=== Intro ===

tl;dr: Symmetra needs buffs that not just compliment her concept as an architect, but encourage people to play her as one.

I feel like as of late, Symmetra has become less well-defined in her concept, and in addition to the community is never really sure what to do with her, the developers are also struggling to balance her in a satisfying way. She originally started out as Support, but the lack of her ability to actually heal people mid-combat hurt her ability there. A few reworks later, she was eventually placed in the “Damage” category which was rightfully so given her high damage output. Even now with 2-2-2 being released, changes to her kit are still a bit “inconsistent” for lack of a better term. The infinitely-lasting teleporter is nice, but having its cooldown start upon destruction really hurt her ability to turret-bomb enemies. The ability became more of a supportive-style ability (akin to a Lucio using speed boost), vs an ability a DPS hero would utilize repeatedly. The bug fixes to her primary fire were a great buff to her damage, but as of writing, there are changes on PTR to put more of a cap on them, just as Symmetra has started to shine in the emerging barrier-heavy metagame.

It suddenly dawned on me that a critical label for her went mysteriously missing ages ago, a label that served as a guide for exactly what she should be doing: “Builder.” Symmetra is canonically an Architect, an occupation that requires tons of measurements, calculations and balancing aesthetics with functionality. While I can say the aesthetics are definitely already present with the hero, the other aspects are not as noticable within her design. So I took a long, long look at her kit. I’m no Top 500 player, but let’s just say I know my way around the mathematics someone “on the spectrum” would heavily utilize, and I want to take the “Builder” concept to the absolute limits. I’m going to adhere to a few design goals as I do so:

1. Elements of Symmetra’s kit don’t just synergize with each other, but relate with one another through specific measurements and ratios that enable these synergies.

2. Preserve elements depicted in sprays, player portraits, etc. Removing her turrets and teleporter removing various unlockables. Removing her Photon Barrier for a different ult is still a viable idea.

3. She should be “formidable” on her own, able to take on opponents with little to no dependence on teammates. She should be able to take on opponents in a FFA deathmatch environment that does not require opponents to be gullible enough to walk into a turret nest.

4. Skill with Symmetra should be derived from measurement, prediction, and creative thinking more so than raw dexterity.

5. Symmetra shouldn’t require any more major reworks that add or remove abilities, but instead just have her current kit tweaked to perfection.

=== Suggested Changes ===

Primary Fire damage per second: ??? -> 140

No ammo requirement.

Player Comment: Damage per second for primary fire is tricky to calculate. After all the math is said and done, a flat 140 is a reasonable round number that comes close to the average she does; time spent reloading included. Removing Symmetra’s ammo requirement will allow her to use it to measure things on the fly without consuming resources.

Secondary fire projectile speed: 25 m/s -> 27.5 m/s

Player Comment: Secondary fire can use a slight boost as a projectile. It’s Symmetra’s only option against Pharah, but it still does a hefty amount of damage on its own, so a tiny speed boost and removed ammo requirement should provide just enough help that the matchup’s not too one-sided.

Primary Fire range: 12 m -> 11 m

Turret attack range: 10 -> 11 m

Player Comment: Setting both primary fire’s range and turrets’ attack ranges to be the same distance allows Symmetra to more easily measure out turret placements by examining the hitsparks at the end of primary fire.

Teleporter max placement range: 30 m-> 33 m

If nothing (whether it’s a hero or object) has used Symmetra’s teleporter in the past 12 seconds, there will be no cooldown for manually destroying it. Otherwise the cooldown is 12 seconds.

Player Comment: Having the teleporter last infinitely is definitely useful for Symmetra’s team. With the window for teleporting being separate from the cooldown however, she often suffers from not having it available for when she desperately needs it, (e.g. in the middle of a Graviton Surge). These problems are only made worse when teammates don’t even bind the interact key to take the teleporter! This change will bring back some of Symmetra’s independence for when she can’t count on teammates.

Turret cooldown: 10 s -> 3 s

Turret dps: 50 -> 35

Turret projectile speed: 15 m/s -> 16.5 m/s

Maximum turret count: 3 -> 4

Turrets no longer slow.

Symmetra no longer has a cast time for creating a turret.

