I recently got back into playing Ana and I think she’s extremely fun to play as, but I need some help from the veteran Ana players here on the forums.
If you have any other tips/settings tweaks to improve on Ana, please let me know.
How much should I be focusing on damage?
I’ve seen Awkward’s video, and he’s clearly very good and seems to focus on damage and then healing when teammates are in immediate danger. He uses nade offensively and hardly ever to self-heal or for teammates. Is this a good strategy still? Does it differ based on SR?
Is her healing weak compared to most other supports?
The last few days I’ve been playing, I noticed that even when I healbot, my healing is nowhere close to LW or Kiriko. I know this is mostly useless without context, but a game I just had was 5500 for Ana and 9000 for the LW on our team.
You should be focusing on healing a majority of the time,and finding opportunities to ditch out damage.
You don’t need to heal your teammates health to max. You only need to heal them to a safe level before you add damage. The faster the enemy dies, the less healing you have to do. There are times where you do need to healbot, but it is dependent on your teammates.
If you are being flank on, you have to depend on yourself to win the duel. Teammates in the metal ranks will not peel for you, yet alone babysit you.
Dish out damage if no one is taking a heavy amount of damage or is critical. If it’s a pretty slow fight, you can contribute damage and swap to heal teammates between your damage shots.
Her healing isn’t weak compared to other heroes. She’s a high healing single-target healer. LW and Kiriko can heal multiple people (though it’s a bit dodgy with Kiriko) and are usually closer to a fight and can heal at odd angles (especially Lifeweaver). Their ultimates also help them heal faster/more.
I’ve seen a trend of Ana’s DPSing too much basically playing Ashe. You should really enable the best players and anticipate who’s at risk to get bursted down/focused. Dishing out damage works well for squishy targets that are in teamfights, or are trying to flank/in the backline. Nothing makes me more annoyed than Ana’s getting tunnel visioned letting their teammates die. They should be commanding the entire flow of the game watching things like a hawk. Shooting a tank and fat targets to stat pad their damage ain’t doing anything lol.
Karq has a video where he’s being coached by a top level ana player (he’s got a series doing this with for specific heroes with players known for playing the hero in question, often t500s)
1, I highly suggest watching it.
2, you will notice how constantly the guy is hammering him to do damage and put pressure.
Edit; found it
There’s a LOT of advice and the guy is very good at delivering it. Well worth a watch.
As others stated, focus on healing. That’s your top priority, especially your tank since you give a lot of healing per shot.
Her buffs are very important. Save your sleep and negative grenade when people are grouped and they are vulnerable. This means no shields, sigs dark void, Zarya bubble etc. This will allow DPS to tank
You’ll have to determine that for yourself after a couple of fights, at which point you will have noticed 3 important things: 1.) How aggressive the tank is, 2.) how good or bad your dps are, and 3.) what your other support is focused on doing.
If your tank is aggro, you will need to focus him, as he will require a ton of resources. If your dps are bad, you will need to compensate for them, and if your support duo is focusing on damage and not doing much healing, you will also need to compensate for that.
So every match will require you to read the situation anew.
That said, you don’t want down time as Ana, you always want to be doing something, so heal when you need to, help with damage when you don’t, and always be thinking about your positioning relative to most efficiently being able to do those 2 things.
Kiriko and LW And Mercy are generally very healbotty. If that’s all they focus on, an Ana will generally fall behind on heals since she has no mobility to keep up and requires LoS. That said, Ana’s strengths are primarily her ability to deny enemy healing, deny many enemy ultimates, and her long range ability to damage. In the instances where you see you’re paired with a healbotty player, that’s your cue to branch out and use your lethality. Don’t worry about the heal numbers, they don’t matter as long as your nades are fat and your sleeps are accurate and clutch and your final blows timely.
Don’t think of it like squeezing in damage. Think about Support as squeezing in healing, especially on characters like Ana. You have great burst healing, so you should focus on damaging until someone gets low enough to need your help. Don’t focus on keeping everyone at full HP at all times, focus on keeping them ALIVE. You have REALLY good damage, so make killing easier on your team by damaging with them as much as you can. Of course use your nade’s to secure kills whenever possible.
Absolutely not. Ana has one of if not the highest hps in the game. For example, Mercy’s is 55. Bap is 70. Ana’s is in the low 90s. However, Ana spends a good portion of her time doing things other than healing. Mercy, Lucio, and LW will typically get more healing than her because they’re either healing more often or healing multiple people at the same time. Healing numbers on the scoreboard don’t correlate to how effective that healing is. Don’t look at the scoreboard to see how you’re doing; it’s very misleading.
