This rework completely removed every shred of creativity from the hero and watered her down into a TP bot with not as much elegance that she once had. She’s incredibly unfun to play against and she’s incredibly unfun to play.
You have to basically feed to get into a range where she can get any value as a Damage hero. You’d think it would be easier as a Damage hero to get kills, right? It’s incredibly difficult to get kills as Symmetra because 1. her overall damage output is garbage, 2. her cooldowns are like a million years long when she depends on them way too much, and 3. her hitbox is still ridiculously large which was meant to compensate for the fact she didn’t need to aim back then. Well now she does, and this hasn’t been changed since she was reworked.
On paper, she does a lot of damage. That doesn’t mean the hero is doing enough damage as a Damage hero. And don’t play the niche card. If she’s going to fill the Damage role, she should be able to fill it. I don’t know why that’s apparently so much to ask for.
Probably my biggest gripe with this rework is that a lot of people’s best hero was basically deleted. Imagine if they made it so Genji was moved to Support and could only deflect healing projectiles. That’s basically what they did to Symmetra and I don’t like it. They completely ruined her, no one can change my mind.
They just wanted to put her as a dps to get all of us queens to quit playing her because of queue times. The entire basis of her viability being supportive is just a coincidence, she is totally a damage hero and Symmetra mains love it that way.
Symmetra’s damage is inconsistent and high risk because they need to offset her utility. This is problematic when her utility only gets effective value in high coordination settings (aka GM and OWL).
Even then, she’s a TP bot and very rarely legitimately ran. If the OWL added a “time played in match” threshold, her overall playtime stat would plummet.
The devs took Sym 2.0, who was only decent in lower tiers of play, and turned her on her head to being a hero that is only decent in the highest tiers of play.
If you play her like a dps lucio you will see she can be quite powerful. Her teleporter is the speedboost. if you team uses it she can be really powerful. I hate when people say close range heroes are feeding for playing in their effective range. Close range heroes will generally need more heals. And be protected more.
She had to stick with her team. But she had a shield that was like sigmas. Except it kept going by itself and was like 1k. But it died pretty quickly and the oval shape made it hard to block some things like explosions from dvas mech. People miss the shield but the ultimate we got is a bit stronger. Right now symettra’s power is mostly in her base kit. Previously her ult was what made her worth using in the team. Shield generator helped her surviability.
She didn’t. You basically only played Symmetra to hold a point or choke that you already had control over. If you lost that point, everyone expected you to switch.
I don’t like her for one simple reason, in a game of countering she doesn’t counter anything.
Even her gimmick tools are irrelevant as other hero buffs melt barriers faster or other cc far more deadlier than the time it takes for her to fire or get to charge 3.
Symmetra 3.0 had a teleporter with a 2 second cooldown and was a projectile speed buff away from being a good DPS. Outside of Widow just deleting her, she could quickly flank teams with orbs from behind and was undive-able unless she just tried to TP bomb someone or messed up her tele.
Everyone was so focused on building her around her short ranged beam and ramp up features (25 more hp, woo!). Now we have Echo with great poke projectiles + mobility and Symmetra trying to make her light-rod work and a perma-taxi teleporter that most players just park in front of spawn.
She should of had her orbs improved and left the beam to be the situational melting rod it was designed to be. Teleporter should have had its “clunkiness” ironed out by now (her whole kit has too much “wind-up” – something has to feel snappier; if not her damage then her mobility, at least).
Symmetra, with an improved teleporter and orbs, would have been the DPS that could quickly start pressuring enemies from around their choke/defense (throwback to how she used to bypass the defense with her penetrating orbs) rather than running face first into it trying to out-damage a team full of sustain.
(It’s still wild to me that barely anyone even recognizes that Sym’s teleporter cooldown went up 5x without any real change to its use outside of leaving it near spawn/cheesy side route or reward for self-destructing)
I guarantee you that was even more the case prior to 3.0 rework. and before you go “she was a suppot back then”, her active value back then legit was just damage.
she doesn’t actually. like even on paper when you actually look into them and compare with other heroes, he numbers are actually quite
agreed
I disagree because if you play current sym as if she didn’t have tp on e, you’d be using plenty of the same strats, plays, positionings, etc. from old sym.
nah, a better analogy would be to say “they hard nerfed out flankers’ mobility with a massive cd” or “they nerfed the fall off ranges of snipers to be 12m”. their problem isn’t that the design was wrong (like you legit can’t be saying adding mobility tool that enables burst combos is bad for a hero that was originally low range, low burst, low sustain and 0 mobility).
but rather the problem is they never gave her sufficient numbers to execute that design and then further tried doing a 180 on the design by nerfing her core uptime tool hard with infinite tp.
It had a far more static tp that you got 1-2 per round.
That is NOT how you play 3.0 tp. That’s how OWL teams and day1 budget sym swapovers play it. Proper 3.0 tp is almost on cd, with pre-cancels to prime it for engage/escape. Dynamic tp is a lot more creative than static tp or shieldgen.
Honestly, I don’t hate the rework, but I don’t like how feedback is selectively ignored.
Like remember back when they gave us a preview of upcoming changes. Many Symmetra mains voiced concerns that the turrets would be worse. The dev response was “no don’t worry they’re actually stronger”. And that just didn’t turn out to be true.
Currently, our turrets do as little damage as 90 DPS on console, 120 on pc. Before, they did 180 AND we could 6 at a time.
Symmetra is supposed to do more damage now, but actually she does the same. They just swapped the damage values so now the beam does the majority of damage instead of turrets.
I also think it’s beyond a joke that they took our most common criticism, the poor beam range, and made it an April Fools.
I would really like to see an acknowledgement of these issues, and some changes moving forwards.
In your opinion. My opinion is that this is by far the most fun iteration of her for all parties.
Actually somewhat engaging in a team fight, instead of just holding left click.
Turrets require more strategic placement beyond just dumping them around a choke
Her ult is actually engaging and requires thought instead of just slapping a very powerful ult behind your back line and forgetting about it
Has a niche with her gun that means there is a specific way to play against her in order to not just feed, but it isn’t game breakingly strong enough to ruin a certain playstyle.
Only thing that she ever had that was in anyway complex that she’s lost was her barrier. Other than that she has just gained engagement, a skill curve and complexity in every aspect of her kit.
My opinion regarding 3.0 is that 2.0 was entirely deleted from the game, and the dev team re-created the whole character back from scratch, based on her initial concept.
To me, 2.0 and 3.0 are two entirely different characters that happens to share portions of the same design space. They are as different from each other as Genji and Doomfist, or Widowmaker and Ashe.
So while I do miss my queen and didn’t connected as well to how 3.0 played, I felt like it was more a “me” problem, and Sym 3.0 had potential to be an amazing character on her own. Just not for me.
Symmetra 3.5, however (the infinite TP change), was just being kept on a leash on purpose for the sake of OWL. It’s the same treatment that Sombra, Brigitte, Mei, Orisa, Mercy and D.va have been going through for years now. They all got their fun factor removed from their kits to make them “balanced” (not quite) for pro play, and in the process made them almost unplayable for the masses.
I also have the opinion that Blizzard backing off from “support do not mean healer” and moving into making every support a healer is probably the second worst thing they ever did to the game. Symmetra 3.0 is simply a byproduct of that decision.
