Symmetra Changes to Hit Overwatch PTR

For those familiar with Blizzard Entertainments First Person Shooter Overwatch, having the ability to heal is a much sought after skill as far as support goes. Symmetra is the only support character to not have any healing skills, and as such I she gets overlooked a lot.

That’s not to say that Symmetra doesn’t have some very impressive skills of her own. She can cast defensive shields on people, set up laser turrets to defend chokepoints and even create portals that can get everyone back into the fight a lot quicker. Nevertheless, Symmetra is a character that tends to only get played at the beginning of matches, once a point is lost players tend to switch to someone else.

Jeff Kaplan has confirmed this in a recent interview

“You know, Symmetra’s a really interesting hero to talk about,” Kaplan said. “She’s one of our least-played heroes, [but] you have to read the stats with a little grain of salt there: She’s a hero who’s very situational and she actually gets played a fair bit, but she gets switched off of. 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. So, that definitely impacts her play time when you’re looking at the stats.”

Some exciting news though, is that Symmetra is being looked at, and is expected to have some fairly big changes, although this isn’t expected to hit the PTR until November.

Jeff himself said that the changes are “definitely on our list, but I don’t think we’ll see a change go live until probably sometime in November”

Although as usual, we don’t have any details yet but the fact that they’re saying the testing is not going to be a quick affair certainly leads to the thought that the changes are bigger than a simple tweak.

“I don’t have anything really specific to talk about right now, other than she is kind of an internal project right now,” said Kaplan. “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.”

As soon as we hear more about these Symmetra changes, we’ll let you know.