Ana's inconsistency isn't because of having to aim

[Strawman-21382]

Firstly it’s because of how difficult it is to stay alive during the team fight. One mistake with Ana and you’re dead and you can’t get value out of a dead character. Secondly it’s because she has a very high impact kit but with a lot of down time: long cooldowns, long reload time, no mobility so it takes forever to reposition, etc. Something as simple as reloading at the wrong time with Ana can get a teammate killed.
This is why game sense and positioning are two very important skills to have with Ana and they are extremely hard to master. Also there are no straight forward ways of practicing these skills so it’s common for Ana players to feel like they hit a plateau and can’t improve.
Aiming with her is not that difficult and having godly aim is not necessary either.

[Skald-1493]

She needs a retune badly.

[Crestren-1121]

Another thing is her sustainability as a main healer. Shes the only hero in the game who has no regen ability or way for her to heal herself without having to waste an ability on herself. And yea, her reload is a bit too long.

Just give her a passive where when she heals an ally, she recovers a small amount of HP and reduce her reload time from 1.5s to either 1s or 1.2s.

[Skald-1493]

The DEVs already stated that they’re not interested on improving her weaknesses — lack of mobility and poor self heal.

@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.

If she is to be fixed then maybe they should make her sleep dart more efficacious — do what what it was actually intended to do. As is it’s more difficult a shot to make than even her basic shots.

@JeffreyKaplan

Ana’s Sleep Dart ability was intended to give her the ability to disengage.

Another possible solution that doesn’t try to improve her mobility or self heal is to give her some kind cover to operate under or something useful as a preventative…

@Skald-1493

Can we give Ana a ghillie suit – a passive that simply lets her be invisible to enemies past a certain distance. Of course abilities like Widow Sight, Opportunist, Sonic Arrow and some such work as normal.

Firstly this would allow Ana to be a different kind of sniper than Widowmaker in her sniper’s nest. Secondly it’ll allow her to play at range – which at the moment she cannot. Lastly it turns her relationship with dive into a cat 'n mouse game – leaving her that much less susceptible to that meta overall.

Also, it does NOTHING to give her extra mobility – which is perfectly in keeping with her play style restrictions.

Thanks everyone.

Whatever the case dive is here to stay. It’s not goin away soon, they keep adding heroes to its roster and every dive hero thus far is a hard counter to her.

After their hard nerf a year ago they emasculated the tanks abilities to peel and upped the distances high mobility heroes could leap and jump from 4 to 7 meters (created the dive meta). They also dropped her DPS. She was never compensated for the shift in metas and subsequently struggles for a place in this game.

She really needs a retune. The game has long since moved on past her. This isn’t the Ana of yesterday anymore. They need to return her back onto the test server for a revisit and rebalance.