u/HalexUwU

When I say "6 years" I am referring specifically to the time between Sym's 3.0 rework (when she gained teleporter as an ability) and around 2024-25 when she started to get played in professional games more, probably around the time that she gained sonar on turrets.

It's always been strange to me that it took so long for people to start playing her in coordinated games, because almost everything she's valued for now she's always had in her kit... so was it really just that it took 6 years for people to really start testing her out and experimenting with playing her more? Or was the Sonar on turrets that big of a buff to her kit, specifically within the context of pro, that it allowed her to have viability? I mean I can totally understand how turrets made her much better in very high elo (as without sonar they were literally useless, and with Sonar they are super valuable for scouting angles/giving your team an early warning about enemy positions.

I'm purely just curious. I don't keep up with pro super consistently, so my experience has always just been on the ladder side of things, but it's crazy how just in the past year people have COMPLEATLY changed the way in which they work with Sym's. The kind of teamwork and cooperation I get from teammates now compared to a year or two ago is just unbelievable, and I've gotta assume it was driven by her recent popularity in pro... it is simultaneously unbelievably frustrating that it took 6 years for people to start picking up on "oh hey, the instant 25M blink is pretty useful!" which I've been trying to tell my teammates about since she got reworked.

I've gotta guess that to some extent this was driven by her sheer unpopularity (teammates don't learn because they don't play with her, and she wasn't given much 'weight' by pro players because most of them didn't play her), but it's one of those things where I just feel like... This is an incredibly, obviously powerful ability... what took so long for people to put that together?

I can't speak for the majority of players, but my experience has been that picking anything but hitscans results in the enemy team playing multi-flyer comps.

I'm Champ 3, I'm currently the highest ranked Sym player on NA, I am rank #49 (sorting by rank). Almost all of my games see counterpicking patterns like this. If one team isn't on, at minimum, 2 hitscans, the enemy team will slowly start swapping every hero on their team until they're playing double, triple, sometimes even quadruple flyer comps.

Here's a game that I just had. Bans should be noted, too. This was not the enemy teams starting comp, but something that they slowly pivoted to as the game continued:

Bans: Sigma, Widowmaker, Mercy, Pharah. Elo range: GM4-C4. We won this game.

I honestly don't think that hitscans are actually that good right now, and the stats generally support that assessment. Even in the GM/Champ range, the ONLY two hitscans with positive winrates are Emre and Ashe. If we go by pickrate, Em is the most picked and has a positive winrate, then the next four (I'm including Sierra because, despite not being a hitscan, she fulfills a similar role) all have negative winrates, with Soj at 47.1%, Cass at 47.3%, Soldier at 49.5%, and Sierra at 45.7%

https://preview.redd.it/g4256nudbsyg1.png?width=838&format=png&auto=webp&s=b458f698075a8a9b1b2b3bb7258bf34428521913

On the whole, hitscans are popular, and they get played a lot, but their general performance is not that good. This leads me to the conclusion that hitscans are being picked not necessarily for their actual strength, but because they are a perceived answer to something else. When I look at my overall experience with everyone just insta-swapping to as many flying heroes as possible, the thought process makes more sense.

Overall flyers aren't the most prevalent, but I don't think it's necessarily about how much they actually get picked, but how often they act as a counterpick. Pharah is a really obvious example of this, and her winrate reflects it. Under no circumstances should Pharah be strong right now, as hitscans are overtly popular, and even the popular supports and tanks are good at dealing with her (Illari, Ana, Dva, Sig), but that's just it: Pharah isn't being played against multi-hitscan comps, she's being used as a comp check for teams which lack them. This provides reasoning for her exceptionally high winrate despite the otherwise unfavorable meta surrounding her. Pharah is also, despite her relative popularity, a hero who seldom appears as a primary hero throughout the T500 leaderboard. When you look at the number of people with Pharah as their most played compared to Sierra, Echo, or Ashe, she is significantly less prevalent, implying that the people who play Pharah aren't using her as their primary hero, but as a niche secondary/tertiary pick for certain situations, likely to answer comps which lack hitscans.

This really bring me to the core of this post: Hitscans aren't actually that strong, it's just that in a game with increasing amounts of mobility, particularly vertical mobility, hitscans have more agency and the resulting sensation is that they are stronger than they actually are.

Agency describes a heroes feeling of control. That meaning: high agency = hero feels like they get to choose how they want to play, low agency = hero feels like they have to play responsively. So, an example of a high agency hero might be Sombra, since she can choose when she wants to engage, and who she wants to engage on, allowing her to pick and choose how and when she fights. A low agency hero might be Brig, who has to play responsivley to the enemy team, meaning that until the enemy does something, she essentially has to wait. When we look at the DPS roster from an overhead a generally true statement can be made that, when the game has more flyers projectile heroes have less agency. If you're on junk and they go Pharah, suddenly you have to spend a lot more time choosing how you're going to play against Pharah. I actually don't think that Pharah invalidates Junkrat, or makes him unplayable or anything... I just think it forces him into a responsive position where his actions have to be made in response to Pharah's actions. This is a trend that is generally true among most projectile heroes when interacting with flyers.

So if we look at Sym for example, in games where the enemy team is playing flyers, I have to adjust my gameplay around that by playing responsive to the flying characters. Sym can't realistically hit flyers, so the result of that is that I lose agency because I no longer have the ability to interact with one of the players on the enemy team, atleast until certain conditions have been met (cooldown expenditure, ETC). It's a combination of both, Pharah wins against this character, but also I have less agency now because there are less viable targets. The perception of having less agency is the same as a perception of your hero being weak, while the Pharah counterswap isn't game deciding, it has that perception because of how much I have to conform around that pick. A great example of a non-flying hero who has a similar effect is Widow, as she is a non-viable target for many heroes while also limiting the way in which you can play the game. Essentially the pattern being created here is that players will prefer picks which they feel give them agency, resulting in "high agency" picks being played regardless of their actual strengths, evidenced by the popularity of heroes like Kiri, Soj, or Cass despite their statistical weakness. Because projectile heroes have so much agency removed by vertical mobility, players will pivot away from from them, towards picks with greater perceived agency, as a reaction. So, when the game is full of flying picks, who projectile heroes cannot consistently interact with, leading to a perception of weakness because of reduced agency, people will instead elect to choose heroes who feel like they DO have agency against these picks: Hitscans.

On a less extreme level, I think that this is also felt through ultimates, with players preferring heroes who feel like they have agency over the currently prevalent ults. As of right now, I would argue that Illari, Sigma, and Emre (flying ults) lead players towards heroes who can answer them. Heroes like Venture, Mei, and Junkrat have almost no answer to flying ultimate's, resulting in a feeling of removed agency, where-as heroes like 76 or Cass do, as they can both contest these heroes while they are in the air, as well as with their own ults (which are superb zoning tools, especially against flying enemies).

This is all to say: with the increased prevalence in flight there has been a decreased perception in the agency of heroes without tools to deal with it. Hitscans, despite being statistically weak, offer agency against vertical mobility tools, resulting in an inflated popularity and perception of strength. This is something which we have even seen the inverse of in OW1, as during double shield meta, a comp in which hitscans lost a lot of agency, we saw a huge boost in popularity among heroes who had tools to get around barriers, such as doomfist.