three ways to deal with ana’s ridiculous pick rate.
Bring flankers back into the meta like tracer and genji
Nerf her .
Three give moira some utility.
Ana isnt facing her predators that is a big part of the problem. She counters hog so hog/orisa isnt going to put any pressure on her. The simple truth to ana is you MUST get her to blow her nade defensively NOT offensively on your team. It makes a massive difference.
Ana is not OP. Moira and Mercy are just underperforming.
Moira needs to be able to heal through shields again, and Mercy needs her 60 hps back.
Baptiste really just need sa lower cooldown on Regenerative burst and for his passive to be less clunky/more useful.
Unless we get another hero that can apply anti-healing debuff (or something similar) she’s gonna remain a dominant pick.
It’s just too good to pass up in most situations and atm you can’t substitute it.
Might I remind you that three of the most popular comps, dive GOATS and bunker, dont traditionally have an Ana in them?
The reason she’s picked is because she offers a bunch of healing and utility in the hands of a skilled player. Yes Baptiste takes skill to heal as well, but Ana provides the most utility of any main healer- and in the upper bracket, thats more important.
Absolutely, 100% yes. Everywhere from diamond upwards Ana’s pick rates are larger than all of the other main healers combined. They have been for over a year. Her pick rates are ridiculously high. Ana has 3 competitors for main healer.
This kind of disparity simply should not be happening. I know she has her weaknesses, but apparently they’re not enough to keep her pick rates down to reasonable numbers.
It’s fine for Ana to be a utility healer with powerful buffs and debuffs. It’s fine for her to have excellent burst healing cooldowns. It’s fine for her to put out a lot of healing. It’s fine for her to do decent damage. It’s apparently not fine for her to have all of those things put together.
When Valk 2.0 came out Mercy was certainly busted. But the entire period between Valk 2.0 and the 50 hps nerf is not monolith. In early 2018 Mercy received some heavy nerfs to Valkyrie. In the following months, she was not the most picked main healer. Moira was. Even in high ranks.
The introduction of Brigitte in spring 2018 shook the meta up for the worse, and Mercy’s pick rates spiked incredibly high for a couple of months, but by the time the 50 hps nerf hit they were already on their way down and GOATS was on its way up.
It’s simply not true that no one else was viable during the entire time that Mercy was meta. During the Mercy period Zenyatta was certainly viable. So was Brigitte after she was introduced. Lucio saw good play time until Brig showed up, but GOATS and his buff would easily have been enough to fix his problems. Moira eclipsed Mercy for a few months (and Moira isn’t exactly doing great right now either).
What’s more, throughout that entire time Mercy received nerf after nerf to attempt to fix the problem. Ana currently has high rank pick rates that are above 12%. They’ve been incredibly high for a year. For months at a time they hovered at around 15%.
She’s pushing out her competitors. This is a problem. She needs adjustment. The only other role that ever has similar pick rates to her is shield tank, and there are only 2 of those. There are 4 main healers.
she hits around 94 hps if you’re hitting all shots, and that’s not factoring the 50% increase she can get from nade.
d.va cant really counter her, eating a nade or a sleep is huge but you cant eat both every fight and she can land one of those abilities and carry the whole fight
You could com as ana hey pressure their dva im looking for a nade
and your team focuses their orisa shield or ur hanzo if he has an angle uses storm arrow and gj now you get a free nade bc matrix is used up and on cd
She’s played because not only is she fun, but she also has a lot of play making potential in the chaotic hole known as ladder. Comps are very rarely built around Ana.
Hanzos projectiles are the smallest in the game.
There’s no reason to bring it down to 50%, since it’s very hard to land a nade that hits multiple enemies. It only happens when the enemy team lets you and making the game more forgiving is the last thing Blizzard should do.
Ana being played to the extent she is right now can’t be attributed solely (or even mostly) to her fun factor.
Interestingly enough, different people find different heroes fun. There are a lot of people out there who find Mercy or Moira or Baptiste much more fun than Ana.
I don’t really support this particular nerf, but the general reason here is that she’s too strong right now so something has to give.
Sure… 
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[Characters required].
