The game doesn’t need any particular character and especially not one that didn’t launch with the game. To say the game as a whole needs Ana’s anti just admits she’s a problem since she’s stronger than all of the supposed overpowered supports.
You forget Ana is a prime contributor to the “too much healing” ideal
I’d argue many of those are not enough against teams that make use of anti though. For example, overhealth for JQ and Mauga does mitigate it, that is true. But often times to even get to your target as JQ you need to use that same ability to simply get up close to do your job. Shout also has a longer CD than anti and is not difficult to take advantage of as Ana. Both JQ and Mauga also heavily rely on their ability to self heal to mitigate damage, which anti obviously counters.
Hog is personally a little bit better against anti than he was in OW1, but also the loss of a second tank to possibly block the anti in the first place means he’s more likely to be anti’d in the first place. Additionally, the support passive allows Ana to throw nade aggressively more frequently than she did in OW1, which further increases the uptime of anti.
They are adding things that do help mitigate it. I think you’re right in saying that. But I do think that in spite of that, the changes from OW1 to OW2 helped push Ana over the edge. I think it’s fair to want something to change since anti currently holds so much of the game together from healing to damage that it limits other potential changes across roles.
Isn’t that that just making it obvious that AntiNade is the problem?
Most of all the 5v5’s current overall problems boils down to the game trying to bend itself around the devs not fundamentally changing AntiNade, Widow or Hanzo.
If those weren’t almost “Needed” to make stuff die fast enough, then they could more easily lower Defenses (i.e. Less bulk healing, nerfed Suzu, nerfed ImmoField, etc).
It would also make it so that heroes like Mauga, Junker Queen or Roadhog are a heck of a lot easier to balance for all ELOs, rather than having to figure out his power level, with and without a Kiriko pocket.
I’d argue that the main things that are limiting the game are AntiNade, Widow and Hanzo.
So in a game that’s could be simplified down to:
Those three heroes are narrowing down ALL of those choices, a lot.
They are a textbook definition of a severe “Balance” problem.
Literally,
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.
https://archive.gamedev.net/archive/reference/articles/article1765.html
Although here’s the definition I used for myself:
Balance:
- Increasing the simultaneous gameplay Choices that are worth your time (i.e. Enjoyable + Viable), and provide unique novelty.
- With very low ELO primarily focused on Enjoyable Choices, and Tournaments almost entirely focused on the most Viable choices. And all the ELOs in between are roughly a spectrum of that.
That all said, what I’d like to see is
TANKS
Tank Passive: Relentless - The duration of all negative status effects is reduced by 50%.
And start off by giving Ana something slightly overpowered, then tone it down at a later date when Ana mains stop freaking out so much.
ANA
Biotic Rifle - Damage and Healing increased to 75.
Health - Increased to 225hp.
Biotic Grenade - Cooldown reduced to 8 seconds.
I don’t disagree entirely, but I do think anti-nade is a problem (not necessarily sleep) since healing and tanks have been balanced around it. It forces her to be picked, otherwise you’re choosing an uphill battle by not having anti-nade since so much of the game was balanced around it.
IMO I’d like to see the game balanced away from anti-nade. Nade nerfed but its uptime increased, and tanks and healing tuned down to compensate it for the fact that the only thing denying 100% healing is Junker Queen’s ultimate.
Oh i agree with what your saying, she needs something done, but nothing major like removing the ability.
Like the talk about how anti is needed to fight sustain, but sustain is needed to fight damage, but damage is needed to fight sustain, but since damage is high and only one tank requires more sustain, but since sustain is high anti is needed, ect.
You get by point.
Its a system that just feeds into itself. We would need a total reset on basicly the entire game, all heroes would need to be looked at. Kinda like how dota recently did a massive overhall to all heroes and their interations to CC.
its not some simple fix, its way more complex then we make it out to be.
Sleep is only annoying because of the hitbox + favor the shooter. I’ve lost count of how many times I actively dodge sleeps only for them to somehow still connect because of how wonky the interactions with it are.
Sustain is high because of Ana…
On that I agree. I don’t think it needs to be removed. But I think the uptime is too high for the strength it currently provides. I think the only solutions without drastically increasing the CD (which I think wouldn’t be ideal for anyone who enjoys Ana) is to reduce the percentage from 100% so healing isn’t entirely impossible or reduce the duration of anti. At least, imo.
I am more firmly in the former being the better solution since if you reduce the duration enough to be significant it can start to feel crummy those playing Ana similar to increasing the CD. While it would still be strong, I think it would feel bad to use if it only lasted a second or two. Too short to really appreciate the strength of it even if that does significantly reduce its impact.
