What Sym needs most is mains who are actually excited to play her now that she’s actually shining at the top level.
Make her a support.
- Rework her secondary fire to be a yellow beam
- Similar to her primary fire, but will be a fatter, yellow straight beam.
- Opposite to her primary fire charge up mechanic, it could charge down instead. For example, 100hps - > wait 2s - > 80hps - > wait 2s - > 60hps. So it could be like a resource meter, and each resource meter you deplete, you go down a level.
- Rework her turrets, instead give her multiple build ables which she could select. This could be jump pads, ladders, photon barrier, etc.
- Make her primary fire a bit more consistent. It could be like 100/115/130.
- Teleporter and shield gen can be her ult again, Those were cool.
so basically
- a worse land mercy without the mobility that makes mercy work
- with 2 structures that are even more niche and even less usable for self mobility than current tp (and absolutely worse as escapes)
- which all in all revives the core problem sym<=2.0 had which was that the design legit had 0 tools for her to get reasonable uptime
- which will also not fix any of her current problems of high dependency on others for uptime.
why bother then?
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Much higher and more consistent damage, instant weapon swap. Much higher heals. Much better ultimate.
Structures would be useful due to the amount of them, could be super useful for peeling for a support. Those were just some structures I thought off the top of my head. If you have any other ideas let me know.
Photon barrier pretty much is one of the least niche abilities in the game. Nothing can go wrong with throwing a barrier.
No it wouldn’t. Please do not even compare the two. This version would be 100x stronger and less niche. I don’t even need to argue that. Even just using your yellow beam would get more value than sym 2.0.
I’m fine with discussing numbers obviously. But comparable to sym 2.0? Lol. That hero was a joke.
the problem is: the beams defs aren’t going to be long ranged (esp since you’re saying that they’re going to be more consistent along side with the numbers you provided), and so far with your suggestions on structures this is what is looks like:
- low range (for both damage and heals)
- low burst for damage and some burst for heals (but you put it on resource or something that forces her to not heal for x seconds so what value she’s getting is questionable),
- low mobility and
- low sustain.
when you factor in that tanks are being more brawly (i.e. going the direction like how younger rein was in his cinematic), dps are all being mobility crept, even moira will be reworked to keep up with the pace increase, what makes you think this design for sym will work?
barrier may not be as niche as the other 2 structures you suggested (of which were the ones I was directing to as more niche than current tp), but it absolutely is not an escape. only if you make it more like rein’s or sigma’s that gets more arguable, but old barrier 100% isn’t an escape at all. at best it helps with some engagements, but not escaping.
and that’s the core issue I’m pointing at here with the design. if she’s seemingly meant to be low range, how is she getting into effective range, maintain it and be able to stay there long enough to get value? because like old syms’ designs, your design doesn’t have it.
flankers, dps, mercy and lucio solve this through mobility. tanks solve this largely through sustain. you’ve got neither (tho realistically as shown by brig nerfs and all the lynching in regards to her sustain, you’re going to have to solve this through mobility).
Why can’t the beam (heal) be medium ranged? I was thinking about 15m. That seems reasonable.
And if the beam range is too short/low, then the healing numbers can be adjusted. I didn’t have set numbers in mind, I was just giving an example.
Maybe something like.
15m beam, 95/80/65 HPS would be good (Not AOE healing, like moira)
She doesn’t need long range on her primary weapon. She’s a support. She’s going to be behind the team most of the time.
It’d literally be one of the highest out of all supports. Doesn’t bap do like 105dps? This would do up to 140, starting from 100 is bap level damage. If anything she might be overtuned.
She literally has a bunch of structures which make her mobile…
A team barrier and 225hp.
If anything, everything you’re saying is making me think she’ll be overtuned with these suggestions. Need to rethink these numbers.
By the way, her teleporter would be an option, as well as jump pad and ladder.
However teleporter would have a finite duration and only useable to herself. Much shorter cast time also. That could work.
MORE TURRETS!!!
Portable shields!
Healing stations!
Need a teleporter here!
A stasis mine!
moira’s heal range is 15m with 70hps linear aoe + 6s cd fade mobility and even she’s getting a rework to adjust to 5v5 (which is more spread out) and the pace increase. what makes you think leveling an uptime design that’s similar but with likely less mobility than current moira’s is going to end well in OW2?
yet you’re putting a resource or charge down mechanic on heal to encourage sym to do something else other than healing of which with your design is either place a structure or damage with beam…
and obvs placing structures isn’t going to be much of the match time compared to using damage beam…
like again, how is this not going run into the same core uptime problems as old sym?
and if you’re saying to continue healing anyways despite having lower hps due to charge down mechanic, then obvs her healing is going to have low burst.
