😡 Why Sanjay (Symmetra 3.0) is Not Symmetra and Why You Should be Angry

Most people who are happy or want to change the symmetra do not even play with her, they just want to stop facing it because it is more comfortable not to have someone melting you. You just need the statistic of this player with sym, and the statistics of a sym main to see the diference. I want to play with symmetra, and to be a defensive they need improve something, like the fire rate and speed of the secundary shot, but the sym 3.0 looks like a mini and fragile zarya.

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I don’t see why people are mad. She is now more deserving of a slot on the roster, being more effective, but requiring more on the player’s end. Now, she requires: a. Aim. Her gun is still basically the same, damage ramps up as you continue to hit your target, now requiring actual skill. The right click is now better to take out enemies at range, with faster charge and a blast radius. b. Gamesense. While not able to skip respawn times, Symmetra’s new teleporter will act as a less powerful Resurrect, that allows you to choose where to put your teammate. And the throwable turrets make her even better at finding enemy attack routes, making it easier for the enemies to get routed by your team, if proper communication is used. I myself, am glad that Symmetra is more viable, and less rage-inducingly easy to get kills with. As I stated before, I dislike Auto-aim weapons, although, Winston is an exception. Moira always feels cheap when I die to her, and Symmetra always makes me go into a state of rage whenever I see her running at me.

Because you have no idea how Symmetra works in the current environment. And I don’t mean that in a demeaning way.

It’s no surprise that people who don’t play her at all (or with a friend that do) simply have no idea how she works, given her reputation. Since launch, she has been relegated as a “troll pick” because people used her as a griefing tool, using her teleporter to send people down edges and teleporting people horribly out of position (eg, defending first point in a payload map, TP sends people all the way to third point). Add to that the fact that her kit requires some level of dedication to even learn how to properly use it in the first place (a feature also shared by heroes like Mei, Doomfist or LĂșcio), and the people that experiment her out to see what is her deal get frustrated because her kit is not as straightforward like, eg, Soldier, and join the “underpowered” wagon.

I don’t mind players like you, that don’t know her strengths purely because of lack of knowledge. I’m more than glad to explain a lot about how, where, and why Symmetra works (or not) in certain situations and maps. So, let’s go through your list and see what we can clarify.

(Small sidetalk about frustration)

You mention feeling robbed of your experience when a “no-aim” character kills you. How broad is that? If Reinhardt gets too close and maul you to death, is that cheap? If Pharah is flying at the skybox and a random rocket that was not aimed at you explode near enough to kill you, is that cheap? If you see Zarya, and she tracks you perfectly and kill you, is that cheap?

If you said “no” to all the three instances above, that is not really that different than dying to Symmetra beam, Junkrat spam, or Moira biotic grasp.

In any case, that is something that depends upon you. We have no control on what we feel, but we have full control on how we express those feelings. If the game have a mechanic that you feel frustrated to fight against, redirect that towards the devs, not the person playing the hero that is in the game.

(Unless, of course, that is an obvious bug, like indestructible turrets inside walls.)

Aim is severely overrated in Overwatch. At least half the cast can do their job only having average aim, while their most important features don’t care about precise aiming at all. There is at least 7 skills[1] that you can improve upon that will be generally more effective for you as an Overwatch player than aim.

Symmetra is one of those heroes that don’t rely in precise aiming. But if you check all her metrics, she is severely limited by another aspect of the game that is as important or more: Time. Everything Symmetra do is limited by time, more than any other character (even Torbjörn). Her gun requires 2 seconds to start dealing decent damage (in beam and orb form), her turrets are frail enough that its usually not worthy placing them mid-fight, and her ultimates need to be placed between fights, or she needs to leave a fight to place them, and that can be the factor that turns the battle against (or in favor of) her team.