I also completely agree with this. I think there’s a lot of moving parts as someone else mentioned earlier. And I think the game’s balance should be looked at as a whole. Really, this should have happened more from OW1 to OW2 but alas here we are lol
If only there was a PTR or experimental card where they could test massive changes to the game.
If only
I’d be fine with this take only if it were followed up by the addition of more anti-heal sources. I think it’s dumb that they counterbalance high healing with a single hero (cause no one is playing JQ to counter just that with her ult). I don’t necessarily want more anti-heal sources, but it’s better than having one character hold all that power.
It also doesnt help that the support role has for the longest time had the least amount of heros to chose between.
As we get more heroes in the roles, we start seeing other people get played.
I remember in OW1, where finding a game without ana was like a 1:100 chance, now finding a game without ana feels more like a 1:10 chance.
As other heroes become avaible and viable, we will see her less.
If they add more heroes and tools to help deal with it and make other changes anti 100% works in OW
Yup. But I’ll also point out.
Just because Anti is getting directly or indirectly nerfed, doesn’t mean Ana needs to get nerfed.
Ana should be high tier in the meta, merely because she’s Popular, and theoretically they are going to solve one of the most Frustrating aspect of her design.
So she should get compensation buffs.
Heck, briefly buff Ana to the point of slightly Overpowered, to give Ana mains the time to stop freaking out about the Antinade nerf.
I think you might be putting the cart before the horse here. Ana and her bionade arrived first, and then sustain creep came along after as it became evident that teams couldn’t function without an answer to anti. And it hasn’t just been supports who have been powercrept to deal with anti. I mean, just look at tanks.
And anyway, even when accept the idea that antiheal is currently the only thing keeping rampant sustain in check… my guy, that is all the more reason to nerf antiheal so that we can actually see what sort of sustain problem we’re looking at, and then nerf that as well. It shouldn’t be on support players to be stuck playing the same hero every single match for eight years running just to make the game feel playable for DPS and Tank players. That isn’t balance.
Except its not the “only” thing, burst damage is the other main contender if not bigger counter to sustain then anti.
Removing anti doesnt solve anything, just shows other aspects that are creating the issues as well.
Like look at tanks, getting anti hurts because damage is so high that in the durration of anti, you can go from 100% to 0% while using defensive abilites. If damage wasnt so high/bursty anti wouldn be as powerfull.
Its never so simple sadly
As someone who has been playing a lot Ilari I can confirm you can just kill things to progress the match.
Like a quick bit of focus fire are looking for low tagets to tap with a full pulse will very much get you to a quick win condition.
my point was that anti makes it a lot easier to kill through things like moira/lifeweaver pocket which would otherwise make bursting things significantly harder. Dmg boost and discord got nerfed so anti is almost essential offensive utility and holds a lot of the sustain creep in check
Yup, but also relatively easy to fix.
Considering if we’re talking Tanks, the main issues are:
Bastion
Hanzo - PrimaryArrow combined with StormArrows
Bastion, you just give him less damage, tighter spread, and 1.5x headshot. Maybe a lot of more HP.
Hanzo, just hard nerf StormArrows. There’s no reason he needs 425-to-850 damage in 1.2sec. Buff Lunge a bit, so he can get away from Dive Tanks better.
That’s a good thing. Blizzard needs to start trying to fix some of their problems instead of adding problems to counter their problems, and the best way to do that is to go back to where it started.
Didn’t we learn how dumb that sort of logic was with Launch Brig?
If you “need” anything specific to deal with a broad issue in the game.
That’s a balance problem. A narrow counterplay problem.
And you can’t fix the root problem, because now you got the game balanced around an ultra-counter.
So this is more so a target priority issue more then anything.
if you focus specifically on the supports as your main focus for damage. Then you will find it a lot easier to actually kill things quicker, as they burn the their resources to save themselves over just their resource dump that is their tank or or dps.
That and well most supports can’t really heal themselves in the same way they can heal a different hero.
And if you get your tank on board with targeting squishies, that healing is basically null and void as long as your willing to shoot same targets as they are.
For me, just pinging a 200hp targets with low health is enough to get at least 1 person to look my way and help.
Also neither of these heroes are particullary good at the moment. Moria specifically is probably one of your worst options, if your not going supper aggro with her like in the same way you would play a genji or tracer.
(she is oddly one of the best flankers to deal with widows, as she doesn’t need LOS to do to burn a large chunk of her HP.)