jump pad is terrible mobility as an escape and obvs isn’t going to let sym catch up to allies better let alone get herself in and out of damage range.
same can be said about ladders.
legit ladders, bridges and jump pads are simply inferior to current tp that lets you instantly go to your destination (both in terms of speed + not getting shot down or booped off or getting destroyed miduse). esp since current tp can go both long and high whereas ladders bidges and jump pads don’t necessarily do both.
not saying current tp is perfect, but those other forms of mobility structures simply aren’t better.
here’s a reference point for you:
for zarya to get decent uptime to damage with her 15m beam (that starts off at like 90dps iirc btw) and somewhat playing behind the other tank (yes they hokey pokey in an out and share the frontline uptime, I’m not disregarding that), she needs the following 400hp and 200hp bubbles while she has 0 mobility.
the sym you’re proposing here obvs has much lower sustain, not 0 mobility but none horizontal (which is most of the time what’s important to catch up to people), and about the same range.
now sure you may argue “but she’s supposed to heal” but here’s the thing:
- you put in a mechanic that encourages your sym to not heal and do something else more (of which that something is literally damage)
- if you want her to basically only heal, with that low mobility, basically your design forces teammates to anchor their positioning to you to get that benefit (leading to only being playable in deathball comps —> too niche) and sustain isn’t going to help her catch up to allies compared to mobility (thus being outshined most of the time; like why not just play mercy at that point who’s more generalised and has more escapes to deal with flankers?).
and again, the other reference point is moira who despite 15m heal range, 20m damage range, 6s cd mobility, self heals, orb self heal, etc. is also getting reworked for OW2 due to all the pace changes.
But sym has more damage, much more utility, and two ults which both are better than her ones. (Tp and shield gen are VERY strong).
Moiras not really being adjusted because of the pace increase, she’s being adjusted because there’s one less tank and she’s a rush support who primarily focuses on healing tanks. She’s actually already a fast paced support.
How about then a flat 100dps beam which has 25m range then.
I know sym mains like the charge mechanic. So you gotta choose. Short range with charge mechanic, or long-range with consistent dmg?
And the heal decay is more so the sym has to manage her healing, rather than mindlessly m1 all the time.
Here’s the thing.
Zarya has little utility outside of her damage and grav, thats why she’s so survivable, and her damage is definitely lower than syms. Sym charges up her beam far more consistently for obvious reasons, and can hold that charge much better. As long as your shooting something you’re perm 100 charge +10dps zarya.
You don’t use sym for her damage. You use her for her utility. DPS is a side thing.
But in regards to this next version of sym. Maybe then we do need to give her 100dps 25m beam…
- utiltiy isn’t a blanket cheque to excuse to write-off poor uptime design.
- “more damage” isn’t an argument when talking about issues regarding how the hero gets uptime to heal or deal the very damage you’re pointing to.
- e.g. do you think a damage hero 150hp hero with a 1m range primary 0 sustain abilities and 0 mobility is going to have all their uptime issues resolved if their primary deals like 200dps or so? obvs not even if you give them “utility”.
what makes you think that your sym design isn’t a “rush support” design?
like if she’s not getting enough mobility for her to catch up to allies to heal them for her limited heal range, how would she not end up only being playable in rush deathball comps?
cool now that addresses the damage uptime side (somewhat). but what about the heal uptime side?
as an aside:
aren’t you one of the people pointing to OWL usage of sym (who legit build comps and strats to specifically “mindlessly m1 all the time” essentially) to justify that she’s fine?
uuh no. barriers themselves in this game generally have pretty good utility (whether it be blocking damage, blocking enemy heals, denying los from certain effects, etc.), esp zarya’s since hers is the only one that has a cleanse side effect. again, utility isn’t a blanket cheque to write-off uptime issues and obvs that notion hasn’t been in mind when designing and balancing zarya and various other heroes.
We’ve seemingly derailed from your design to current sym so I’ll address this from 2 perspectives (current sym and your design) to demonstrate the point I want to make about sym’s uptime:
current sym:
max dps is lower than sym’s, but actual damage dealt numbers obvs isn’t the case (you can see in overbuff hero pages) because conditions to deal damage (i.e. how they get uptime) simply is worse for sym and better for zarya.
like the claim that sym charges up more consistently isn’t really true when you actually consider what she has to get that charge i.e. what tools does she have to not only reach 12m of the enemy (already lower range that zarya’s beam), but also what tools does she have to stay there long enough to get and maintain charge (getting charge is ~2.5s minimum if 100% aim)? esp when sym has to start from 0 most of the time because unlike zarya, sym loses a level upon 2s of not dealing landing primary fire ticks on enemies or enemy shields whereas zarya maintains charge for longer passively (i.e. the decay rate is a lot slower).
like very evidently 225hp simply isn’t enough. meanwhile zarya, who has much more sustain + actual abilities to stay alive in effective range to be able to more reasonably actuate value from a sustain damage weapon, doesn’t face the same uptime problems.