Player Comment: The stacking slow effect of turrets made clusters of turrets very difficult to escape from and are a big source of frustration for many mobility-dependent heroes. These changes are intended to bring more flexibility in the way Symmetra distributes her turrets and increasing the speed with which she can do so. Having Symmetra’s turrets attack the same target helps eliminate situations in which the turrets are attacking an invincible target (e.g. a Mei in Cryo-Freeze)

Assume all bug fixes mentioned here: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/four-symmetra-bugs-that-have-a-strong-negative-impact-on-her-gameplay/396383

=== Explanation of Changes ===

Most of Symmetra’s abilities center around placing some object in 3D space, so the most important measurement to her would be likely be distance. Here, I’m going to define a new unit of measurement, the “Symmeter”: The distance Symmetra walks in 1 second. (About 5.5 meters). With this, Symmetra can relate the distances and ranges of the rest of her kit to each other:

1 Symmeter: The distance Symmetra walks in 1 second

2 Symmeters: Length of primary fire, attack range of a turret.

3 Symmeters: The distance a turret travels in one second.

4 Symmeters: A turret’s attack diameter.

5 Symmeters: The distance secondary fire travels in one second.

6 Symmeters: Maximum placement distance of a teleporter.

Infinity Symmeters: Length of Photon Barrier.

The second most important measurement to Symmetra would be damage dealt per second, and by extension, how many resources she commits to an attack. If Primary Fire’s damage per second is made to be the same as a group of all turrets at once, then Symmetra can more easily guage the impact of boosts from her teammates. For example, with 4 turrets max:

0: 1x (normal speed)

1: 1.25x (same as a discorded target)

2: 1.5x (Supercharger)

3: 1.75x

4: 2x (Amplification Matrix doesn’t boost lasers, but same amount)

=== Methodology for calculating changes ===

A few controversial changes are needed at first to help calculate the rest of the changes to Symmetra’s kit. These changes will make Symmetra’s primary and secondary fire more suitable for measuring things without consuming resources while also serving as slight nerfs to compensate for other bigger changes.

Constant damage for Primary fire: Photon Projector should do a consistent, flat amount of damage in both primary and secondary fire. No ramp up, no ammo regeneration, just pure damage. There isn’t any “absolutely straightforward” type of weapon in Overwatch that can be used to measure or quantify others, no weapon that’s free of the chaos that comes from variation. Symmetra is a prime candidate for such a weapon, and having it would make damage calculations elegantly simple. Using PTR’s damage numbers, and assuming Symmetra manages to keep 100% accuracy on a target for 10 seconds (leveling every 4/3 seconds) then spends 1.35 seconds reloading, the formula to calculate her average damage per second is (60 * 4/3 + 120 * 4/3 + 180 * 4/3 + 6 * 180) / (10 + 1.35) and calculates to 137.339207. At max charge, the formula levels out and becomes 180 / (10 + 1.35) , or 158.590308. This could be rounded to a nice flat 140 dps that divides evenly into Symmetra’s ultimate charge requirement of 1680 points and makes everyone happy. Yeah it’s 40 dps lower than her maximum potential, but it’s starting 80 points higher than where she normally does. Symmetra needs a high damage output potential to compensate for her modest HP compared to how Reaper and Doomfist get more health for hitting people.

and calculates to 137.339207. At max charge, the formula levels out and becomes , or 158.590308. This could be rounded to a nice flat 140 dps that divides evenly into Symmetra’s ultimate charge requirement of 1680 points and makes everyone happy. Yeah it’s 40 dps lower than her maximum potential, but it’s starting 80 points higher than where she normally does. Symmetra needs a high damage output potential to compensate for her modest HP compared to how Reaper and Doomfist get more health for hitting people. Turrets should no longer slow: Removing the slow effect makes it a lot easier to calculate how long a character will be damaged for as they walk away from a turret. It makes Mei’s niche in the game a litle stronger by making her the only one capable of slowing down heroes, gives Genjis less of an excuse to complain about turrets impacting his mobility, and Reinhardts would be happy to not be slowed to immobility. However to ensure that Symmetra can do a better job of keeping people in range of her turrets, she should be able to move and replace them more frequently to compensate, so other buffs will be suggested later.

Infinite Ammo: As of writing, when Symmetra charges her secondary fire, it consumes about 9 ammo, then consumes 1 more ammo when it’s actually fired. The ammo remains consumed if Symmetra cancels the animation by using another ability, but she’s somehow still able to charge and fire a full-charge energy orb even at 1 ammo. Having infinite ammo would nullify Symmetra’s ammo consumption weirdness AND make primary fire function closer to an actual turret. Hanzo, Sigma, D. Va, Reinhardt, Moira, and a Mercy using Valkyrie already have infinite ammo. I think we’re overdue for another DPS having this capability. Doomfist doesn’t count because his ammo is still limited by time instead of quantity.

