CHOICE OF ULTIMATE
Perhaps the biggest and most exciting change coming for Symmetra is her new ultimate ability. Like before, Symmetra will be able to place down a teleporter that allows teammates to travel quickly back to battle. However, now she can also choose to place a “shield generator” that covers any nearby teammates within a certain radius with additional shields.
Symmetra will be the first Overwatch character to have a choice of ultimate ability, thereby allowing her to be useful in many more in-game scenarios. Since the shield generator does not need line-of-sight to administer shields, Symmetra can hide it like she did her teleporter and force the enemy team to find and destroy it if they wish to ensure a successful offensive attack.
Symmetra’s teleporter is great for defending the first point in all capture maps, as it allows her team to skip the long walk back and spend the majority of time fortifying a proper defense. However, when defending a secondary point the spawn point for defense is always immediately behind the area they are trying to defend. This makes Symmetra’s teleporter pretty useless, as it only saves approximately five seconds of walking time.
Likewise, the teleporter was often not helpful when dealing with payloads, as the moving playload conflicts with the idea of a stationary spawn point. If the enemy team were to push the payload past the placed teleporter, its much easier for them to continue forward with no defense setting up a barrier.
The inclusion of the shield generator means Symmetra can now be extremely useful when holding a point that is near a spawn, as she could buff her whole team against oncoming attacks. As well, she could sneak behind enemy lines while on attack and place the shield generator somewhere near the point, thus allowing her team to have a better chance to take a point with additional protection. Who knows, maybe we will start to see Symmetra’s placing the shield generators on the payload itself to further fuel the dreaded Reinhardt/Bastion/Mercy combo.
