overwatach-symmetra

Are you a Symmetra main?  Or do you just love to play her? Have you been counting the weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until you finally, finally got word of the Symmetra overhaul?  Well, wait no longer!  Jeff Kaplan took to YouTube today to detail all the changes coming to our favorite Vishkar architect.

The biggest news, she will be the first character in Overwatch to have the choice of two, count them, two ultimates.  She sill retains her original teleporter but now she also has the option to build a shield generator.  How will that work?  Glad you asked.  When her ult is fully charged and you hit the ult button, you will still get the teleporter, but if you hit the ultimate button a second time you will then get the shield generator option.

The shield generator is a buildable item which, of course, means it can be destroyed it just like the teleporter, or Torb’s and Symmetra’s turrets.  When deployed it will put shields on all allies within a “very big radius”.  Similar to Mercy’s ultimate, the shield generator will ignore line of site, and will also shield players more than her current, individual shields.  No word yet on exactly how much more.  Unfortunately, this does mean the current iteration of individual shields will be dead and gone.  Honestly, not much of a loss there.

The teleporter isn’t getting out of this unscathed either.  In a fantastic move, the teleporter will now have more health with part of that health being shield health, meaning it will regenerate over time.

But if that isn’t enough, she is getting even more shielding.  Symmetra is turning into a shield goddess.  Instead of her current shield capabilities, she will have a completely new ability called Photon Barrier.  (seriously, between Photon Barrier and Shield Generator I feel like this is Star Trek and Star Wars respectively.) This Photon Barrior is elliptical in shape and, when deployed, will move along a chosen trajectory.

Dear god, this can be used in so many ways.  Don’t have a Reinhardt on your team but need to push forward, Symmetra is you gal.  Need a handy hiding spot for your oh so vulnerable Mercy, Symmetra it up.  Want to protect Bastion but don’t want Reinhardt to stand in one place most of the match… you get the idea.  Seriously, I could keep coming up with scenarios where this shield would be oh so damn useful.

But wait!  There’s more! There are also going to be minor tweaks to her current turrets.  You will start with 6 turrets before the ability goes on cooldown.  You can still only have 6 turrets deployed at any given time but doubling the available turrets before cooldown is huge.  In addition to that, the cooldown is being reduced from 12 seconds to 10 seconds.  No more frantically running to play 3 turrets so you can not so patiently wait for the cool down to slowly place 3 more.  Now you can place all 6 quickly and step away.

Her primary weapon is also getting a slight boost.  The distance of the beam will be slightly extended.  Don’t worry, she won’t suddenly become some sort of beam sniper, just maybe give her a bit more survivability when getting in super close to enemies.

UPDATE:  The Symmetra changes are now live on the PTR.

Kaplan also gave us an update with a feature announced at Blizzcon.  Shortly after Symmetra, the new control map, Oasis, will hit PTR with the goal to push it out to live games on all platforms in early 2017.

One more thing, then I’ll let you watch the 12 minute video if you so desire.  Blizzard is adding a social feature that will allow you to, hopefully, stay with players you enjoy playing with but aren’t on your friends list.  At the end of the match, in all the post match shenanigans, a small button will appear that says something to the effect of “stay with group”.  When you hit that button, it will automatically party you up with the other people in the match that also hit the button, enabling you to roll from match to match to match until you are sick of each other or pass out from exhaustion.

These other changes are coming to the PTR soon™.

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