Overwatch: Symmetra Buffs Coming in November
By Maxwell Jeffery 26 September 2016
Symmetra fans are in luck, as Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan confirms that Blizzard will be looking into giving the support hero a buff in a November update.
If you’re an Overwatch fan who is into the competitive side of the game, there’s a high chance that you’ve noticed a lack of Symmetra players in the more prestigious rankings. Well it seems Blizzard has noticed this too, and buffs to the support character will likely be coming in just a little over a month.
According to Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan, during his interview with Business Insider, changes to Symmetra are definitely on the list of things to do. Kaplan stated that the turret-builder is one of Overwatch‘s least played heroes, though he claims that this statistic may be deceiving.
“What happens commonly is players will play her on defense on the first part of a point, and then when they’ve lost that point, then they’ll switch off of Symmetra,” Kaplan commented, regarding the support character’s lack of use. “So, that definitely impacts her play time when you’re looking at the stats.”
The director also mentioned that a character as situational as Symmetra isn’t really desirable, meaning that Blizzard is going to take a good look at changes to the hero before choosing how to buff her. Any changes that do come the Indian architect’s way will likely only be active come November, due to a range of other balancing issues on the agenda first. At the moment, Kaplan and the team are looking at balancing Ana, Widowmaker, and Junkrat in various ways.
As Symmetra is the only support character available without some kind of heal, perhaps Blizzard will see fit to raise the amount of shielding she can grant to her allies. An alternative buff could be reducing the charge time for the character’s ultimate, in order to get more teleporters up and running to keep her team in the action, as well as making the character slightly more useful when it comes to attacking an objective.
Despite her lack of use, stats released several months ago actually indicate that having a Symmetra on your team was a good thing, with the defensive hero holding a win rate of over 60% across all platforms. This was, at the time, the highest win rate of all heroes, so either the game has changed too much since then, or perhaps players have simply gotten used to countering the turret and teleporting tactics.
Do you think that Symmetra could use a buff, Ranters? Leave us a comment and let us know!
Overwatch is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
