If you’ve played a lot of Overwatch and reached at higher levels of play, maybe platinum and up, you’ll probably cringe at the sight of an attacking Symmetra. She has a very unique kit, but she’s mostly situational. Her main strength is providing a good chance to pull of a first hold defence- holding enemies from ever capturing the first point in certain maps.. and that’s it.
From general statistics gathered from stat sites like Overbuff and MasterOverwatch, Symmetra is the least popular hero. Her saving grace was that she did have value in pro matches, but the current meta has her falling out of use. With that in mind, Game Director Jeff Kaplan has mentioned in an interview with Business Insider (yes, really) that we should look forward to some changes to her soon. “[Symmetra is] definitely on our list, but I don’t think we’ll see a change go live until probably some time in November,” he mentioned.
What kind of changes? Kaplan did not mention any, but this statement is a hint of thins to come:
“She is a hero we’d like to make some changes to. I think those changes wouldn’t see the light of day until November, though, because we want to do a bunch of internal testing. It’s one thing when we do something [minor] — like, we have a change to Junkrat on the [Public Test Realm] where his Ultimate activates faster, but it’s a very incremental, safe change — whereas the type of changes we think need to happen to Symmetra require a lot more internal testing and discussion.”
With the recent PTR patch only involving small, incremental, but needed changes at the moment, maybe the change for Symmetra is something more substantial? The only balance changes being tested currently is an ultimate charge decrease for Ana- who is getting too many of good uses right now due to that, an area of effect increase of her Biotic Grenade, Widowmaker’s scope animation quickens to 0.3 seconds from 0.5 and Junkrat’s ultimate triggering a bit faster.
Also, the community has started some data mining and found new voicelines for Symmetra, indicating that she may have some significant changes to how she plays.
It must be a huge challenge to keep all the current 22 heroes all viable for play. Just looking at the e-sports scene alone, there’s fluctuations of use when any kind of balance changes happen. Keeping all of them at least in the state where all the heroes has its use, and adding more along the way (¿Quién es Sombra?) is a massive undertaking.
Expect the changes to probably arrive alongside any big announcements Blizzard has in store at Blizzcon this November.