That was right after the Symmetra re-work, and it never made it off the PTR, but yeah. People were binding their scroll wheel on the mouse to primary fire, and rolling it over people and basically taking a 200hp character and deleting them in .5 seconds. It was nuts.
Sad part was, if you didn’t use the exploit, the beam felt really, really good. Once ramped up, you felt almost invincible, because you could melt people the way it was intended. Unfortunately, people with bad aim were seeing bonus damage from swinging the beam back and forth over their target, which would do an initial burst of damage. They weren’t intentionally exploiting the bug, but it was still happening.
Devs saw what was happening, and in a moment of stained underpants, slapped down a hamfisted ‘fix’ that pretty well much castrated the effectiveness of beam weapons, but most notably Symmetras in stage 1, to the point of it being pointless to use it unless you had a shield, or a fat target you could charge up on.
Yeah. That fix for it is what caused the issue with the tickrate and rampup, which is what was ‘fixed’ again on the PTR now.
You do still kind of want to charge it up on a shield for a tick or two if you can get away with it, because a lot of the time you can stand out of LOS and just nick the shield for a quick ramp without being in danger, and then you can drop down and be like AHA I HAVE CHARGED BEAM, RUN PEASANTS.
In the grand scheme of things it really only affects Symmetra due to her ramp up. Zarya’s benefit is negligible. But yes.
It’s NOT a buff. It’s a FIX. It’s how her beam was intended to be but wasn’t because of a band-aid they slapped on an exploit. Calling it a buff is disingenuous, as a buff is something that can be argued against and/or reverted. This is how Symm’s beam was intended to work all along. Not a buff. A fix.
It’s a fix you donkeys. That’s like saying every 5th time Reindhart swung his hammer it did no damage, but we buffed it to actually do damage. Well, no. You fixed it. You fixed the bug.
