Let's talk about Ana

I think Ana is overall a solid Support. She can be an incredible backline healer with potential global range. However, her talent tree (at the very least) and Biotic Grenade could use a few updates. Here are my suggestions:

Base Kit

  • Biotic Grenade
    ** Reduce Healing Reduction to 75% from 100%.
    ** Increase healing radius by 25%.

I strongly believe that 100% healing negation was always too good on Ana. There was never any good counter-play to it. As compensation, I’ve increased the healing radius of the ability to help widen Biotic Grenade’s supporting ability.

  • Eye of Horus
    ** Now pierces allies with full Health.

This update has been needed since Healing Dart a similar update. This will help prevent allies from blocking shots that were not intended for them.

Level 1

  • Grenade Calibration
    ** Healing radius increase reduced to 75% due to compensate for the baseline increase for Biotic Grenade. With this talent, Ana still gains a sum of 100% increased Healing radius (25% is just baseline now).
  • Detachable Box Magazine (Rework)
    ** Quest: Stack 5 Doses on an enemy Hero.
    ** Reward: After reaching maximum Dosage 10 times, Basic Attacks against targets with maximum Dosage cause Basic Attacks to bounce to an additional nearby enemy, prioritizing Heroes.
    ** Reward: After reaching maximum Dosage 20 times, gain Detachable Box Magazine, Cooldown: 45 seconds. Activate to Basic Attack each enemy once within a wide arc in front of you.
    ** Passive: Shrike healing generated from enemy Heroes now heals all nearby allies.

Detachable Box Magazine really needs a rework as it simply cannot compete with the other talents of its tier. This is my suggestion. It’s hard to tell how good Shrike healing will be in a full team setting, especially with her increased efficiency with spreading Doses. It would require a bit of testing, but it would definitely make Ana more interesting to play.

Level 4

  • Air Strike
    ** Now has global range.

I feel this should have been global from the start. It already has a 3 second delay and shares a CD with Biotic Grenade, why not let us throw it anywhere we want?

Level 7

  • Temporary Blindness
    ** Now Basic Attacks against you also cause Sleep Dart’s cooldown to recharge 100% faster for 1 second.

Updated to compete with the tier. I think the CDR will be welcome against heavy dive comps.

  • Debilitating Dart
    ** Removed.
  • Emergency Hover (New) - “A trick I’ve learned from my daughter.
  • Cooldown: 60 seconds. Activate to cause Ana to hover in the air, becoming Invulnerable and immobile for 2 seconds. While hovering, Ana can only cast Healing Dart, which has 50% increased range.

Let me know what you guys think. I always felt Debilitating Dart was too generic. I think this type of “iceblock” ability would fit well with Ana.

Level 13

  • Speed Serum
    ** Now also increases Healing Darts width by 15%.

Speed Serum is essentially counter-productive to her design. It makes hitting consecutive Healing Darts that much more difficult. Therefore, I think the slight width increase should help with this and also to compete with the other new talents.

  • Smelling Salts
    ** Removed.
  • Purifying Darts (Rework)
    ** Healing Dart removes Stuns, Roots, and Slows from the target, and heals for 10% more when doing so. If a Stun is removed this way, the target gains 25 Armor for 2 seconds.

Combined to make the talent overall more universal, but at reduced efficiency to allow the other talents to compete.

  • Double Pin (New)
    ** Biotic Grenade drops a second talented grenade at Ana’s feet. The damage and healing does not stack.

This is intended to help Biotic Grenade provide more area coverage, especially for your backline. Because the damage and healing will not stack, I don’t see this being too big of an issue, but it will require testing none-the-less.

Level 16

  • Concentrated Doses
    ** Now is capped at 100% increased healing.

Level 20

  • Ballistic Advantage
    ** Now will pierce allies with full Health, but the round will still explode on any allies.

This will still allow Ana to receive proximity healing from nearby allies, whether they are full Health or not. If this change ends up breaking Eye of Horus, it can always be adjusted as needed.

  • Custom Optics
    ** Removed.
  • Dynamic Shooting (Rework)
    ** Basic Attacks increase Attack Speed by 5% for 4 seconds, up to 100%. The rate increase is doubled while Aim Down Sights is active.
    ** Passive: Increase the Aim Down Sights Basic Attack range bonus from 2 to 4.

Combined both AA talents, as she technically has 3, currently. With the rework for Detachable Box Magazine, I’m very interested to see if Aim Down Sights becomes a more popular build.

