i am curious if they didnt touch sym and she was support in 2-2-2 what would she be like? i believe she would be in a worse position than she is now since she didnt bring that much to the table in terms of support
i really wish they leaned into her supportive kit and expanded that when they changed her
What we can assume, almost for sure, is that she would have received some form of primary, cooldown and long cast-time less healing. That, above all things, appears to be the sole demand for a Support character. Symmetra would have gotten that - a new ability, a new function on a new ability, a replacement for an ability, something. As long as she could heal is what I’m saying.
Other than that, I dunno. Never played before late 2019, so I haven’t seen most iterations of the character. Therefore, I couldn’t tell you much of what worked about those older versions of her (despite my experience with the current iteration of Symmetra).
She would likely tear a hole in the space time continuum. (At least mentally, like she already has.)
Safer to wait for the Utility Support replacement hero… likely releasing in OW2.
She’d be in a much worse position now. Echo and Sig would’ve made her life even harder. Limited range, no mobility, measly wind up damage…yeah no.
Shield Gen as a concept would make the damage problem in this game pretty much non existant. But you have to consider how easily Shield Gen was destroyed and how it didn’t compensate for the rest of her kit.
Worse, absolutely worse.
Her Orbs are not easy to hit, now make them slower. Ana and Bap will have constant Ultimate on standby due to Symmetra giving them free charge.
She won’t be able to contend against any hero and once her nest is destroyed, she’ll have extreme difficulty utilizing her Turrets in actual combat situations. Her Ultimate will be the 3.0 Teleporter in a way: the only thing that saves her from being completely useless.
What they might have done:
She would probably be very bad. Just like she is now.
unviable. static comps are basically dead with all the tank powershifts and nerfs, and because of these changes, teams are forced to move around much more. old sym not only wouldn’t be able to keep up, but would face much more down time than she did previously because of the powercreep in the ranged and hypermobile heroes.
when you further factor in 2-2-2, there’s even less reason to pick old sym because OW cornered themselves in balance in that supports pretty much need a spammable heal method to be viable, because THAT’S how important support healing is from the lack of other sources of team sustain, esp when talking about during combat.
if anyone doesn’t believe me on the down time, see the following in the old sym GM gameplay below:
and obvs when you consider how much faster paced the game has become from tank nerfs and powercreep, the above gets much worse.
“waiting for enemies to come to you” simply isn’t an efficient notion to build a hero kit around in OW. you simply get more actions and opportunities for value if a hero has agency to “go to and away from enemies” at will. and that’s the reason why most heroes in the game that don’t suffer from sym’s viability issues i.e. those heroes actually have sufficient tools to facilitate their own uptime at will. like this is the same reason why even snipers (supposedly low mobility heroes) reposition often to maintain being 1 corner away from los rather than stubbornly and knowingly waiting in 1 spot however many corners away from los on the enemy.
i think she would end up just suiciding for kills by flanking, or just spam ineffective orbs and give enemy healers ult
I know allot of people want sym as a support again and I do support this but I think it would be hard to impliment
though Sombra would work allot better
I understand why each support has to heal expecially in 2-2-2 but if that wasnt a thing it would be really cool to have utility supports with great abilities but low damage and no healing
Sym 1.0 would be pretty much the same as she was then; bad. Possibly slightly worse given that one of her best matchups (Genji) isn’t as played as he used to be. 1HP turrets were also comically easy to destroy, and the shorter range would not be as useful against the newer, mostly high mobility heroes.
She wouldn’t be great but she would be a way more fun than current 3.0
She was never actually a support
My hypothesis is that they realized they had too few supports, so they decided to move her into the support category to make it seem larger than it was
She was the black sheep of supports because, well, she didn’t really do it
You can argue shields and turrets, but I always ask how Torb wasn’t a support then. People claim it’s because the ultimate abilities were different, but that distinction, to me, is completely pointless. The characters still had more similarities than differences, and she absolutely was far more similar to Torb than any support.
Symmetra should have launched in the “Defense” category since that’s typically only real time she was used
I think an OffTank version of Symmetra would make more sense.
Since Tanking basically boils down to “Stand on objectives really good, and give your team a positioning advantage”.
And nothing quite screams “positioning advantage” like Teleporter.
She’s also got a mega-tank Ult, and a whole theme around creating barriers and structures out of light.