Why Symmetra's Primary fire feels bad

General Discussion
1

As you can assume from the name, I am a Symmetra one trick. As soon as they announced that they were reworking her I waited until she dropped and now that her rework is live I am over the moon. I love what they have done with her kit. I think it could use some tweaking, but I feel that she is in a place now where number fixes would actually help her. There is just one glaring issue with her kit.

Her primary fire.

Like most of the Symmetra mains who are posting here I have found myself relying on my secondary fire for the majority of combat. The burst damage seems much more capable of killing targets than my beam.

So I sat down and I thought to myself, what is it that makes her beam feel so bad?

When you look at it on paper it shouldn’t. If you were to calculate the average DPS for every hero calculated over a minute of combat withing 10m (As syms beam can’t reach further and damage falloff is a thing) and allot for time spend reloading, the top 5 Dps would be the following:

  1. Bastion (Sentry) - 419.4 Dps
  2. Reaper -189 Dps
    3 Symmetra -147 Dps
    4 Junkrat -134 Dps
    5 Torb alt - 131.3 Dps

An honorable mention goes to Sixth place Hanzo, and 125 dps.

Now when you look at this list there are many things to note. Bastion has spread on his gun, so even with good aim he can’t reach this max dps easily. Though I will say if you just run at a bastion and try to beat him up close it is not easy.

Reaper and Torbjorn both have shotgun style guns and have damage fall off. So their gun doesn’t have as consistent damage, and has to be used up close. Junkrats weapon has a projectile with an arc which makes it harder to get damage than a more reliant hit scan.

When you actually look at it on paper Symmetras Gun doesn’t look that bad.

//imgur .co m/FEtKMER

That is a graph of each characters avereage maximum damage per second for each second, accounting for reloading.

For ease of viewing I split the hero pool up below into two graphs

imgur .co m/lYM1Bin
imgur .co m/MENbyXi

When you break it down, it actually shows why Symmetra gun feels so bad despite being so good on paper. Infact her gun only has one problem.

It has damage ramp.

Damage ramp is a great mechanic for a lock on gun. It prevents the lock on from doing too much damage early one, which allows increased damage later on. In turn the lock on makes sure that you always get the lower levels of damage, because its damage is guaranteed.

Once the gun requires aim neither of those ring true. The lower levels of damage are not guaranteed, but you are still getting the same punishment the auto aim gun has of not having your damage until later in the combat.

Symmetra’s long term damage is fine, her long time between reloads keeps her damage high. Not to mention that it doesn’t have the spread that the other guns of that strength do. Long term, it is the best at what it does. At least in my opinion.

THe problem is the immediate damage doesn’t make up for the long term payoff. YOu often hear of Symmetra’s complaining that they find they die before their gun gets to the full damage. THat might sound like a complaint of a salty sym main mad they have to aim. But when you actually sit down and do the numbers, her time to kill on a 200 health hero is 2.66 seconds.

Let’s see where that lies with the other damage dealing characters

1 Bastion (sentry)- .44s
2. Reaper- .71s
3 tracer- .83s
5 Junkrat 1.01s
7. Doomfist- 1.01
6 Torb (alt) 1.06s
7. Soldier 76- 1.17s
8. Sombra- 1.25s
9. Bastion (recon) 1.25s
10. McCree 1.42s
11. Pharah- 1.52s
12. Widow Assault -1.53s
13. Hanzo-
14. Torb Main 1.71s
15 Sym Orb 1.85s
16 Widowmaker (bodyshots only)-2.08s
17 Mei alt- 2.22s
18 Genji 2.3s
19 Symmetra- 2.66s
20 Mei- 4.44s

This actually makes sense as of why most Sym mains use her orbs over her beam for most fights. Unless you are already fully charged, her orbs kill people far faster than her beam. But more than that, when combat breaks out Symmetra brings one of the lowest damages to a team fight. Only mei does less damage, but only with her primary which slows and eventually freezes the target. I am not saying that Symmetra should have the strongest gun in the game. But if a gun is going to be limited to 10m in range, I should at least feel like it is a strong tool in that range. Not the second worst dps weapon.