Let me know what you guys think!

3 Likes

Those are largely terrible suggestions.

The only changes that are needed are:

  • Detachable Box Magazine needs to be changed to a trait talent, not Q. Preferrably for self sustain.
  • Limited per hero hit CDR on lvl. 4 Grenade talent
  • Basic Attack range increase talents are clunky and need something
  • EoH passing nearly full health targets and maybe profiting from Q talents.

Don’t even think about touching her lvl 13 talents. Maybe give Smelling Salts a 0.5s window in which the next stun is removed if it does not eemove one directly. But that is all.

6 Likes

Is this fancy way of saying you wish for Ana to be removed from draft modes due to her getting permabanned or subtle hint that you want every hero to get major buffs to compete with this rework?

1 Like

note: I talk about winrates and competitiveness of talents. Unless otherwise noted, that means I’m pulling from Hotslogs, the last couple of weeks, Masters and Diamond players games only. Unless otherwise noted.

TBH, we really need Synris to make a comment here :wink:
Given her main is Ana, and I think she probably is the most active Ana player on the forums. Or rather, the highest level/most experience with Ana on the forums.

people will probabably disagree with me, but I think making it not a complete neuter is probably better to avoid Ana either being in a state of being:

  1. must ban/OP
  2. weak

I should note, while her current winrate is pretty balanced, the OP/weak has a lot to do with matchups. She is the 3rd most popular support, but is I believe the most banned support hero, as a percentage of games played to bans.

The only suggestion I would make is to expand the overall AOE 25%. It’s anti-healing on a single target is getting nerfed, no reason to make it’s two-aoes baseline.

A good QoL change.

The spell got nerfed. Why nerf the talent also?

No. Just no. Make the talent better, sure, but you could do that in the current framework, change from 12 stacks total to…
at 6 stacks, activate to gain 2 charges of healing dart
at 12 stacks activate to gain 3 charges of healing dart.

Easy buff, without changing how the talent works.

The talent itself might need changing, but this just looks like a mess. Especially with how it passively improves Shrike, for some reason.

No. I think the concept is neat, but… As a general rule suggesting global heals for anything beyond an ultimate is a poor idea.

Whenever Abathur gets reworked/heavily tweaked… I expect his global heal to be removed. Global healing is busted.

I like the idea, but This is probably way to powerful a buff. Just increase it’s blind amount, or have it make the sleep from sleeping dart last long. Or sleeping dart fire faster.

I don’t really play overwatch… But given Ana’s whole thing is her darts doing things to enemies… I don’t see how the ability is generic?

Maybe it is just me.

It is competitive currently, I don’t see a reason to buff it due to that. If it ever falls off, such an addition may make sense.

Why are we combining these? Part of the reason Blizzard has some heroes were the talents for the same tier are all about doing a certain kind of thing is to allow for easier balance of the talents.

I like this ability, but don’t feel like it fits what the tier is about.
And also… Given the other 3 abilities on the tier are approx. balanced with each other, why not just add this as a 4th ability!

Why?
the talent isn’t beating the others in the tier. All this does is make it worse for good Ana players. Maybe I’m missing something.

Might be to powerful, as you point out. But, it is the “worst” performing level 20 talent in Diamond/Master in ranked.

Dynamic shooting has the highest winrate in ranked at Diamond/Masters… Why are we combining the talents?

Expanding into including Platinum players, to be able to get a win percentage on Custom Optics, it’s winrate doesn’t sink below the other ultimates. To my surprise.

I think the baseline change would be good for Ana, although 75% might be 'too much" a reduction. But letting some form of healing get through it (even if greatly reduced) would, imo feel better to play against, while not changing the impact of the grenade very much.

A lot of “why” and “feels too powerful” changes.

2 Likes

This seems more like a nerf than a buff, there was never a problem with the radius of the grenade.
Ana is primary a single target healer and the extra radius isn’t going to do anything because the extra healing you recieve only applies to the healing from ana.
(unless you take grenade calibration but that solves the radius problem in itself by making it bigger and making your allies be able to heal themselves more with their own healing abilities)

FTFY. But seriously this is how you would fix this heroic to make it useful. You’d be able to deal damage and heal at the same time.

unneeded change. increasing the radius or decreasing in this case isn’t going to be helping Ana.

