Ana - is Blizzard trolling us?

[McCam-1696]

I’ve said the same few things of how they were treating Ana in my post recently and its quite sad.

@GeoffGoodman

I think its worth talking a little about our balance philosophy here. People often will post things such as “why doesn’t Blizzard see that this hero has X as a weakness and that is what should be fixed.”

One aspect of our heroes that is very important is that they all have various strengths and weaknesses. This is a core aspect of what makes teamplay so important in Overwatch. If you have an Ana on your team, this gives you certain advantages such as being able to be healed from very long range, having a more offensive-favored ultimate, and having the ability to disable healing on enemies (which can be especially vital against heroes that really rely on healing such as Roadhog). That said, she also brings her own weaknesses that must be managed, such as low mobility and lower self-healing. A team may opt to run Brigitte or Lucio with Ana to help peel attackers off of her, for example.

When we want to buff a hero, sometimes it can be the right call reduce these weaknesses. For example, if a weakness is just too overbearing or a hero just has too many weaknesses compared to their strengths. But more often we would rather amplify a heroes strengths and make the hero just better at what they do, which leaves their weaknesses still around for enemies to exploit and for allies to try to manage.

I hope this helps explain how we look at balance issues and heroes in Overwatch in general.

@McCam-1696

Let’s look at Ana a character who fits the “if a weakness is just too overbearing or a hero just has too many weaknesses compared to their strengths.” concept you said. As of right now Ana clearly is the overbearing and too many weaknesses that you mentioned. Let me list them for you…

• A sniper who can’t get to sniping high grounds
• A sniper with bad sniper damage that also has DOT (Damage Over Time)
• No Self-Healing that isn’t tied to a cooldown or don’t have the strengths to back up the weakness
• Nano-Boost an Ultimate that is too weak without the speed boost and other characters have better versions of this ultimate and/or abilities that outclass this along with too many ifs to makes its value
• Terrible at defending herself even worse than Zenyatta
• Zenyatta is a better sniper than her even after his alt-fire nerf
• Sleep Dart an ability that is hard to land, slow projectile speed, and can easily be disturbed by .1 damage with a very long cooldown
• Biotic Grenade a very good ability that is constantly wasted used upon yourself than you allies or enemies to get the value it needs

As you see this is way too many weaknesses that’s overbearing and the positives you gave for picking Ana is very easily countered to be even called strength. How can Lucio or Brigitte help peel for Ana if Ana is supposed to be healing from afar? Are they supposed to sit next to her from afar? If so how is Brigitte or Lucio going to heal the rest of the team? Or is Ana supposed to sit next to them with the rest of the team defeating the purpose of her being a long ranged healer? Your balance philosophy isn’t making sense.