Blizzard is Re-designing Symmetra’s Abilities

Prior to Overwatch’s release Blizzard had a firm layout for Overwatch. Anyone can switch heroes at any time without the restriction of multiple heroes. That’s now gone in quickplay and competitive play. Over the months after release, Blizzard is always iterating, improving, and balancing heroes. The recent change they made was to Symmerta. In a developer’s update video Jeff Kaplan (Blizzard VP and Overwatch’s Game Director) talked about redesigning Symmerta and what they want from the changes.

One of Overwatch’s big appeal was the fact that your team composition was flexible during matches. Now Blizzard has shied away from some of those ideas. But it’s all for the better, they’ve added an arcade mode which lets the player have more options in game modes. And of course, there has been already many tweaks and changes to all the heroes. But nothing as severe as the upcoming Symmetra update.

On Tuesday, Jeff Kaplan release a video that addresses Symmetra and how player are utilizing her. Blizzard wanted Symmetra to be viable in almost every situation, not just in a curtain map or team composition. As of today, the update is now in the public test servers. Usually, when an update is released on the PTR, it releases next week on the live servers for everyone.

 Let’s get to the meat of the story, the Symmetra redesign.

·        Ultimate(s)

Symmetra will be the first hero that will have multiple “Ultimates”. She will still have her teleport – which has some balancing changes like, more health and shield for the teleporter. She will also get another ultimate called, Shield generator. This ability provided shields to allies in a large area around her. This ability ignores line of sight, which allows the player to be creative about their placement. You must toggle between Ultimates to use them.

·   Photon Barrier

The Photon Barrier will replace Symmetra’s Photon shield. Instead of targeting allies to give them a shield boost, she will launch a shield that travels in a straight line. Anyone in the barrier will gain full effect of the Photon Barrier. This is a big change in the way Symmtera plays.

·    Sentry Turrets

Before the update Symmetra’s turret were useful but never was available with the long cooldowns. Symmetra is all about setting up to manipulate the map. The Overwatch team knew this was a big part in her gameplay, so they decided to provide Symmetra a full six turrets right of the bat – before, you had to wait until the match started before the cooldown ticked down, and on top of that you could only hold three turrets at a time.

·    Photon Beam

The Photon Beam is Symmetra’s primary weapon. It was a good tool for close range combat. Jeff Kaplan and team didn’t feel that it had enough range, so they increased the range.

Blizzard did shy away from their original idea of Overwatch, with the idea of switching heroes on the fly without any limits was a great hook for players. But as the game ages the game also becomes a better one. That shows with the additions of Ana, Sombra and now the Symmetra update. I don’t usually play as Symmetra so I don’t really know the problems that she has in competitive mode, but she is a fun hero to play. I’m going to see how much has changed in her gameplay.