobility is only ever going to get within effective range of enemies if she get team pocketted in which case we’re likely talking about w+m1 (12m) in which case she’s not going to have a say in whether she escapes or not unless she’s throwing, the team decides that for her as they’re the ones enabling and facilitating the engagement.
and when your entire team is 12m from the enemy, either it’s hard commit to team wiping them, or risk dying trying to get out. i.e. sym doesn’t disengage with that build, she simply doesn’t have the tools to, she’d just w+m1 until a team wipe or she dies. and that’s exactly how it played out with old sym.
I miss the times when using tele was actually a game changer.
I used to bring it close to the enemy spawn and the poor numbs couldn’t even tell what was happening.
what was so bad about the old teleport (or shield gen) as her ult?
Like I really don’t understand why it was changed to a map wide shield, anyone know the reason?
Nothing. It was everything else about her. People didn’t like an auto aim weapon that did a lot of damage.
Sym definitely need some improvements.
boom now she uses the shield to get in her effective range and then dies😎
swag
Like what Zephrin said, it is better for Sym to have mobility.
Also:
This is beyond true.
I would do anything for Sym’s old shield back 
I miss it so much. So versatile, so reliable. TP on ability will always hold her back. It’s just like rez and immortality field. Way too strong for a cooldown so they can’t change anything else about the hero
I mean OP brings up an important topic. If she can’t be balanced with TP, why don’t we try to balance her without it?
While I agree with the point of this post, I don’t agree that giving her photon barrier would be balanced, it would probably leave her as a very weak hero.
Or swapping the Photon Barrier back into a cooldown ability & having a unique version of the turrets as a DPS ultimate ability that can help her secure multiple kills, like DPS ultimates do.