Hence why you see zarya be able to deal more damage stats-wise than sym despite the fact that sym has turrets oin top of weapon fires whereas zarya just has weapon fires. Now let’s look at your sym design.
Your design:
so you’re adding 2m onto primary and in terms of sustain, and not much is added on sustain (if barrier is like old barrier, it legit isn’t much sustain in effective range) unless maybe when it comes to shield gen except you’ve reduced the damage on it (i.e. making you need to spend more time in effective range to get something done with it). is sym going to be reasonably getting uptime with that? I doubt it as she’d be highly reliant on deathball comps to get that even if she’s a support.
a 100dps 25m beam would more adequately address this, but you’ve made her heal method pretty much the same which suffers a similar issue but is more focused on mobility because getting close and staying to allies != getting close to and staying close to danger.
It kinda is, a hero cannot have high DPS AND good utility. Imagine mei with soldier gun.
No. But that’s a massive, unrealistic hyperbole which I didn’t suggest at all.
Think of it this way.
A hero could have 5 star damage/killing potential, but 2 star utility
A hero could have 5 star utility but 2 star killing potential.
That is balanced.
What you’re suggesting is 5 star utility but negative star killing potential, negative star sustain, etc.
I meant that rush support isn’t necessarily a problem, but moira is so focused on healing clumps of high HP pool targets.
Sym can be a rush support, but she wouldn’t be an AOE healer, so she wouldn’t need to worry. Plus, we haven’t even tried this design.
How about healing scales with distance. Like beam falloff.
Something I’d like to see is like a really vivid yellow color beam at close range, but a pale yellow colour at large range. The max distance would be 25m perhaps.
No.
It’s decent. But nothing compared to syms utility is my point.
They aren’t really alike at all. Syms utility, and charge mechanic, etc is wildly different from zaryas.
A sym tping her whole team across the map gets more value than both bubbles and arguably her ult combined. But a zarya staying alive and dealing more DPS on the frontline gets more value. Etc.
high dps != good uptime. like even mei and sombra despite being “utility dps” all have reasonable uptime tools.
mei actually has range via icicle and wall placement range (like 35m iirc) not to mention higher sustian of cyro + 250 to compensate how her damage is lower.
sombra has perm invis + mobility so that she pretty much always has the initiative + be able to get in range often and stay there.
again, killing potential != uptime. yes my example is extreme and that was on purpose to show you a counterexample to the logic you were in fact using.
utility and damage simply aren’t a blanket cheques to write-off for poor uptime design.
like you were (and still are) saying damage/killing potential and utility can nullify uptime issues, and I gave you a design that 100% follows that principle but absolutely unquestionable in how trash it’d be.
uptime has 2 aspects:
- reaching the effective range (mobility vs range), and
- staying in the effective range long enough to get value (sustain vs burst).
and for support designs there are different uptimes i.e. heal uptime (whereby depending on the heal mechanic, may not be concerned so much about 2.), damage uptime, utility uptime if applicable, etc.
you design for support sym absolutely runs into a heal uptime issues due to mobility not compensating lower range, and possibly a damage issue depending on which solution of beam you decide to go with.
the rush support is kinda the problem. moira’s only decent in deathball comps rn because her value drops off quickly when teams that play more spread out (which will happen in 5v5 with only 1 tank + making tanks more brawly + dps mobility creep).
your sym design, who’s likely going to have less mobility, will suffer the same problem even if she doesn’t aoe heal.
it doesn’t really solve the issue. you’d still want to only really play her in deathball comps so that teammates would get the heal by slowing down. like having falloff scaling only just makes the problem only slightly less black and white, but the dichotomous difference is very much still there.
Honestly, I think Sym is going to be pretty much ignored for PvP. I don’t have high hopes.
I think the team will be putting a lot more effort into giving her the best of all her previous iterations and more in the PvE content.
And sym has her teleporter, her turrets, and she can spam from range. That’s reasonable uptime. Sure her primary fire has less uptime, but thats the same for meis primary.
Rush isn’t going anymore as long as lucio and rein exist in the game. Problem with moira is she only provided AOE heals. That was all she gave. sym will provide more.
It gives her more uptime. I’m not sure what more you want, for her to have 0 weaknesses? 25 range yellow beam?
you legit
did
not.
TP:
legit one of the longest down time mobility abilities in the game (10s min, can have more than 10s because if you have it up somewhere and you’re not using it, that’s also down time. and this even will be more and more frequent as the pace of the game increases). not to mention it has a 2s deployment time. not to also mention if you use it for any team tp or so, that you don’t have it for yourself anymore until you get another tp cast.