All this together means that Symmetra key ability is her capability to read a fight, and predict the enemy next move. When you think you are being smart by taking a side path, and is met with four turrets and a orb to the face, that means Symmetra read you like a book, and prepared herself in advance for you moving through that space. On the other hand, if she prepared all those defenses, and you took right instead of left, she is now alone in that flank, with all her defenses set somewhere not useful for her team. She needs to scramble through the pieces, and make an emergency plan to salvage the situation.

If someone plays Symmetra, and is able to constantly outplay the enemy team, that is a sign of skill. But the main problem when I present this argument is that when people die because the enemy aimed better, or was in the high ground, you can live knowing they were “mechanically better” than you. But being outplayed so constantly that you feel you can’t do anything to revert the situation means the enemy is a 200 IQ Rick & Morty fan “smarter” than them, and that hurts much more. Because training aim? You can give tons of excuses to not sink those hours into aim drills. Lack of time, lack of focus, bad hardware, “playing for fun”, etc. But when someone outsmart you, you know this was 100% your fault. That is also why everyone pick on the nerds, but leave the jock alone, despite both “outskilling” your average student.

So, yeah. Stop overvaluing aim. It’s not the mighty-end-all-skill in this game. It might be in other FPS, but not in Overwatch.

You are describing all the good characteristics of current teleporter, not the proposed one.

Just like the teleporter, you are giving the good points of the current version of the ability, not the new one.

You are missing that she will only have a stash of 3 active turrets. Current Symmetra have a stash of 6 turrets, and can use 4 as a gate in the main choke/point, while using the extra two as tripwires to alert teammates about flankers. Having a stash of only three turrets means that either you have to cover less flanks, or you have to leave the point/choke unprotected. Both cases are a nerf in Symmetra’s current area coverage.

People have a lot of misconceptions about her turrets, like thinking if they break them, she automatically become useless. The turrets have 1 HP, they are designed to break every team fight! What matter is how you make the enemy team stop focusing on your teammates to turn around and look for those pesky turrets that are pestering them. They are given the choice to ignore the main fight and waste time looking for measly turrets, or ignore the turrets and get slowly melted while the fight goes on.

Also, people who don’t really play a lot of Symmetra, usually only know how to set deathgates (that are heavily countered by Winston’s mere presence), while the range and amount of turrets currently available for Symmetra means she have many more options, and a lot of them really work with her “pre-emptive defense” playstyle I mentioned earlier.

This video gives a good starting point for people trying to understand Symmetra’s strength through turrets:


I hope this helps your perception from the point of view of a Symmetra main.

[1]: The seven skills above aiming in my list are, in order: Positioning, Map Knowledge, Hero Knowledge, Team Synergy, Ultimate/Cooldown tracking, Communication, and Coordination (aka, teamwork).

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We need only look at the other reworks and how they went to know where this is going


Unfortunately there are not as many Sym mains out there as there were the other mains so it might not see nearly the traction. It also does not help that Sym is a very hated character in general.

I expect there not to be much of any sympathy toward those who disagree with the changes. That’s a downer I know. I’m sorry, but I do believe I know where you are coming from with your points.

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You know, I just realized what you may be thinking because of this rework, and I’m sorry for trying to argue. Forgot to put myself in your shoes before making my claims, and for that, I’m sorry. I just let my hatred of current Symmetra cloud my judgement (As evidenced by the fact that I didn’t read the patch notes). If Genji received a rework of this caliber, I don’t know how I would react. Although, it is worth a try before drawing a conclusive opinion on it. Imagine the stupidity you could do with the new Teleport! Sure, backcaps are going to become a lot harder, but since when have they been viable? The new barrier seems like a cool idea, that could be brilliant when properly executed, and overall, I feel that Symmetra will be much more viable and usable. This new Symmetra overall, imo does what the older one did quicker, but requires more work, practice, and management on the Symmetra’s part.

Apologies accepted.

