Hot take: Ana needs a rework more then anyone else

General Discussion
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Now I don’t mean change her role or anything but I really think that she is in more need of a rework then anyone else in the game.
Ana’s kit is like a combination of stuff that just doesn’t work together and optimizing the fun out of the hero. She can also be frustrating to play as and sometimes with. There are other heroes who have issues for sure but Ana’s kit actively fights its self.

Let me explain…

Starting with shrike. There are alot of issues with it, easily the biggest offender. At its best its a nice bonus that can help you survive but at worse it outright hurts your healing. Sometines so much so that I feel like I’d be doing more healing completely with out talents.

Starting with its impact on your positioning. Ana has very poor defensive options. Now this is totaly fine, shes a sniper. Her self preservation should come from her excellent range and while her AA range is longer then average, its not always enough. Mobility exists and Ana is very weak to being doven apon.
All this very often leades to just not being in auto attack range and just having a useless trait in teamfights. The best times to use this life steal dot is almost always when your not in any danger in the first place.

Trying to shrike things all the time also messes with your healing. Positioning to easily land Q and double hitting with every Q versus positioning to shrike stuff are often 2 very different positions. This is why trying to go all out on shrike leads to very poor healing.
Also theres a reason why virtually every AA hero gets some kinda sustained bonus move speed. Its because walking away from an AA hero would almost completly shut them down otherwise. Not only does Ana not have any move speed bonuses but Aim down sights slows her down. Its really hard to stack on people who dont want to be stacked on with out at least halving your healing.
Taking shrike talents only exacerbates this. The quest at 1 wants you to to shrike alot. And its not like you can just fire an AA or 2 when the opportunity arises either. You have to get 5 stack on someone before the stacks start coming meaning you have to sacrifice your positioning even more to fallow your target for at least 5 AAs. The only shrike talent that works is the sleep dart one and its specifically because it bypasses all of shrikes hurdles.

Finally for shrike, its just not worth the effort. First let me explain how to achieve theoretically optimal shrikage.
Get people to 5 stacks with either 5 AAs or a talented sleep dart + 1 AA.
Next stop attacking them. Each additional attack only refreshes the duration so the shrike stack is wasted.
Start stacking shrike on someone else.
Keep track of the dot duration for each shriked enemy and refresh them with an AA.
And there you have it. How to play Lunara, er Ana.
Its alotta effort and what do you have to show for it? Well you heal back some of the damage you took trying to be Lunara and you did some ok but not spectacular damage of your own. Keep in mind that you also gotta be studder stepping beacuse poor AA Ana can take all the self preservation she can get. Your heal is also on a 2 second cooldown and make sure your healing the people who actually need it. Also if your aiming down scope, don’t waste that pierce shot and if your not, make sure your allies are blocking your healing. Also keep an eye out for opportunities to use your heal nade. On who you ask? Well make sure your dividing just enough attention to figure that out beacuse thats your most important ability as Ana.
Ok, maybe a little overdramatic but take it from someone who play freaking AA whitemane that its not worth the effort. If your in the majority of people who dont even spread your dot in PVE, i dont blame you.

You are the teams healer. When your given the choice to shrike things or to heal, you’ve gotta choose the healing. Your not LiLi whos got the flexibility to do both all the time.

Don’t worry, I don’t have quite as much to say about her other abilities.

Ana’s Q, W, and E are alright. Mostly only minor complaints here. Her kit is pretty shallow as far as healing is concerned. You either land your Q or you don’t. I know W can be used to heal aswell but it’s very often better used for its crazy good 100% healing reduction unless things are going wrong. This is subjective but imo, the only thing in her whole kit that makes Q more fun is Active Reload but you don’t get that till level 16. Sharpshooter can be alot of fun to but it’s got the same level issue aswell as killing your ability to safely check bushes. Something Ana is otherwise on of the best heroes in the game at doing.

Speaking of talents, let’s get more in to that.
Beacuse Shrike has so many issues, all its talents have some kinda issue aswell. Now I’m not saying they are underpowered or anything like that. On the contrary, many of them do something crazy powerful on paper to try and make them more enticing to pick. If Ana’s kit were more accommodating to the idea of running around and multi dotting things, stuff like up to 50% spellpower reduction with a very long refreshable duration, 12% more healing per stack for your Q, and some admittedly pretty good self healing when stacked, this stuff would be completely insane. I’m not a fan of any of the Shrike talents and if heroes profile is anything to go by, neither are most people.