:thinking: :thinking: :thinking:

ehhh, i prefer the orignal reward where you gain 3 charges of healing dart. The problem with it was that the CD was to long for how unreliable the reward could be.

How i would fix this would be to bring back the original damage bonus, lower the cd for the 3 healing darts to 30 seconds and make them pierce/heal for more.

+1

+1

plz no. Invul for 2.5 seconds at lvl 7?!??!?

There is some good, some bad but overall a pretty decent ana rework idea.

3 Likes

The only thing she needs is passive for Eye of Horus - the moment Q procs, it heals in small AoE (AoE heals for less, probably).
Buff for EoH, DBM and situational alternative for piercing Q (could work better for heavy melee comps)

That is literally what I’m suggesting. I’m suggesting to rework Detachable Box Magazine to give Ana easier methods of throwing out Doses. In addition, Shrike will heal all allies as well. It’s hard to tell how good the healing will be on paper, it would need to be tested hardcore.

  • Limited per hero hit CDR on lvl. 4 Grenade talent

Disagree here, the CD reduction lets it match the healing duration of the Grenade quest. I don’t think the CDR should be changed for this talent.

  • Basic Attack range increase talents are clunky and need something

This is somewhat true. I don’t mind Aim Down Sights though. It will feel better with reworked Detachable Box Magazine.

  • EoH passing nearly full health targets and maybe profiting from Q talents.

Profiting from Q talents would break EoH. It’s a global heal - it doesn’t need anything more than simply piercing full Health allies.

Did you even read my suggestions? I’m nerfing her W out of full-healing-negation. I don’t see how that warrants “permabanned” status. lol

If they give a passive 2 seconds and up to 4 seconds (say 1s per hero hit) on hits, you would actually have a two second window to profit of the grenades healing buff with the grenade itself when going grenade build.

With the current CDR you will never have this as the CD is exactly the duration of the buff with completed quest and with just two hero hits you would be even with the old CDR.

I think you might misunderstand what I meant by this. The passive of Detachable Box Magazine, makes Shrike heal all nearby allies. That means each Dose heals everyone for 50% of its damage. It’s a passive healing, but if Ana is aggressive enough to get Dose stacks, it could get respectable. The Rewards then simply help Ana with stacking Doses.

This was capped so it does not get out of hand with the new Detachable Box Magazine. With the last reward, she can instantly get 1 Dose out on all enemies within a wide arc in front of her. That means, if she manages to hit all 5 enemy Heroes, she’s already at 50% increased Q healing. Believe me, this needs to be capped. It may even need to be nerfed further, depending on how well Detachable Box Magazine build does.

1 Like

Yes, I did see you would give her tiny nerf in exchange for giant buffs. The thing is when overall effect is heavily on the buff side on one of the top supports currently it equals as guaranteed permaban status.

  • The Healing Reduction nerf is needed, because 100%-healing-negation is too strong (and always has been).
  • The healing radius increase is meant to help W fulfill it’s intended multipurpose. You have a higher chance of hitting your divers while you also aim to negate enemy team healing.

unneeded change. increasing the radius or decreasing in this case isn’t going to be helping Ana.

This was reduced to keep the talent buffs the same. Ana is still getting the overall 100% healing radius increase, but she now has 25% of that baseline. The healing radius does not need to exceed 100% overall.

FTFY. But seriously this is how you would fix this heroic to make it useful. You’d be able to deal damage and heal at the same time.

Honestly, this would break EoH. Especially at lvl20. It’s a global heal, it doesn’t need any more help than the Q treatment.

plz no. Invul for 2.5 seconds at lvl 7?!??!?

You’re right. 2.5 second iceblock at 7 is really good. 2 seconds would be better. It would require testing. :slight_smile:

Ironically when Ana came out she was the perfect counter to double support comps and no one cared about it at her release. And sense then I haven’t seen more than a few people complain about the 100% heal reduction.

But it already does its function as is currently.

It’s a Global heal that can be blocked by team members, Structures and enemies.
EoH is bad because of how unreliable it is. They could increase the CD back to what it was to compensate for my buff.

A healer whose weakness is being dived on does not need a Iceblock.

I’ve always felt it was too strong, but Ana got some leeway because she is difficult to play.

I strongly believe Healing Reduction/Amplification should work similar to Armor. Healing Reduction should not exceed 75%. Completely negating an aspect of the game (even if it is temporary) without any counter-play (or innate weakness) is bad design.

A healer whose weakness is being dived on does not need a Iceblock.