Overwatch is a FPS. Would it not make sense that the majority of the playerbase would prefer a hero that gets to shoot? Besides, I only listed her being fun as a part of the reason, because despite what the forums claim, Mercy is also a very strong hero right now and definitely capable of challenging Ana in terms of power. So either people can’t play Mercy or she’s not as fun as Ana. Moira is a bit weak at the moment and Baptiste is a little bit less versatile, although arguably stronger in his own situations.
no, she’s fine. the rest of the game is broken though. flankers and mobility is not strong enough, CC is too strong, snipers are too strong.
Splashing at the very least 2 people really isn’t that hard, the bigger issue is the vast majority of the time once someone is debuffed they will die unless the enemy team decides not to follow up on it for whatever reason. Debuff a tank and watch their frontline crumble, debuff a support and finish them off w/o them being able to do much and take away a portion of the enemy team’s sustain.
It makes getting higher value pick off’s easier and then she has sleep dart to take someone else out of the fight for a good duration.
Total healing shutout is just too strong an effect.
I don’t know. Maybe it makes sense and maybe it doesn’t. I personally prefer Mercy, and I know many other people do. Some people seem to really like melee heroes. Or CC focused heroes. I know a bunch of Reinhardt and Winston mains. Doomfist seems to be pretty popular. I have a friend who likes shooting things, but strongly prefers Baptiste to Ana.
Different people like different things. Overwatch is not a traditional FPS, and it attracts lots of different kinds of players.
It doesn’t seem right to me to claim that Ana’s high pick rates are attributed to fun, but not to make the same claim when other heroes have high pick rates. No one bought that claim when Mercy’s pick rates were high. I don’t think most people think that Orisa is categorically more fun than Reinhardt (except when Reinhardt is top tank, in which case he’s more fun).
I understand your argument, and I don’t think it’s without merit, but I don’t think it can explain the current situation on the ladder.
Mercy is better than some people make her out to be, but I don’t think she challenges Ana in terms of raw power.
pickrates do not inherently mean overpowered. You want to nerf one of the weakest parts of her kit to compensate for an inflated pickrate due to meta. I’m not sure how you think that would help when she already heals less on average per game than every other main healer.
It’s not. look at the 5th and 6th most picked hero’s across all elo’s. Look at the 7th most picked hero in GM. Other main healers are not being oppressed into obscurity.
Well, she doesn’t have decent damage, with one of the lowest dps’ in the game.
Her only buff is an ultimate, and her debuff is tied to her only means of healing less than average to other main healers as well as her only form of self sustain, on a 10 second cooldown.
Not sure how that entails excellent burst healing cooldowns either, being one of the longest cooldowns in the game.
So no, she doesn’t have the damage, healing, buffs or debuffs you’re over exaggerating.
This lasted for like a month, if that. Because Moira was just released and people wanted to replace mercy. We got the short lived slambulance that still couldn’t compete against dive, or the lesser known anti dive at the time with spamrat.
You are seriously downplaying how long Mercy was a must pick for.
https://i.redd.it/bw0k20jeghg11.png
https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/b4ub8m/overwatch_league_hero_pickrates_per_stage_season/
This is like text book denial. Literally Mercy was must pick until the healer buffs patch.
She didn’t. She got nerfed within the first month which killed moth and we went right back into dive. She then got nerfed once more like a month later and she stayed the same until the support patch. Well, there was also the damage boost “nerf” that didn’t just affect mercy, and also affected Ana and Orisa’s ultimates.
She is not, quit the hyperbole already. 5th and 6th most picked hero’s overall, mercy and moira. 7th most picked in GM. Mercy. Overwatch league has Mercy’s pickrate right behind Sombra in a bunker heavy meta that doesn’t even favor her. Baptiste is literally right behind Ana in pickrate in OWL.
3 actually, and 4 main tanks if you wanna get technical.
2 of which have serious problems of their own.
On most points and maps she cannot be far in the backline.
And she is easy to dive, especially when she is far behind her team.
There absolutely is a disparity. The main healer category is small and is relatively necessary. You’re expecting main healers to be high on the pick lists. You should be comparing them to each other, not to all other heroes.