Usually, yes. But I wrote a huge rebuttal on why it’s not really a good idea to “shut up and wait for PTR”:

Tl;dr: We are giving our feedback by talking about how we feel about it, Blizzard’s history show us that once things are in PTR they rarely change, and asking people to stop discussing a matter they care about is rude.

Definitely, all ideas are cool, and individually, I don’t mind trying them out and see how many new options they will open to us (except for orb, that was a dumb change).

My (and OP’s) major complaint on the topic is how they are changing everything on her kit at once. Pretty much the only thing that will stay will be her turrets, but they will change enough in so many aspects (placement, area coverage, damage, resilience, stash size, etc) that saying the ability is equal is like saying Sombra and Tracer guns are equal, and mentioning both have 120 DPS as proof.

Imagine if they gave Genji his Dragonblade as his only weapon (nerfed to be balanced, of course), his shurikens were a short cooldown ability or alt fire (think like Doomfist hand cannon), removed his double jump, his dash would only be active during his ultimate, and deflect would cover a larger area as have a increased duration, but no longer send the bullets back to the attackers. But during his ultimate, he would become a super ninja, have increased speed, double jump and dash back, and his dragonblade would deal more damage.

That is how I felt when I read about Symmetra changes.

I hope to be wrong, but I feel her TP will be much more situational than people are expecting. For instance, if her team already have good mobility, they don’t need the portals to reach high ground.

We don’t know how long the TP lasts, or its cooldown. So, before that, we can’t really say how much mobile this will make her team. If she is able to spam portals every 4 seconds, this can make for an hectic fight where people are switching sides very often (imagine crossing from one high ground to the other mid-fight in Anubis or Numbani).

But if the cooldown is more akin to Mei’s wall (another vertical mobility tool), it will mostly be used like Reaper’s Shadow Step, a reset position button, not something to be used mid-fight. Then we get back to the point that if her team don’t need a stepladder to reset positions, she would be much more useful by having her occasional photon barrier.

Ditto for the wall. We lack a lot of numbers before we can decide if its a good ultimate or not. If the wall is permament until destroyed/replaced, and can be cast multiple times (ie, placing a wall don’t prevent you from earning ultimate charge), that is amazingly strong. But if it is on a time limit (like Supercharger) in addition to being able to be destroyed, or if it prevents Symmetra from earning ultimate while the wall is up, the difference in value is very different.

I disagree on all aspects of that affirmation. But, again, we need more solid number to back any of those declarations. But what we read so far points to the opposite: she have less turrets, her orb is much more spammable and require less thought into each orb, her gun is “solid” DPS all the time thus requiring a bit less caution on approach (knowing when to flank so her gun/step sounds are masked by the battle itself is a major aspect of current Sym), and her ultimate will affect the whole map, instead of the limited range of TP/SG (if TP is too far from the point, its useless. SG need to be close enough to give its bonus to teammates, but far enough to be hard to break).

The new TP and Photon barrier are both situational picks in different areas. To me, they sound like lateral changes, not buffs or nerfs. It’s just different.

The only thing that distinctly requires more “work and practice” is the fact that she will have to aim. And as I said before, I think aim is severely overrated as a “good skill” in Overwatch, unless you play something like Hanzo, McCree or Widowmaker.

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You know, I would actually like to try that Genji (Blizzard, get on making better custom game settings), but I get where you’re coming from. Actually, now that I think about it, that wouldn’t be much different to how I play Genji, in fact, it would make that style more viable, but the removal of double-jump, I would hate (as evidenced as to why I hate new Sombra with a passion. You get hacked, with no time to react, and then, if you’re playing Genji at least, the chance of survival is very small).

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Maybe we should start calling her Sanjaymettra.

Please stop with the “Sanjay”, a rework is not a new hero. They aren’t changing her appearance or personality at all. They are just reworking her.

Calling Symmetra “Sanjay” is like calling Mercy a different name because she can fly.

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From now on I’m calling Mercy by Marcey and Hanzo will be Hanzey.