The next set of changes is intended to make Symmetra more “cohesive” by establishing numerical relationships between each ability. Interestingly, Symmetra is very cohesive already, but can stand to have some adjustments. By preserving common strategies she uses, we get a wonderful side effect of making her numbers a lot easier to tweak by turning her kit into a simple constraint satisfaction problem. There are 10 relationships to define:

Primary Fire should be a length at least twice the distance Symmetra walks in 1 second.

E x Primary Fire: The maximum placement distance of the teleporter should be at least two times the length of primary fire’s beam, preferably three. For teleporters placed two primary fires apart, This preserves current functionality of allowing Symmetra to teleport, turn 180 degrees to damage a foe, then repeat for the other side, being as annoying as Tracer. For teleporters placed three primary fires apart, she’ll have more mobility, but it comes with the tradeoff that attackers in the middle have a bigger safe zone from attacks coming from the teleporter.

E x Q: Photon Barrier should last long enough to cover the cooldown of the teleporter and the time it takes to deploy. This preserves current functionality of allowing Symmetra to potentially stall with Photon Barrier while waiting for a teleporter to come off cooldown.

E x Secondary: The ratio of the distance secondary fire travels in one second to teleporter’s maximum placement distance should be at least 5:6, but no more than 1:1. This preserves current behavior of Symmetra being able to fully-charge an orb, shoot in the direction of the teleporter, and teleport before it reaches her new position.

E x Shift: The max teleporter placement range should be at least twice the distance a turret flies in one second. This preserves the current behavior of teleported turrets getting to their destination twice as fast as if they would had they flew. The time it takes for all turrets to regenerate should be less than teleporter’s cooldown. This allows Symmetra to combine all turrets with her teleporter with the same frequency that teleporter becomes available.

Primary x Secondary: The damage per fully-charged shot from secondary fire < Damage per second done by primary fire. The multi-tick nature of primary fire means that it does worse against armor than secondary fire, and requires that Symmetra put herself more at risk than just spamming charge shots from behind a wall, so it should do more damage. Ratio of damage per second from primary fire to damage per shot from secondary fire should be between 6/5 and 7/6; close enough to be similar, but different enough that you can guage how quickly you’ll get your ult spamming one or the other. If Symmetra is not allowed infinite ammo, then this should stay true: ammo_cap = primary fire's ammo per second * secondary fire's ammo per shot . This preserves current behavior.

Primary x Shift: The length of both primary fire and the attack radius of Symmetra’s turrets should be the same. This allows Symmetra to use primary fire to guage turret attack ranges. If you can’t see the hitsparks when primary fire hits a wall, that means a turret placed there won’t reach your current location. Primary fire should do the same damage as a full group of turrets. If you think that having good aim as Symmetra should be rewarded with more damage, you should be playing a hero that can actually headshot instead.

Primary Fire x Q: By making primary fire damage constant, Symmetra can more easily calculate how long it would take to get her ultimate.

Secondary x Shift: Secondary Fire should travel faster than Symmetra’s turrets. This preserves Symmetra’s ability to partially mask her turrets’ flights with right-click spam. Damage per second done by 2 turrets <= The damage per shot done by fully-charged secondary fire < Damage per second of 3 turrets.

Secondary Fire x Q: Ignoring passive ultimate charge, it should take at most 14 full-charge secondary fire shots for Symmetra to gain her ultimate. This preserves current behavior.

Shift x Q: Symmetra’s ultimate should last long enough to allow Symmetra to regenerate all three turret charges, if not regenerating them itself. This allows her to reposition her turrets to compliment her ultimate, then be ready to place them back where they were originally after it finishes.

Let’s also some external constraints brought on by interacting with other heroes:

A full-charge Secondary fire shouldn’t one-shot Tracer, but should damage her enough for a melee to finish her.

Pharah should be free from worrying about Primary Fire and low-lying turrets, but Symmetra’s secondary fire should travel fast enough that she should still be wary of it, as well as any turrets placed up high just for her.

Photon Barrier should last as long as Widowmaker’s ultimate as a sort of counter-ultimate, though 1 second less still would probably be OK since Symmetra would be using it reactively.

Hanzo’s fully-charged arrows can be fired every 1.25 seconds and do 125 damage each, traveling at 100 m/s, with infinite ammo. He averages 100-200 dps, depending on how many headshots he gets. This is one of the closest analogues to Symmetra’s Secondary Fire in terms of chargable attacks, but unlike Hanzo, Symmetra is unable to headshot, so secondary fire should stay close in terms of damage.

Though it would be nice for a full-charge secondary fire to 2-shot Torbjon’s 250 HP turret, usually it’s just a single no-charge secondary fire away from being destroyed if it’s not repaired

Bastion should still be a 3-hit KO with 3 full-charge secondary fires when not transformed.