It’s funny you say that when Ana’s lvl 7 talents already help deal with her dive weakness.

  1. Temporary Blindness helps against AA dive.
  2. Mind-Numbing Agent helps reduce ability damage against anyone she can AA (divers).
  3. Debilitating Dart helps against any dive really.

I don’t like Debilitating Dart because it feels too generic. It doesn’t interact with her kit in any way. It’s just a boring debuff.

With my iceblock suggestion, it gives Ana players what they need most - time to line up a shot (Q). I agree that a 2.5 second iceblock would be a bit much at 7, but then we can simply adjust the ability. 2 seconds would be a good starting point. If it goes any lower than 2 seconds, then I would add that the ability resets the CD of Q on activation. :slight_smile:

so i’m by no means an ana pro, but some of these suggesions seem odd. I feel like ana’s identity is “anti-healer healer”, so taking away the heal block seems counter to her identity. Also the hover talent is just… odd. Ignoring the flavor issues (whats making her hover? She’s never been shown to have any kind of mobility gadgets, not even a grappling hook) I feel like ana shouldnt need dive protection. You’re already hanging out in the back lines, and sleep dart is super easy to land when a dive hero gets that close to you, plus her other damage reduction talents can help save her. If an ana has screwed up that badly/the dive hero managed to beat all that, i think they deserve the kill at that point.

1 Like

Even if they changed the healing reduction from 1 to 0,75 it wouldn’t change her win-rate by more than 1-2% at most. On paper it sounds big difference but in reality the effect is the same, you get no heals(even pre-nerf AH along with another healer couldn’t save people when hit by xul heal reduction back in the day when healers even in general healed more).
The original role of Ana was actually to be the anti-healer, it’s why they sped up her release as she was to be the end of double healer meta. The reason why she didn’t even end up being remarkable for it was very low uptime and hard to time heal denial.
Personally I’m completely fine with full heal denial of hers. It’s hard to time for most part and like I said the effect at high number is practically the same as full denial to the point you should not be healing that person. The comparison to armor is fairly poor also because armor has both absolute in protected and loophole in GK variants dealing full damage through normal armor. For heals it wouldn’t really fit due to there only being 3 GK variants among all supports while regular GKs to armor are dime a dozen, it would put healers in extremely uneven situation.

1 Like

The counterplay is healing amplification. I believe we should have more of it in the game.

The problem is thought you need to use Temporary Blindness offensively against AA heroes like Winblades and Raynor that are messing up your team. When you get dived on it usually won’t be there ready to use.

mind numbing agent doesn’t do to well against burst divers since you need to get off a few AA,
Delibating dart is the only true anti dive tool she has.
And it’s a skillshot that can easily miss.

Honestly, that’s not enough counter-play to warrant 100% Healing Negation. If they do add more counter-play later on, then it’d worth discussing full negation.

The problem is thought you need to use Temporary Blindness offensively against AA heroes like Winblades and Raynor that are messing up your team. When you get dived on it usually won’t be there ready to use.

mind numbing agent doesn’t do to well against burst divers since you need to get off a few AA,
Delibating dart is the only true anti dive tool she has.
And it’s a skillshot that can easily miss.

I’m not sure your points here disprove that her lvl 7 talents help against dive.

In either case though, if you don’t like my suggestion, that’s fine. I’m honestly just looking for something else besides Delibating Dart or at the very least have it tie to her kit in some way. :slight_smile:

I want this and the others not really.

1 Like

Out of curiosity, does anyone find airstrike actually useful?

I find the delay to be too much of an issue and only value that talent for its cooldown reduction on grenade.

I’d just make these changes:
-detachable box magazine: Repeatable Quest. Healing an ally below 25% health reduces the cooldown of healing dart by 1 second. Each time the cooldown is reduced, the threshold is increased by 3% health. Once 85% is reached, gain one charge of Healing Dart and reset the threshold to 25% health.

-Nano Boost: Target an ally with a boost. For 8 seconds their offensive abilities cost no resources, refresh 30% faster, and apply up to 3 doses.
-Nano Boost upgrade: Also increases damage by 25% and increase max doses applied per target to 5.

-Eye of Horus: Additionally gains all healing dart talent benefits.
-Eye of Horus upgrade: Now pierces all units (not structures) and fires an additional sleep dart with every third shot. Passive: sleep darts become a full stun for the first second and damage from Ana no longer wakes sleeping enemies.