Here’s the current GM numbers this week for main healers:
Ana 12.85, Mercy 5.65, Baptiste 3.47, Moira 1.12.
Here’s the masters numbers:
Ana 13.34, Mercy 5.19, Baptiste 2.63, Moira 2.17
And in diamond:
Ana 12.41, Mercy 4.63, Moira 3.69, Baptiste 2.45
In all of these cases Ana has more than twice her next competitor. She also has more than all the others combined. What’s more, in many of these comps Mercy is being used as an off healer, not as a competitor to Ana.
This isn’t a blip in the data. This has been going on for more than a year. Some of that time was far worse than the current situation, with Ana getting pick rates of over 15% for weeks at a time. I don’t know what to call this aside from a disparity. Maybe you and I use the word differently.
Just for some context, in March of 2018 Moira had a GM pick rate of about 7%, Mercy had about 4.5%, and Ana had about 3.3%. That’s much closer to being balanced than what we’re currently seeing.
It lasted from late January to mid April. Then we had a couple of months of Mercy’s pick rates increasing, and then they started decreasing. People were trying to figure out what Brig meant for the game. The trend was going towards GOATS, and they would have continued. Especially with the buffs to Lucio and Ana.
What’s more, during the entire time that Moira was more meta than Mercy, their win rates were very similar. It’s hard to claim that Mercy is a must pick when she’s winning the same amount of games as her competitors who are played more than her.
This is simply not true for that whole period. It was probably true from the introduction of the rework in August 2017 till the Valkyrie nerfs in January 2018, but it wasn’t after that. She wasn’t winning more than Moira when Moira was picked more than her, and comps that featured Mercy lost in a big way to GOATS that was on the rise. She was not a must pick past January 2018.
She was a must pick for half a year. Ana’s had very high pick rates consistently throughout this past year.
She absolutely did get nerfed repeatedly. The devs were aware of the problem and were working on it. It’s much more than can be said of Ana.
As I said above, you should be comparing main healers to each other. They are absolutely being crowded out on the ladder.
OWL is not monolithic. Mercy’s pick rates in OWL come from the fact that several teams like to run comps that play to her strengths, many of which use her as an off healer.
Healing grenade is also a buff. I’m counting sleep as a debuff, but that might be an eccentricity of mine. I don’t mind adding a CC category.
She does have excellent burst healing cooldowns. Both grenade and nano are burst healing. Burst healing is not usually needed on a constant basis, and having two of them (on top of her already high single target healing) qualifies her for this tag in my opinion.
It’s true that grenade is also her means of self sustain, but she’s not the only healer. Her second healer should be helping her out. I know that if I play Mercy alongside an Ana I do my very best to make sure she NEVER has to use grenade for self healing as it’s too good an ability. In any case, this is a weakness but it’s not been enough to keep her under control.
Regarding damage, that’s debatable. I was comparing her to her competitors. Her damage is certainly higher than Mercy’s (even when you factor in damage boosted). It’s also less trashy than Moira’s. Her damage has also historically affected her viability, so I put it in.
They don’t always mean that, no. But you have to have some explanation for pick rate disparities this high that last for this long. They’re not random. They require some reason.
What’s more, pick rate arguments were leveled at Mercy as well. Sometimes they were justified, and sometimes they weren’t. You can’t use them for one hero and ignore them for another.
I don’t think I’m guilty of hyperbole, but if I am it’s reminiscent of some of the claims people made about Mercy.
I think you’re understating the issue that the main support class has. Two of the main supports, as you say, have serious issues. One of them is being used as an off healer as often as not. It’s possible that Ana is completely fine and that the other main healers need some adjustments, but it’s also quite possible that Ana just needs a nerf.
It’s been inflated for over a year, meta after meta. At some point one has to wonder why Ana has always managed to stay so close to the top. Why the meta never shifted against her. Metas don’t change randomly. They’re influenced by all of the heroes, support included.
Something has to be changed. I think that a heal nerf is an effective way to do it. Let Ana bring utility, and force another healer in to shore up the healing.