This sounds like a really great idea! I especially like the charging aspect of how it charges both the healing and the dps aspects. Another idea for healing could be some sort of passive that has to do with health/shield regen but that could be tricky to figure out.
Yeah I had a rework drafted up in my head a while ago
it involved that, projectile speed on orb increase, orb damage scaling with charge (because 120 + improved projectile speed might be too good), turrets being able to heal when not damaging an enemy, using teleporter cleansed + activated passive shield regen on sym/allies with shields (including rein/sig’s barrier recharge that could be fun)
Also I was thinking if you wanted to go crazy change the cadence of photon barrier to be like tracer’s pulse bomb - lower uptime and health but charges way faster so you had it every fight for a crucial fast initiation/block a big enemy damage ability like high noon or d.va bomb
This sounds really fun. Lets just hope Blizzard listens to us and maybe give sym some of these changes for Overwatch 2.
If I knew how to workshop I think I could’ve made it in there??
All I know is that the one thing I want from blizzard is for them to give the players the ability to mess with the same knobs/dials they do for patches so we can present them solid ideas
well
idk
that or experimentals every week instead of every three
though my game design brain has just been rattling really hard over the past week or so so i just really want to do that
if sym 2.0 was allowed to place her buildables from far away she would have been awesome.
And perhaps for her photon barrier to reflect back damage.
Sym’s problem is currently (and was always) her range of attack coupled with her typical squishy-fragility. Her kit being more utility based and requiring more team-coordination than most DPS/characters is also a huge issue. The most independent form of Sym was 2.0, but even then, she was still trash.
If they’re going to make her a worse Reaper/Doomfist, they’re going to need to give her tools for some proper staying power. Otherwise she’ll always be a worse Zarya. The only reason she’s still picked is because her aesthetic, voicelines, and sassiness are top tier and fun. She’s also somehow useful in PvE modes and vs noobs, so there’s that too.
I guess it depends on what you’d qualify as salvaging it. The character had numerous critical problems in that state. For example:
- Creating a permanent advantage, as in Shield Generator, is just highly unhealthy for the game. We later saw this repeated with Release Brigitte’s Rally.
- Most of her kit was specifically focused on passive defense, making her naturally obsolete half of the time due to the existence of offensive objectives.
- She had near-zero skill expression, leading to her being perpetually overpowered at mid-to-low skill levels and literally never played at the professional level.
- The notion of ultimate charge was irrelevant for her, because her ultimate was always active, so it was economically more efficient for her not to deal damage and rather to simply exist with a shield generator instead.
Those problems had to be solved somehow to “salvage” the character, and the rework accomplished that pretty well.
I’m going to be quite honest…
I’m (happily) surprised to see people being objective about her on here…
People tend to gloss over how flawed a hero 2.0 was…(out of love for hero and perhaps hatred of 3.0 I would imagine)
I don’t think she was salvageable…not without making her some completely overbearing based on how much they would have to beef up that kit to get her to work outside of her very narrow niche (a problem she faces even today)
Was 3.0 the way to go? Maybe, maybe not…but I dont think 2.0 was ever going to really work…a rework was inevitable
I think I am going to make a new post specifically about the shield generator and ask the question of if it was balanceable like with a limited duration and such. While I am fairly certain it won’t be making a return and was unhealthy for the game as a whole, I want to see what creative ideas people can come up with as finding spots for it seemed pretty fun.
I think TP need to be ditched because it eats too much of her power budget, and instead you give her Brigitte original Repair Pack, but giving out shields instead of armor. Name it “Photon Shield” as her 1.0 ability, and call it a day.
For a memory refresher, it is a big healing burst on a short cooldown, with excess healing being given as armor that disappear after 4 seconds decaying shields.
If Blizzard decided to turn shield HP into anti-burst, like I proposed before, Symmetra would fill a really interesting niche of protecting the team squishies against snipers.
With TP out of her kit, you can start strengthening the other parts of her kit as well, like a stronger T1 beam, faster orbs (or a return of piercing), more turrets to give her warding agency back, etc.
Heck, if you consider the TP to be a core part of Symmetra as well, you can also consider moving it back into an Ultimate, and changing it so that it can be used more offensively. I keep returning the the idea that activating her ult would give her the ability to place the TP exit anywhere within a certain radius, using the UI of Doomfist ultimate to place the exit, with the entrance appearing where Symmetra is.
I really like that idea for Symmetra’s tp. In my opinion, I feel that her teleporter is really connected to Symmetra’s identity just like her turrets. I think having it as an ability is a little weird and situational. I think that the teleporter ultimate you suggest would be a great way to allow Symmetra to play more offensively and also bring back some aspects of her original teleporter. Using the UI of Doomfist is really great idea for it as well.
2.0 would have been a beast if her photon barrier worked like Sigma’s does now.
She gotta be looking suspect at him to have her barrier and can absorb the barrier for health
My point of view is that every hero in Overwatch have flaws, and we are supposed to use our teammates strengths to cover for our individual weaknesses.