Symmetra should still be able to use a well-timed turret to shield herself from McCree’s deadeye. It’s still a really cool play when you pull it off, so they should still have a projectile speed instead of being placed instantly or similar.

Symmetra should remain terrified of fighting a Reaper close-range, but secondary fire shouldn’t be more than a three-shot on him if he doesn’t heal from shooting her.

Symmetra’s maximum damage/second shouldn’t exceed 300-the amount of healing Zenyatta’s Transcendence provides per second.

Finally, after consolidating all of the above, we can write a simple program in python using the python-constraint library: https://repl.it/repls/StupidClearcutBackups

With the above constraints, its output comes to this:

{ "primary_fire_dps": 140, "primary_fire_range": 11.0, "secondary_fire_dps": 120, "secondary_fire_projectile_speed": 27.5, "teleporter_cooldown": 12, "teleporter_deployment_duration": 2, "teleporter_max_range": 33.0, "turret_attack_range": 11.0, "turret_charge_cooldown": 3, "turret_count": 4, "turret_dps": 35, "turret_projectile_speed": 16.5, "ult_duration": 15 }

=== Q and A ===

Q: Why. Why would you do this.

A: Fun thought exercise. Wanted to find an application of CSPs I’d enjoy that could also potentially result in something productive.

Q: “Since you’re removing her charge and reload, what would they do with the indicator on her gun?”

A: It can find some good use indicating your distance from the opponent you’re lasering. 3 notches = 1 Symmeter, 2 notches = 2/3rds, 0 notches = Point blank.

Q: “Why not make the turrets do more damage if you’re getting rid of the slow?”

A: At the time of writing, each turret does only 50 damage with a 10 meter range, AND slows movement by 20%. Because of they way the slow effect stacks, moving takes you 1.25x longer with 1 turret, 1.67x longer with 2 turrets, and 2.5x longer with 3 turrets. While under the slow effect of one or more turrets, a hero’s effective walking speed will be (1 - (.2 * turret_count)) * 5.5 m/s. By the time they walk a distance of 5.5 meters, they take 5.5 / effective_walking_speed * (turret_damage * turret_count) damage. At 1 turret, this is about 62.5 damage (11.3636364 damage per meter (dpm)). 2 turrets is about 167 damage (30.3030303 dpm). 3 turrets does a whopping 375 damage (68.1818182 dpm). And at 5.5 m away, you’re still not even out of the turrets’ range. The damage per second might be be 50 per turret, but the damage per meter compounds with more turrets if you decide to run away from them instead of shooting them. Without the slow effect, the damage per meter linearly scales alongside damage per second. This is why the recent change to slow stacking that got reverted receently was so particularly devastating to Symmetra’s turrets.

Q: Your methodology is poor, too full of assumptions and doesn’t even include actual playtesting. Where did you even get these numbers?

A: Numbers came mostly from Overwatch’s Gamepedia wiki with a bit of stuff that’s currently on PTR. I’m not charismatic enough to attract a big enough following that can commit to hours of playtesting, and I’m sure how I’d even begin to go about getting rid of the “leveling” aspect of Symmetra’s primary fire without weird side effects. If you’re willing to improve on any of this, do feel free to tell me.

Q: “Dude, do you have a life?”

A: Bruh, do you have something you enjoy enough to learn applications for advanced mathematics?

Q: Your formatting’s hard to read.

A: It very well may be, I kind of typed this up in Notepad++ and pasted it into Blizzard Forum’s text box. There may be a bit of formatting mangling, so please point it out to me.

Q: You put so much effort into this for something the community’s just gonna turn into a joke.

A: Which is the bigger joke: This post, the person that ridicules the man for doing the mental work he’s not smart enough or willing to do, or this question and answer for being more of an answer and question?

Q: This is a poor way of balancing Symmetra. Don’t you think she’s going to be overpowered/underpowered?

A: To the best of my ability (read: based on the program I wrote), I’ve arrived at a set of numbers I think would at least be a good baseline for her. Numbers that keep her close to what she currently does, but should still result in a buff that lets her see more frequent use in OWL if the presence of barriers doesn’t result in it already. If I were to nerf something arbitrarily, I’d probably take her primary fire damage down to 120 dps, but for the most part I think these numbers are pretty good.

Q: Do you think these cynically-worded questions are secretly you criticizing yourself on account of knowing that you’ve sunk more time into this than you’d like to admit?

A: Yes. (Unemployment makes you do interesting things.)