With the most recent Experimental Card update in Overwatch, Symmetra received perhaps her biggest changes yet as the Damage hero switched to the Support role. While some are loving this new playstyle, others argue it doesn’t quite make sense.
After weeks of anticipation, a brand new Experimental Card finally launched on February 11 and it was certainly a doozy. Every single hero in Overwatch today was adjusted to some degree in the update.
While certain characters were hit with minor tweaks and quality of life improvements, others were drastically changed in a number of ways. No hero was safe and some, like Symmetra, even had their core identity shuffled around.
No longer a Support in this new Experimental Card, Sym now falls under the Support role. As a result, her entire kit had to change in order to match this new play style.
Her weapons, abilities, and even her Ultimate all function differently now. While some prefer this fresh version, many believe it just doesn’t click with the Indian hero.
To fit in with her new Support role, one of Sym’s biggest changes applied to her Sentry Turrets. Rather than latching onto enemies and dealing damage, they now attach to allies and heal instead.
While this may sound powerful on paper, this rework needs some “fine-tuning” if it’s ever going to reach the live servers, players agreed on Reddit. “[Turrets] need to avoid people with full health.”
In order to fix the issue, others suggested a “manual” targeting option be added to allow for some on-the-fly healing changes. “She needs a way to choose which person to heal, and yeah, the healing needs a buff as well.”
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Although some players are in favor of Sym’s new overhaul making it into the full game, with the aforementioned buffs, others remained skeptical.
“This doesn’t really work out,” Reddit user ‘Chartercarter’ fired back. “To have a healer character whose only form of healing can be removed completely so easily isn’t a good idea.”
Without her Sentry Turrets in place, this new Sym build can’t do anything else to heal her team. So while it is “interesting” at a glance, her new style may be “wildly inconsistent” if it reached the main version of Overwatch.
“Sym is my second favorite hero,” another player chimed in, “so I could totally be biased, but as it is now, I don’t think this would be a good change. Since she can’t directly heal people, it often feels like you only have one healer.”
For the time being, this enormous set of Experimental Card changes are sticking as just that. There’s never any guarantee these innovative tweaks will reach the live game. More often than not, they merely serve to showcase some bold design choices that never quite saw the light of day elsewhere.
Though every now and then, a handful of hero updates do inspire some live Overwatch updates. We’ve already seen popular demand for Mercy’s changes to hit the full game, so only will tell if anything gets copied from this new experiment.
