Ana brainstorming thread

General Discussion
81

I’ve added a suggested cast-time decrease of sleep dart to the OP.

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82

i’m so glad someone clipped this happening, it’s beyond frustrating…but hey, at least a fix/nerf for deflect should be coming to PTR soon…i think it was like…in May or June? i can try to dig out the reddit thread when I get home if someone is interested…

also, bump, cause there’s some neat stuff in this thread

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83

I think the rifle should have an up-front immediate payload, and an additional over-time effect like a small Zenyatta orb. As I fleshed this out in my head, my thoughts were 50 up-front, and then 10hp/s for the next 5 seconds for a total of up to 100HP. She’s shooting needles full of nano machines after all.

If the over-time is allowed to stack on a single target, leave her clip and reload speed where it is or cap it at something like 4-5 stacks.

I like this, but I think the grenade should deploy a mist where it breaks and have an extra 2m diameter (1m radius). The mist applies a HOT effect for allies and a DOT for enemies that stand in it, in addition to the heal boost/heal block effect it currently has. Let the mist stick around for say 5-6 seconds since it’s stationary. Same cooldown.

I think just increase the travel speed. The dart is pretty strong as it is.

I think if it just increased the healing the target receives in addition to current effects, it would be pretty amazing.

I think the aim assist she gets while scoped just needs to be wider. It’s roughly 15-20% of the screen. I think if she’s actively ADS, the target closest to the targeting reticle should get healed. If you couple this with giving her biotic healing a longer HOT effect I think she’ll be fine.

I think she needs a passive “gadget” to help this grandma. Her whole kit is built around verticality that she can’t take advantage of herself.

Not a fan. If she can make use of verticality she’ll be good.

How about every time she reloads at least 5 bullets, she jabs herself for 5 healing per bullet as a part of the reload? Call it “Take Your Medicine.”

84

Thank you for the feed-back, it’s interesting with ideas about healing over time (I used to tinker with that idea a lot) but to me it now kinda feels like Moira’s “thing”. Not sure how the devs would feel about them sharing it.

Keep the ideas flowing! :slight_smile:

85

Ana had it first. Her rifle has always had a rapid HOT in how it applied the healing. Zen even had HOT before Moira. It’s just a useful bit of kit and considering how much it seems they’re pushing for a mobility and brawl meta, being able to jab a few targets is kind of important. Especially since her bullet stops at the first thing it hits, which may not be what you wanted to heal.

86

I’m an Ana main with a lot of passion. She is without a doubt my favorite character and as soon as she was introduced I thought, “this is the hero for me!” She’s struggling against dive, but that’s hardly her biggest issue – her former niche was burst healing tanks, and now Moira does that better and more easily, so the only reason to pick Ana over other supports is for medium-long range healing, and for the anti-heal effect. However, she is extremely fragile when played at long-range due to her lack of a passive ability. When she is inevitably dived, she has no way to escape the encounter and has to use every resource available just to survive. Ana needs a more consistent way to survive a 1v1 that doesn’t take away from her ability to support her team. While Ana requires a higher amount of skill to be effective, expecting every Ana player to hit an extremely high-skill sleep dart every single time they’re being focused, and punishing them with almost certain death if it misses, isn’t exactly what I would consider to be good game balance, and isn’t fair to Ana players. If there’s a way to make sleep dart more effective (like increasing the damage threshold before they wake up) or easier to hit in the first place, it would do a lot in making her feel less fragile.

Another issue that I haven’t seen mentioned before is that when Ana is scoped in, her bullets have a highly visible bright purple trail to the enemy team, broadcasting her exact position to everyone. In my opinion, it’s way too bright and obvious considering how vulnerable she is to being dived. It makes sense for a high-impact hero like Widowmaker to have extremely visible bullet trails, because they have the potential to one-shot, but it makes a lot less sense for Ana. When she is unscoped the bullets don’t have this trail, which means I tend to unscope far more often and only use the scope when I absolutely have to. Due to the bullet trail I find that there are too many drawbacks to using the scope and not enough benefits, therefore if you can hit a shot unscoped you should.

Perhaps Ana could gain a buff where after a few seconds of being scoped in, similar to Widowmaker’s scope, the shots ‘charge up’ and she can heal through enemy barriers.

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87

Love it all, except the aimbot part. Feels cheap.
I think the camouflage is also a little bit over the top, would be cool against Widowmakers though!
The 150 hp +50 shields is a great idea actually!

Seriously, other than the aimbot idea, I love it a lot.

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The aim assist should only be while she’s scoped IMHO. She has some aim assist right now, it just needs to be more lenient with allies that are moving quickly. She has a bionic eye after all. It’s part of her character.

89

Where in the heavens did you get the idea she has a bionic eye?
She lost an eye to Widowmaker. Mercy offered herself to fix her eye. Ana said she’s cool with her eye and who she is.

I’m not saying the idea is bad. I think it’s cheap, because Ana is supposed to be an aim-intensive character.

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90

I agree on having either the 150/50 HP and shield change OR what’s commonly called “Transfusion” where whenever you hit a target gain some HP back (friendly or not) not on just every 5 shots. This would restore 10 hp/shot.

The next change would be to put in that reload/ammo change. Not super OP but good enough to where you can feel it.

These changes together give her some more sustain and make her a lot less CD reliant in terms of her survivability and these will just overall keep her in the fight longer.

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91

I mean, yeah, if Brigitte has “Inspiration” as a passive, Ana could have something like “Motivation” to heal herself only when healing allies. right?

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Yeah, that was the “controversial” idea. I just thought it interesting to add, it’s not a favorite by any means but I do like exploring new and creative ideas for Ana. :slight_smile:

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93

Camouflage + sleep dart out of nowhere against Widowmakers would just be too fun :laughing:

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94

I actually like the idea of some sort of camouflage, although maybe not on Ana… some other hero in the future maybe? A defense hero? :wink:

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95

I was answering in length, but I had to delete it.

We already have too few threads about our most beloved sniper, let’s not deviate the subject, sorry for being a buzzkiller xD

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It was my bad, I started it… :stuck_out_tongue:

Also I’m going to deaviate a bit more because apparently I’ve tortured this forum with over 1 000 posts now.

On topic - buff the granny Blizzard!

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97

Now added to the OP:

Healing shots can now pierce full-health allies to heal teammates behind them.

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98

Oh yeah, I actually forgot about that.

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while this sounds appealing, on the other hand, i think i personally could actually dislike it as well? since i like to “preheal” people when the time is right, cause of the heal over time…it can be a lifesaver in certain scenarios.

i do agree with what @Kartoon wrote tho, playing Ana is so unforgiving, and honestly , I just gave up on her, despite her being my fav hero (ever since i learned how to aim and switched to her after Mercy)…
i think sleep is such a great ability, but, if it only punished my mistakes that harshly, fine, i could live with that I guess. but every time a damn stray D.Va bullet wakes up a Genji or Tracer that are really hard to hit, a part of me dies, along with Ana.

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100

Hey Quizzy, I commented in another Ana thread about having written up an idea for giving Ana some self-healing. Here it is–I’d welcome feedback from anyone on it. ^^

Sleep dart and anti-heal are both such powerful abilities that I find it hard to justify cutting their cooldowns too much, but if Ana had other means of self-healing it would allow her to be more liberal with her grenade, even without touching the cooldown, raising both her offensive capabilities and her total healing done per match.

(To be clear I think the cooldowns have room for some tuning, but I also imagine there’s not a lot of leeway between “Ana is literally defenseless” and “Ana can negate basically the entire healing and/or ultimates of the enemy”)