But to emphasize my point I am going to put her in a different list.
1 Zenyatta -1.73s
2 Mercy -2s
3 Ana -2.28s
4 Lucio- 2.5s
5. Symmetra -2.66s
6. Briggitte- 3.42s
7 Moira- 4s

When the fight breaks out, four of the support options are better dps picks than symmetra’s. And the two that deal less damage heal themselves as they fight allowing them to stay alive longer.

If Symmetra if going to be a serious dps pick she can’t be doing less damage than a support for the first four seconds of every combat. Especially since she needs to be within ten feet of an opponent to deal damage.

On the graph I included the line of what it would look like if they dropped the ramp up time back to 1 second, it looks a lot better for sym, she has to wait two seconds instead of four to start doing real dps damage. But that begs the real question, why have damage ramp at all.’

Honestly Symmetra’s weapon would be very good if they just removed the damage ramp up all together. 180 damage is not much more than what soldier can do. And honestly I would rather have a beam that does less damage (maybe 160_ but has no ramp up, than one that ramps up to get high damage. Late fight damage does not matter if I have no survivability.

Get rid of the damage ramp up, fix the damage from there. And her gun will feel a lot better.

TL;DR: Her gun feels bad because of the damage ramp up, it is actually a very strong dps once it gets going. Look at the graphs and watch her dps increase over time. To make syms primary feel good just remove the damage ramp.

6 Likes
2

Hi GaySymmetra

Awesome post you have made!

I have a lot of hours on Symmetra and totally agree with you that her main beam now feels to weak to use. Also I feel like you have almost too many options now. Do you use beam? Or orb? or do you go for a quick turret in the backline when 1 vs 1?

When in close fights with tanks who’s shields you should be able to shred, they now can kill you before you have a chance to charge. Before you could charge on a squishy and then kill the tanks. Now you can charge on the shield, oh wait Rein took his shield down and bashed your head in…

To me the new Symmetra-Zaria beam feels useless. I think they should make the orbs her primary fire (which by the way are now awesome) and then give her the moving barrier back as her alternate. That way she would still have a signature weapon (and not just a slightly altered less effective Zarya beam), but also be able to better dual as she was before. That barrier shield gave her so much more utility.

Otherwise I like her new kit very much.

Thanks again for your post with a clear visual of her effective beam dps :wink:

1 Like
3

Mcree dps 140 plus headshots so syms aiming beam should least do about that I think.

4

I am actually also in favor of just dropping the short range beam. It is the only part of her kit that leans towards her being an up close character. In stead of her old shield back. I would rather them give us back the old orbs. That way we can throw piercing orbs that go through shields but are slow. Or faster ones that do aoe damage but don’t go through shields.

1 Like
5

If they wanted to keep the primary as a ramp up weapon, they should have made the orbs contribute to charge level on the primary as well. This way, on successful orb hits while she’s closing distance, she’ll have the staying power with her beam once she gets in range.

This way, we get our cake and eat it too, and the beam won’t feel so god awful when attempting to ramp it up on players.

Just an idea. I’d be down with them making the beam straight damage as well.

6

i use the orb most of the time too, even at close combat especially against highly mobile heroes thanks to it’s splash damage. i almost never use the lighsaber cause there’s little to no reason to get into close range anyway. personally id like if the hitbox of the beam was bigger, maybe even a much loser lock like mechanism as moira’s, but higher charges make it lose the lock and becomes more pinpoint accurate

7

Even if u remove ramp up, that WONT fix the issue, because w weapon accuracy now a factor ur only doing 90 dps at best.

It doesnt need ramp up removed, it needs more range so it can do its intended job–busting barriers

1 Like
8

Damage ramp up is only a good mechanic on an autolock weapon. If you aren’t guarenteed the lower levels of damage, they damage better be high at the later levels, especially since it is not guaranteed. No other Dps has to wait to get their full dps, and two seconds of trash tier support level damage is not something any damaage character should have.

1 Like
9

Her primary feels bad because it is not fun to use. Arguably, the damage output is fine, just fine, in consideration of her secondary and turrets. Nevertheless, the primary feels as dissatisfying as a Thanksgiving without mashed potatoes. It adds nothing to her playstyle and feels burdensome to use. Sometimes, irrespective of damage, a game needs to be fun. Symmetra is not fun to play.