This is an extremely hard question to answer as there is no correct answer and anyone who says something like “You should be focusing on healing a majority of the time” really doesn’t understand it. For example, if you have a Life weaver that can solo heal your entire team with no issue, damage, and utility will be your main focus.
So it’s easy to see the value of healing, the health bar goes up and the teammate is in the fight for longer. It’s hard to understand how damage gets value and that’s the issue with understanding when damage is better than healing.
You can gauge some things;
Like if the next shot will kill someone, you should take it as even if someone might die by getting the kill at worst you going to a 4v4 and at best a 5v4. If you heal all you do is continue the fight. Ofc, there are exceptions like the person you need to save is vital or the person you’re killing isn’t really the problem your team has.
Understand, that doing damage someone makes it easier to kill everyone so if you’re seeing a squishy target being focused landing a shot on them will likely balance that fight in your team’s favor.
Damage to zone, landing 1 or 2 shots on some targets that need time to engage like an unsupported phara,ashe ect… if as strong as killing someone in a lot of cases. Zen can suffer a lot if you able to zone him.
There is a ton more to it but remember there is more to damage than fragging, it can zone and enable kills. Think about games where no one pressures you on Ana and you can do anything you like, it almost feels like a team is throwing when they do that. As Ana, you have the ability to be that pressure.
As for healing some healing will be much more effective than other types of healing and you really do need to understand when your healing will mean the difference between life and death and unless you can get a high-value frag or high-value play then this is your main focus.
Then there is pocketing and this will come down to understanding how good the person you are pocketing is basically, if you know that pocketing one player will win a fight then it’s worth doing but there will be times when you damage will 100% be more effective like shooting the target of the person you are pocketing.
Lastly, there is healing to get someone back into a fight this can range from being an extremely bad thing to being the thing your team needs… You will always need to ask yourself do you need them back in the fight to win, Can you do something to win now If you don’t focus on the fight will it give a chance to the enemy?
While lengthy all I’m saying here is you need to learn how valuable each action you take is and always frame that in winning a team fight.
Now here is a big thing… Mechanics… without them, your damage will get LOW value and healing will be better… the problem is if you always heal your mechanics will never improve so even though it will suck for other people you need to keep making plays that you want to make not make plays that are safe. This is why when people say “focus on damage and heal in clutch” it’s good advice to get better at Ana because it’s so much easier to learn when healing is good once you’re good at the rest of her kit. Personally, once you are confident you should know your balance of heals/damage.
Worth noting the support you play with will determine how much healing is worth to… with a zen it will be a lot higher value than with a moria/bap. Also, what you’re healing with them like if you have a Bap pocketing a tank… You pocketing them to will have insanely low value.
Ana will never be in the position where you can’t win a fight because you can’t heal enough, teams only need a certain amount of healing to take a fight.
As for Ana’s healing vs others… it has its niche of being instant long-range and some of the highest single-target healing in the game. You also need to know when to scope an unscoped both have advantages and disadvantages. In general unscoped is better but scope is more realible and instant.
I guess I’ll close by saying if you ever stop thinking about all the things you can do and how they can win a team fight then you aren’t playing at your best. Also, if you have an idea that can win a fight… do it… the only way to learn is by trying.
It depends on a lot of things really. Your damage output versus healing output really depends on your teams survival capability without constant healing support. If they can last a considerable amount of time and use cover, then make sure your team mates are no lower than 50-60% health and then focus into damage.
It’s ok to not immediately top a team mate off, so long as they’re not being bombarded.
It also depends on your confidence. If you see a cluster of team mates who are low and a Genji is diving in to one stop shop them with Dragon Blade and you think you can tap him of the last of his HP? Go for it. Because it won’t matter how much healing you throw at your team if he can just swipe and delete them.
Low healing is kind of just what to expect these days. Unless a game goes on for a considerable amount of time or your team just has a habit of peeking and poking, you’re not going to have big numbers in the healing department. (At least, nothing beyond 15k). Ana should be focusing the Tank for heals primarily, since everyone else has about 1/3rd to 1/4th the health of that role and as such, can usually be topped off by the other Support. Now don’t mistake that for ignoring the rest of your team, if you can top them off because your Tank is holding the line, then do so!