The problem arise when Blizzard failed to give everyone the same amount of “weakness”, thus creating some characters with drawbacks so innocuous that they rarely are an issue, and create the illusion of them being “flawless”. Eg, Tracer, D.va or Lúcio at year 1.
Symmetra 2.0 had a lot of minor annoyances in her kit, and definitely had some glaring flaws, like the lack of range and the overreliance on setups. But I don’t see them as “they are bad, need to be removed”, but as “they are unique and need to be worked around with personal skill, teamwork and ingenuity”.
That is one of the reasons why my most hated part of Hanzo rework was the addition of Lunge. That mobility tool removed one of his weaknesses (dive), so he became a bit too good for his own good. They reeled back some of Storm Arrow damage potential, but very few people actually talk about how Lunge made Hanzo much more survivable in the mid-range fray.
They really are, but if you are forced to take one out to add healing on her kit, I think TP is more “disposable” than the turrets.
Ideally, they would move it back into an ultimate, but that is another beast to tame, since Sym 1.0 biggest issue was exactly that her TP barely helped while defending the last point, so they gave her Shield Gen to solve that problem.
IMO, Shield Generator was the strongest ult in the game, until we got Valkyrie 1.0 and Rally 1.0, which both were also absurdly OP ults. If you was able to keep shield gen with a decent uptime, that alone would justify Symmetra slot in the team.
It definitely needed a nerf. One of my favorite suggestions was originally to reduce it’s power to only 50 shields, but give Sym herself a global 25 shield buff to the team, mirroring her old Photon Shield, without the upkeep issues. That would made her better without changing overall numbers, but moving part of SG power into Sym base kit.
Shield Gen being only a temporary buff could also work, but it needed to be one of those long-term ones, like Orisa Supercharger, or the current Great Wall of Vishkar 12-15s base time, with maybe a burst of healing on placement.
Point being, there was room to work with Sym 2.0, but Blizzard decided to just scrap the whole kit and recreate it from scratch using the same base concept. Some like the result, some didn’t, and some don’t care.
This!
While I do enjoy Symmetra 3.0 and believe that it should be worked around with before they go for another rework (if needed), I didn’t like how Blizzard never really worked with Sym 2.0. I am just hoping that Blizzard works with Symmetra 3.0 before potentially going to a Symmetra 4.0.
I think both her teleporter (which was where you placed it and in spawn) and her shield generator were better than her current ult.
Her shield projection was amazing and less… clunky than her teleporter is.
If they’d made her able to cast turrets and kept her unchanged otherwise, she would be better now.
Her going from very low aim requirement to phenomenal aim requirements was just cruel. I know a couple of people who considered her their main. They either stopped playing OW entirely or switched to a low aim character like Winston, DVA, Mei, Reaper, Torb…
Sym 3.0 aimed to fix a couple major problems people had with 2.0:
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Auto-targeting attacks. A lot of people had issue with Symmetra’s primary targeting enemies automatically, and it contributed to a pretty severe skill curve making her much stronger at lower SR than higher.
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Shield generator. A lot of players had issues with this one too, arguably much bigger issues than with the lock-on. Not only did it basically force people to hunt down the shield generator before they could push, but the temporary HP it offered messed with breakpoints and pretty much destroyed the one-shot heroes viability while active. The latter point is also likely why Blizzard has been moving away from temporary HP in general, as now it’s limited to two sources, both of which are ultimates and which are either only for a few seconds or non-restorative.
#1 is basically unsalvageable. You either have it or you don’t. #2 is kinda salvageable. They could’ve made the SG not regenerate through walls and have a limited lifespan, but I suspect that would make it not so great of an ability. That also has the Torb 1.0 problem where it basically turns the ult into a guaranteed zoning effect since nobody wants to push into that kind of tankiness.
Realistically though, i think both of those were unsalvageable and had to go. The question then is what do you do with the pieces that remain? IMO 3.0 is Blizzard’s attempt to answer that question.
I understand what you are saying and definitely realize the drawbacks to 2.0. However, I feel like 3.0 was kind of rushed. I understand trying things out in their own personal practice range, but we don’t even know if Blizzard tried to help Sym 2.0 independently. Also, it would have been better if Blizzard actually tried releasing changes to better Sym 2.0 rather than just going to a rework. The only way to really know if something will work is to try it in the actual game setting. Nonetheless, the past is the past and I hope the devs actually try more things for symmetry 3.0 before potentially reworking her with Overwatch 2.
That’s fair. FWIW I think they’ve expressed not wanting to mess with Symmetra and Torb further.
That said I have a sneaking suspicion there are going to be a lot of rather dramatic hero changes for OW2, due to the ripple effects of the global tank/support/DPS adjustments. I doubt she’d be reworked entirely but she might play very differently.
If they tried making smaller orbs move even faster for mixup potential and introduced the turret changes she probably would’ve been better but still hated for her beam.
Just out of curiosity, did you also argued about removing the autotargetting of things like Reinhardt’s hammer, Genji’s Dragonblade, Winston’s tesla, Ana’s Nanoboost, Sombra’s Hack, or Zenyatta’s Discord/Harmony orb; or are your autoaim complains just for Symmetra?