Just go look at overbuff. It’s easy to see that how a person feels about Ana is likely to be directly proportional to what bracket of difficulty they’re playing in. At plat she’s usable. That’s roughly when her numbers starts to improve. By the time you’re gandmaster she looks ordinary. So yeah I can see where you’re coming from.
The big problem is that most people are not at the grandmaster end of the pyramid and the lower you go the more masochistic her play becomes. That’s a problem and it’s entirely correctable.
They know what kind of skills are useful to lower brackets but easily circumvented by good team play and what kind of skills require a bit of practice and learning from the player to master.
Ana’s the direct opposite of the Bastion experience. That’s a hero who’s a terror at lower brackets but struggles terribly at higher brackets. To fix him I’d think they should give him a skill difficult to master but very useful to him in the upper brackets. Give that hero something worth learning and his curve should flatten out.
In that same vane they should give Ana some kind of defensive skill that gives her an edge at the lower end but not near as useful to her against a coordinated team that communicates. That too would flatten out her curve. She wouldn’t be OP in the upper brackets and should wouldn’t be an utter nightmare to play at the lower end.
What that ability can be doesn’t actually matter so long as it’s efficacious – that it works to do what it’s meant to do. I had advocated for a Wall Climb and Self heal but Jeff directly shot it down. Now that these aren’t on the table anymore as an option I’ve put my banner around the Ghillie Suit concept.
Easy to use at the low end. Easy to get around at the high end. Never entirely useless.
Still, it doesn’t matter what skill they give her except that whatever skill that is doesn’t leave the hero painful to play for most everyone in the game except the elites.