2 Likes
10

Trust me, I was preaching this well before you made this post. I was just stating if they wanted to try to keep some semblance of balance, there are ways they could still achieve a better balance and still keep it viable, but not OP off the bat.

Some people would think 180dps is “too much damage…” even though we can’t crit with it.

All I’m asking is this: Why does it hurt the same to have a laser burn a hole through your eye socket, as it does burning a hole in your leg?

11

Accuracy is definitely important, but a lot of people haven’t played around with the tweak they made on the PTR. Her beam is now a cone (not visibly, just the hitbox) so that it’s larger towards the end of her beam. You can actually hit to the outside of the outer circle on the default reticle, and it will do damage.

You should try it out if you have the option for the PTR. It’s a nice change, but the range is still abysmal.

12

If thats true why isnt it in the patch notes

1 Like
13

I don’t work at Blizzard man, I don’t know why they didn’t include it.

Maybe they didn’t want to urinate in the cheerios of the Symmetra haters out there, thinking they’re giving her an advantage she isn’t due?

I just know every PTR patch, I test the everloving heck out of Symmetra, and my other favorite characters to see if there have been changes ‘stealth’ added.

This isn’t the first time they’ve put undocumented changes into the game.

14

I’ll say this until it’s acknowledged by a developer.

1 Like
15

I will agree that her tickrate killed the only thing that was good about the weapon. My arguement would be that even if the tic rate was fixed the weapon will still feel bad because damage ramp is a bad mechanic on a aim weapon.

That being said both would need to be fixed for the weapon to be good.

2 Likes
16

Could not agree more. And these problems are only compounded when you start taking into account less than 100% accuracy, which punishes Symmetra more than most heroes due to the necessity of high accuracy to achieve reasonable DPS. It’s really quite funny that the one thing they didn’t completely overhaul is the one thing that ends up dragging her rework down. They need to go back and fully commit to leaving old Sym behind, and give her a completely new primary that has a function.

I’ve been meaning to write up a post going over the math of why Symmetra’s current primary is literally never more effective than her secondary, in any possible situation. Maybe I’ll get around to it soon.

This I am also in complete agreement with. At first, I was in the camp that wanted her to receive a survivability buff to lift up her primary. But then I realized that this would merely be a bandaid for several much bigger problems. One, that her primary is still garbage for dealing damage, and two, nothing in her kit is fitting of a close-range hero except her useless primary. Forcing a close-range playstyle into her kit to justify a useless weapon would be a terrible idea and would only drag her down even more. The only solution is to let go of the idea of a close-range ramping primary. It just doesn’t work, and like everything else in her old kit that didn’t work, it has to be excised.

I just posted in another thread a little while ago that despite the rumors of them trying a change to her primary, it was bogus that they didn’t put it on the most recent PTR update. I hope it’s true that this is just another case of a AAA game being incapable of simple documentation.

And one more thing I thought of that makes the laser pointer feel bad to use: there is nothing about it that rewards aim. Nothing at all.

  1. Some people might say “But the better your aim is, the more your damage ramps up!” However this is in fact a punishment, not a reward. It would be more rewarding if I deal max damage the entire 5 seconds I’m achieving high accuracy than only in the last 1 second. As it is now, it merely cripples you and laughs at your effort until it feels you’ve suffered enough.
  2. It can’t headshot, so despite needing aim to do any damage at all, it doesn’t reward better-than-average aim by giving you more damage; it only gradually removes the an unjust punishment. You only get the minimum benefit out of it when you even start to get a benefit from it at all.
  3. It incentivizes doing the least aiming possible by shooting barriers because of its gimped ammo economy designed to make it even harder to achieve the damage you deserve for your aim.
  4. It takes less effort to deal more average DPS with her secondary.

No one likes a weapon that forces you to have extremely high accuracy for long periods of time but doesn’t reward you appropriately for it. Hence why no one uses this terrible laser pointer.

1 Like
17

Now that I don’t have to contantly play her at close range and can play around high ground and teleport escapes I find that her health is really suited for long range engangements. If I take damage less than 100 I can use my teleporter to get to cover and heal it back, placing sentries to slow anyone chasing me.

I have actually found that though I am not getting any real change in kills per match, my deaths per match are dropping drastically and one of the reasons is I can actually play around her shield health.

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