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We haven’t even seen so much as a teaser about Sym 3.0 and thus we have no idea how close or far she’ll actually be from Sym 2.0.

Chill out and wait for something other than proposed numbers to get worked up over.

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why is sanjay being discussed? i know nothing about an announcement or leak?
source?

edt:naming it sanjay is more confusing then just symm 3.0

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My friends call their new versions “Marcy” and “Hattori”.

As I said earlier in the thread, I really like to give nicknames for different versions of the same hero. We have nicknames for LĂșcio and D.va as well, but they only make sense in portuguese (I’m brazilian).

This is their intention though, so the reaction isn’t unwarranted. The changes considered aren’t reworks they are intended to be a new hero with another skin. I mean it’d be better to delete the hero at this point, and add a new one. Just say in the lore she died and another “light engineer” from her company took her place.

i will never understand this argument about how it’s not really Symmetra but a new hero. It’s like you have no idea what a rework is.

Yes, Synmetra is having her whole kit changed, but her core mechanics will still be largely unchanged. She will still deploy her turrets, she will still help her her team with a teleported, she will still deploy a barrier, and she will still have damage ramp up. Even though her orbs might not pierce anymore, even though she might not be able to auto lock on anymore, even though she might not be able to deploy her shield generator: She will still be Symmetra.

Honestly, it’s like you want her to still be considered a trash pick always. Her kit is finally being reworked and changed to better fit the game and all you can do is whine about how it’s not Symmetra.

Being upset about a big change is normal, but there’s a lot of possibilities with this new kit as well. Just think about how great the new teleporter could be for re-positioning, flanking, getting around enemy builders. A lot of new possibilities. Pairing that with a flanker could make for some great set ups.

A lot of it reads like making her a much more pro active sort of character.

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When patches get released on most heroes it is a rework. It is only very rarely that a hero gets a new ability or one that is changed. Think Mercy or D.Va who got abilities changed. However, even in those cases it was a rework, albeit more extreme for Mercy, because most of the core abilities if not all remained the same. Changing the numbers around the abilities is a rework. I don’t know about Symmetra 1.0 because I never got to use her. I can say that this is remake. Here are the core abilities that remain the same:

  1. Symmetra has turrets with more health and better ways to deploy.
  2. She can still shoot “orbs” that explodes instead of going through.
  3. She still has no mobility. We will address this more later.

That’s it. Now here is what is unrecognizable.

  1. Her primary fire with this Symmetra will no longer be a short range hero like she used to be. This will change her to a hero that is more mid-range. Without mobility abilities unlike pretty much everyone else that is a on Offense or Defense.
  2. People argue that she still has a teleporter, but this is more of a mid-range portal that can be used for flanking. This no longer serves the same purpose.
  3. Shield gen is gone. Now she can’t indirectly protect teammates.
  4. Photon barrier is gone. This was the only saving grace to her lack of mobility and allowed her to set up attacks or protect teammates. Instead we get a Mei wall now, but have to wait for her to have an ultimate to use it.

These are not reworks. These are Sanjay’s abilities, who is in some way similar, but is different overall. Instead you choose to be ignorant and call this a rework. However, if you can’t see how this a remake right away, then I am wasting my time. I will do as I do with other toxic players ignore you and move on.

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This is pretty spot on. I would HATE if my main (Hanzo) was changed drastically, im glad his changes were big but not huge like the ones coming to Symmetra. I really do feel bad for all the poor Sym mains who really enjoyed the game. I would be incredibly sad if Hanzo was removed from the game. Everyone has to show a little more sympathy here. Overwatch is the only game i play so maybe it would mean more if my favorite character was removed, either way though it really sucks that for some people a part of their life is getting removed with this change.

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Blizzard is on the right track to achieve that
 :thinking:

I didn’t know she is a trans! :wink:

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I look forward to every Symmetra change.

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