Blizzard’s recent attempt at making turret-centric heroes less reliant on their automated abilities has seemingly gone sour.
Just a week after Torbjörn and Symmetra received multiple balance changes to put less emphasis on their turrets and more emphasis on other parts of their kit, one Symmetra main created a video to display how the recent changes to her Photon Projector aren’t nearly as impactful as one might expect them to be.
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With the season five mid-cycle patch that dropped last Tuesday, July 11, Blizzard added a passive ability to Symmetra’s primary fire that allows her to regenerate shield health while dealing damage to a shield, but the life-sucking ability isn’t useful at all, according to one high elo Symmetra main.
Posting a video to Reddit, this player shared all of the times during a 10-game span in which they were able to regenerate life with the passive ability, and spoiler alert, it wasn’t that much. The player, HalexUwU, noted that they averaged 84 healing from the passive ability for every ten minutes played. The means that the passive procced for less than three seconds every ten minutes.
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Listing a plethora of issues with the new passive that make it extraordinarily niche, Halex determined that, even though Blizzard’s intent was to make Symmetra a more flexible hero, the design team had actually done the opposite.
“All these changes accomplished was making Sym more niche,” Halex said. “This clownery needs to be fixed.”
Halex didn’t comment on how the damage value changes to both the Photon Projector and Sentry Turrets counter balanced one another. But based on Halex’s general assessment, it’s not too bold of an assumption to believe that the secondary fire buff isn’t worth the corresponding nerf to turret DPS.