So what would I do to Ana?
Well as boring as it may sound, I think Ana’s design would really benefit from some kinda passive regeneration baseline. As long as Q healing is given something cool it would work out alright.
I didn’t mention this earlier but Q has a bit of a frustration factor for both parties. It sucks to miss and it sucks to be missed. Not something I’d want addressed in her base kit but a talent would be nice.
Just off the top of my head, what if a level 1 or 4 talent where Q left behind a larger “jet stream” that healed for a less amount. Maybe hitting with one could even empower the other to give it some kinda higher skill celing and not just a dumb noob talent.

Also pls bring back that one nade talent that basically let you drone strike with it from like half the map away, that was super cool :stuck_out_tongue:

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So is there a TL;DR version of this?

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Shrike bad

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Ana needs rework more than Nova? Please.

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Ana is fine but for a little buff/reorganisation to her W talents (they are boring and all on 1-7).

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Why would Ana needs a rework? For me she works perfectly fine.

Tbh. I wouldn’t like to see a rework for Nova, except maybe changing decoys, which is the most useless talents/ability of her. Q-Build on the other hand is fine to me. For example I don’t understand why her 16 decoy talent isn’t baseline…why would someone ever pick it compared to the other two options? It’s just bad…

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She doesnt heal as much as the other healers
Shrike is indeed crap

You mean health or mana?

He mentions a couple of talents that could use a change. I agree with him.
Sharpshooter is too much of a gamble
But I didnt scrolled straight to the comment section

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Dunno about Ana’s talent tree, but her kit is perfect.

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Your playstyle is very aggressive (from AA WM) while Ana has one of the worst stat for when it comes to escape. If she gets caught, she dies most of the time.
Vampiric Rounds (trait lvl 1) is rarely worth it unless you’re a ding addict and playing against weak tank players.
From stats, she only really need a buff on Biotic Enhancements (W4). The name doesn’t fit what I would give it as an additional functionality, but it would be to apply her trait once on enemy hit from W.

If Ana’s survivability would be greater, it wouldn’t be fun to face the deadly spell power stackers (Ana, Li-Ming, Varian) that one shots you and while they survive their engage with more ease.

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It’s not like I don’t play her. I’m about level 40 with her and im comfortable enough with her to take her in to my competitive matches on occasion.

I feel like I’ve failed to get my point across because this is what im talking about.
This is the whole playstyle, vampiric rounds just attempts to reward you more for playing like this. Playing like this is an issue because it almost destroys your ability to heal in a proper fight and thats am issue because not only is this your only real source of self healing but like a third of your talents want you to play like this.
The only reason why any of those talents are worth anything is because of the dose talent for sleeping dart thus eliminating the need to auto attack and at that point why does the auto attack thing exist at all if if just encourages you to position poorly and heal less.

Thats my biggest issue with her.
I also think her talents are kinda lame and Q is not super interesting until 16 and thats just to late for the thing the whole heroes healing is centered around imo.
Its like how anduin’s Q was just alright before his rework but as soon as he got his new level 1 talents he instantly became one of the most fun healers in the game.

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That’s the fantasy, right? Playing safe like a sniper, but having poor self preservation. If you break that balance and give her more survivability, then she becomes too much of a hassle to deal with.

You’re forgetting her lvl 13s. These are the real deal that make her rewarding. Also, for her W baseline that breaks some of the top healers like Whitemane and Rehgar.

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I don’t want her to have more survivability. I want to sit a screen away and be a heal and debuff bot.
I think the shrike stuff should go away in favor of more sniper stuff. I think its dumb that a basic ability and a third of her talents are telling you to get in there and be a lifesteal tank.
I don’t want to play her like AA wm : p
If a genji or what have you gets on to me, I should live or die based on whether or not i can hit the sleep dart.

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Yeah her healing has not kept up pace as more and more AOE damage/healing has been added through power creep. And her range seems less impressive when there are more heroes that have longer base range and mages who have long range spells.

It’s odd, I never much cared about her lack of defensive options when she first came out with smart positioning. But with the baseline pierce at the cost of her mobility, it can feel quite punitive at times. I think this kind of mechanic can actually be interesting game design wise, but if none of the other heroes have to deal with these kinds of limitations, she’s just going to feel weaker comparatively.

