[ANA] So I figured out how to fix AntiNade

General Discussion
1

So it’s expected that the devs will be dealing with Ana’s Biotic Grenade, some time in Season 9. Here’s a video of Flats looking at Alec Dawson’s thought’s on rebalancing AntiNade.

There’s a variety of ways they could deal with AntiNade, and they all have their downsides and tradeoffs. But I thought of one that does two unique things:

*1. It’s visually obvious.

* 2. It doesn’t conflict with Junker Queen’s Ultimate.

ANA

Biotic Grenade

  • The Anti-Heal effect only prevents healing on the first 50% of the enemy healthbar.
  • Visually, only the first 50% of the enemy healthbar is purple.

JUNKER QUEEN

Rampage (Ultimate)

  • The Anti-Heal effect only prevents healing on 100% of the enemy healthbar.
  • Visually, 100% of the enemy healthbar is purple.

And there you have it. It specifically affects AntiNade in a visual obvious way, but doesn’t conflict with Junker Queen Ult.

And it still maintains a lot of usefulness on DPS/Supports. However it is way less effective on Tanks. Since half of a Tank healthbar, is a lot. That said, if it needs to be more harsh, make the purple take up 75% on the bar.

That all said, Ana might need a buff of some sort for this nerf. But it’s probably either damage or survival of some sort.

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2

I’m so tired of explaining how over half the roster has countermeasures against Biotic Grenade’s debuff, so I’m just going to try to get you to think critically for once.

What happens when everyone is capable of countering Biotic Grenade’s healing debuff effect? What point is there is everyone can counter every debuff in the game?

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3

And I’m tired of explaining how limiting the choice of half the Tank roster is, by definition, is a massive Balance problem.

Because that’s what Balance problems are. Choice reduction problems.

What is Play Balance?

Sid Meier once said, “A game is a collection of interesting choices”. It follows that game elements being out of balance and thereby eliminating choices detracts from the gameplay. Ideally, a game should be a series of choices, ending with victory of defeat or some other end condition. Sometimes, some choices will become unquestionably the only choice, or definitely not a valid choice. If there is only one valid choice at some point, but the game hasn’t ended, there is a play balance problem. Nearly all situations commonly referred to as imbalances can be boiled down to a choice reduction.

4

No, it’s not, because every Tank has a defensive ability that negates outright or buys time to stall out the duration. Again, you don’t get it, you don’t think, and you don’t educate yourself to understand this.

5

So you think you know more about game design than the most senior game design guy at Riot for the last 18 years?

Because that’s the author of the article I linked to. Tom Cadwell.

And you’re basically saying “Choice Reduction is not a Balance problem”. When that’s literally the definition of a Balance problem.

6

At this point a flat 50% healing reduction seems sensible. The issue then is what about compensation buffs? Because as much as people here like to pretend Ana is op she’s really not. Nerfing nade in this way would probably gut the characters so what changes can be made to offset this? I’m curious about how much stronger Ana will be if she’s allowed to crit. That’s just one idea. Maybe they could increase the AoE of nade as well if you cut it’s effectiveness in half. A lower cooldown is an obvious tradeoff. They could just buff her primary in general with a faster fire rate or better projectile speed. There’s a ton of ways they could lower anti to 50% while keeping her the same in terms of overall strength.

7

But how do you visually represent that?
And does that apply to Junker Queen Ult too?

8

Probably the same way as a hacked or discorded target. Give them a different hue so teammates know they’re vulnerable.

I’d say no since that’s an ult and it’s meant to be a fight swinging thing.

9

Nah I mean like, let’s say the top half of the healthbar is purple.
But the bottom half of the healthbar is normal.

10

Well in my case since it’s a flat 50% reduction it applies to the entire hp bar and the whole thing can remain purple. It doesn’t break any consistency since the healing buff from nade makes the hp bar shiny too lol. For your case idk how that would work tbh. But I feel I heard from somewhere that this type of change can’t be done due to some technical issue?

11

Yeah, it’s that Blizzard technically doesn’t want to do it :stuck_out_tongue:

In seriousness, though, if you went to a 50% Heal Reduction, you probably could just extend the duration of Anti-Nade by a couple of seconds

Alternatively, split Healing Nade and Anti-Nade into two entirely distinct abilities and balance each independently–that’s probably a more involved rework but frankly it might make balancing her easier, since nerfing Anti-Nade wouldn’t also impact her healing. That, I think, is an understated part of why Ana has been such a pain point for balance–tying the heal block & heal boost together makes certain balance changes ill-adapted for addressing her, since they would either be overly punitive because of how it impacts her healing, not punitive enough because of attempts to preserve that healing, or just really contrived and unintuitive.

In that example, if you nerf Anti, you can buff Healing without some weird contrived changes. Say both abilities started at a 12 second cooldown (not saying that’s the right amount, just an example), you could nerf Anti cooldown then buff Healing cooldown to, say, 10 and 14. Or you reduce the scalar on Anti from 100% to 50%, then increase the AOE on Healing. Stuff like that–as it is right now, though, it’s hard to effectively buff or nerf Anti without also nerfing or buffing the heal boost aspect.

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12

How about something like that.

Imgur: The magic of the Internet

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13

as a support main, supports need counters to their abilities. ana nade is one of them.
healbotting should not be a strat you can blindly run successfull.

imagine you could do nothing to stop the enemy healing besides landing a lucky hs as widow/hanzo/soj.

if anti isn’t balanced, healing in general needs more downtime.

if anti only affects the first 50% then its effect imho ks kinda pointless. ehy stress it? if they dont get bursted 50% - 0% in an instant you just heal them back up as they use defensive cds.

14

Yup.

15

the problem is people keep hating on nade but never mention healing in general is to high which is why anti is mandatory.

if healing is lower, then theres no need to deny it.

why would any sane person nerf nade but keep healing untouched?

16

I assume people don’t mention it because the first steps to all of it is fixing Ana. A lot of things in the game are balanced under the assumption that Ana is in 100% of games to provide a hardcounter, and those things were typically added in after Ana. They are, themselves, a problem caused by Ana/nade.