Turrets:
just because you have have a turret somewhere further away, that doesn’t equate to sym having longer range. like do you consider junkrat being long ranged just because he can leave a trap on the other side of the map and still have it trigger?
like it’s simply unreasonable to consider turrets as equivalent to a weapon fire or to be as significant enough of their gameplay to count the hero as longer range esp given how counterable they are. like are various heroes’ “range” destructible, or on 10s cd each or heck even when you put them far, they still need the enemy to actually walk past into their los to actually damage while they’re still being able to shoot you back even if they didn’t walk past them?
And the worst accusation of all, “can spam orbs from range”:
just because projectiles don’t have falloff doesn’t mean they don’t have an effective range 
like do you consider genji or junkrat to be long range just because they can spam far? are you going to go into duel snipers from long range with genji or junkrat and expect to have a good or decent success rate with that spam?
obvs no for the same reasons you don’t expect that from say reaper, tracer, sombra, bap, or any hitscan with a shorter ranged hitscan.
sym (all iterations) simply doesn’t have sufficient tools for uptime. what changed was that old syms legit didn’t have tools for it at the design level, and current sym has really bad tools for it.
and I honestly don’t see your design actually making a good improvement on that core issue, let alone all the drastic gameplay changes you’re imposing form merely changing the core purpose/goal of the hero that I haven’t gone into yet.
I doubt it considering from we’re seen so far with OW2, there seems to be a decrease in tanks’ sustain to facilitate them being more brawly and so whether if it’s viable to speed boost a rein with shield up to take the team closer is a big 
.
do you consider a reaper sniping with his primary while all mobility abilities are on cd as uptime?
what I want foremost is a design to make sense (i.e. actually conceivably viable) first, and then we can discuss whether or not such a drastic change in gameplay design is “fun” or even reasonable as a rework for sym (this “fun” subjective side I legit haven’t even gone into thus far) as well as whether if there is any point in such a design in context of what’s already in the cast.
legit look at all the other heroes’ designs (who haven’t had historical balance issues) in how they get uptime.
- mobility compensating low range or vice versa of longer range to compensate
- sustain to compensate low burst so that they reasonably live long enough in effective range to actuate the sustained value or vice versa of higher burst to compensate low sustain so that they don’t actually need to stay in effective range long.
and when you consider the above principle in context of OW2 whereby teams will generally play more spread out, there will be mobility creep in both dps and tanks (tanks because they’re going to be more brawly, case in point: rein will be able to manually cancel charge, that’s going to lead to reins using charge much more for general mobility), do you honestly think that a low effective heal range support with low mobility and meh sustain is necessarily keep up with most other heroes to do their job well?
I highly doubt so.
you may think what I’m saying is “oh you just want no weaknesses”, but legit look at how various other heroes have been designed and numbered:
- mercy despite being 15m ranged for beam has a 2s cd GA with 30m range to let her very leniently reach allies to get in range for high uptime as well escape threats. not to mention has a passive self heal on top of how mobile she is which already makes her hard to shoot at.
- lucio is similar in that as long as he’s alive he’s always healing or speeding people around him and he’s got speed boost and wall ride speed boosts to chase down allies to ensure they get his benefit despite it’s radius and can heal himself while healing allies as well. his healing might be low but his ult provides really high burst sustain for key moments where needed and can boop to peel.
- ana and zen despite low mobility has decent if not long range on all their abilities so that wasd movement is enough. both have self healing methods. ana has sleep to self peel or peel for others. nade for burst sustain or burst offensive (or both). zen can abuse corners well for shield regen + his volleys for ranged burst that is also his tool for dealing with flankers. and like lucio, has a high sustain ult for key ultimates to compensate low base heals.
etc.
like yeah, those heroes obvs have weaknesses, but the point I’m making here is that when you look at the designs of all the heroes that haven’t had historical balance issues, all of them have tools in their design to try and actually compensate their weaknesses to a degree. heck look at tracer: her weakness is supposedly her fragility (and it is) yet she’s been given also recall that also heals her back up. dps snipers have mobility to get angles and escape flankers despite supposedly not being all that mobile, etc.
like that’s the kind/level of “weakness coverage” we’re dealing with for the vast majority of hero designs in the game already. any new hero design will need to meet that standard to be viable.
Because their kits were underwhelming to compensate.
Overheal can come back but the limitations would either make it useless or the rest of the hero’s kit would have to be crap.
I was more thinking of what if people use the teleporter they get a temp(shield) boost of lets say for example 25
Putting more eggs into the team TP baskets is not the sane thing to do when the issue is that most of Sym’s impact is into said unreliable basket.
actually it was 5 meters