Overwatch team "not looking at making Symmetra a healer" but considering "dramatic" changes
Overwatch fans, the Symmetra overhaul is coming.
The Overwatch community is crying out for a Symmerta design pass, and they will be. Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan addressed these concerns in a recent community update.
"We are looking at Symmetra. I don't think changes for Symmetra are as easy as some minor number tweaks that will have her available and ready for play in a changed fashion very soon," the Overwatch game director said.
"I think the types of changes that we wanna look at for Symmerta might take us a little bit longer than something like the Widowmaker scope change, which was relatively small and easy for us to do."
The Overwatch team is exploring multiple possibilities for changing Symmetra. It could fiddle with cooldowns and timers, but it could also make "some other changes" that "might be a little bit more dramatic in terms of design vision for her". That said, Kaplan said these changes won't turn Symmetra into a healer; Blizzard would rather move her out of the support category than shift her design so fundamentally.
"We're not looking at making Symmetra a healer. What we're looking at is making her more viable in more situations," Kaplan said.
The idea of the Symmetra balance change is to open her up to more use beyond defence situations, Kaplan said, and the earliest we might see this in Overwatch is mid-November. However, it might be much later than that.
It's frustrating not to know what form the changes will make, but it's likely the Overwatch team doesn't want to communicate those ideas until it has a good rummage around and figure out what it's going to do with Symmetra, to avoid backlash if it changes its mind.
Elsewhere in the video Kaplan discusses changes to Widowmaker and Junkrat which you can check out right now in the Overwatch PTR, as well as spectator mode and eSports broadcasting and upcoming content.