It’s also at odds with her shrike because if you’re at further range, you’re likely not AAing. I do think that a vampiric playstyle can work though. If you don’t want to play her like that, I don’t see why you have to. If some do however, I think acting like a ranged off tank with much more aggressive positioning so the fact that you do less healing is fine because you’re taking the heat off other players and getting sustain out of it too.

Choices are fine, but I do agree there’s some clunkiness and updating could be done.

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First of all, i just wanted to mention that her last major rework went a heck of a long way to improve her compared to her version on release.

On release, her only form of self healing was through her grenade. Given that she was bound to receive incidental damage, this meant that you barely had a chance to use your grenade offensively. Self healing through a mechanic like Shrike was a very welcome change.

I also love that Aim Down Sights became a baseline mechanic. Sacrificing speed for sniper capability (in this case extra range) really sells the sniper theme.

Do you guys remember how you used to get piercing heals? That’s right, a quest talent asking you to sleep X number of targets. How crp was that? Players would just spam sleep on easy to hit targets (like a tank) instead of saving sleep for strategic reasons just to get the quest completed. Aim Down Sight was a great way to resolve this problem resulting in the removal of that stpid talent.

In saying that, I do understand your point in that Shrike is a little too difficult to apply for the benefit you get out of it. The effort vs reward is just not there.

Personally, I think her baseline kit is in a pretty good place. Her damage isn’t great so you dont need to AA if you don’t want to (or have the skill to do on top of your regular healing requirements). Standing back safe and doing zero damage is a perfectly decent way to play Ana imo.

If she needs any change then it would be nice to revisit talent rows 1, 4 and 7 to address your comments (ie the shrike build needs addressing). Also “Armoured Stance” at level 20 needs a look at. Other than that I like her.

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I think the rework was ultimately necessary, as it made her more accessible and lowered her skill floor, but unfortunately, it was also a definite nerf to her skill ceiling.

The questing talent was truly awful, but the reward was just godly. Ana is all about angling shots for optimal pierce healing, and aim down sights is really annoying in that regard. The old range was so amazing, that you honestly didn’t even take incidental damage.

I’d like to see options to get some of that crazy range back and maybe reduced speed penalty from aim down sights.

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That’s not what you just said.

Her healing is very good.
Like who else even compares on healing per mana, or healing per second?
Anduin gonna Divine Star and output 650ish healing across the team every 10 seconds while Ana is dishing out 390ish across two every 2s.

As long as your allies actually line up instead of trying to dodge it or take heals they don’t need. Hardly any healer is going to perform much better.
Maybe don’t eat every aoe the enemy throws out.

Shrike build is the most fun build with her, and really strong when you can pull it off.
You just can’t all the time.
That’s how talents are supposed to work, you’re supposed to adapt to the match-ups.
If you’re just going the same build every time no matter what…hate to say it but you’re probably bad.

Anyway, when was the last balance patch, much less rework?
March?

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Uhhh, do you know how to read? Although they can be indirectly related, heal output is not the same as range, nor did I mention anything about the skill ceiling in my initial comment.

Her healing can be good if you’re constantly lining up pierce shots, and I tend to do fine on her compared to most, but on average, it just doesn’t compare to other healers. Those are just the facts. She’s only higher than Uther, and lower than Tyrande and Kharazim, both of which also do way more damage than her. The only benefit is that she has self heal and heal deny. Combine that low siege damage, it’s not exactly a surprise that she’s one of the lowest win rate heroes currently.

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To be fair, Tyrande’s healing is kind of insane now. I feel like every time someone complains about her, her healing goes up.

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I wouldn’t qualify her healing as insane. It’s good if you can weave in lots of AAs, which a lot of players aren’t great at. So her healing when taken in for average output, is one of the lowest amongst healers. That being said, that has never really been Tyrande’s strength, nor has that hindered her. She still excels when you take a look at her holistically, because she brings so much else to the table.

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Don hate me, but I have to disagree.
Granted, she’s gotta not drop her auto attacks at all or it noes dives harder then probably any other healer and its almost all single target healing.
Q healing is alright but her cooldowns really put her over the top if you can take full advantage of them.
I wish i had a better video cuz this one was made before her other level 4 talents were buffed and it might also be before they were moved to 4 from 7.

This was her highest hps build at the time (i think). Hopefully its not worse now then it was then and i dont look like a fool but im pretty sure its about the same if not better.
I will also say tho, her healing does trail behind other healera a bit post 10 sense she kinda just stops getting healing talents.