How to fix Ana: An ANAlysis

General Discussion
1

Hello all! As many of you know, Ana is in a pretty tough spot right now. She may be seeing some decent playtime in Overwatch League(even more than Moira!!) she is still suffering from some fundamental issues as a character.

Now, to start off I will quickly get something out of the way: Ana should not get any sort of mobility. The common argument is that she is a sniper with no way of getting to high ground. However, this is a weakness that is intrinsic to her kit and should remain. Any sort of Ana that had an escape or a movement ability would utter break the game. Ana is forced to duel flankers who come after her. This is 100% how it should be. That is why she has tools to win those duels.

Give Ana 80 damage per shot

Please? I know they gave us 70 damage but honestly I think Tracer deserves to die if Ana can land two shots when she doesn’t have recall, especially with her current state in the game.

Replace Ana’s 10 shots with a reloadable meter

Currently, Ana suffers when she must heal targets who are almost full. She wastes healing on targets who don’t need a full shot. This creates a massive inefficiency in her play where she must reload more often when compared to her healing output.

The way to solve this issue is to change Ana’s 10 shots to a reloadable meter. The meter will be full at 750. This way, the meter goes down even with healing. Every time Ana heals someone for the full 75 health, the meter will go down by 75. This system will give Ana the same 10 shots if all 10 shots heal for the maximum 75. However, this is a rare occurrence. More often than not, Ana will get more shots than previously and will not be punished for topping off her allies. If the meter is at less than 75, the final shot will still heal for a full amount, similar to a Mei Icicle or Symmetra Orb.

Of course, there is the issue of Biotic Grenade. Biotic Grenade amps healing on effected targets for 4 seconds. The solution for this is to reduce the amount of meter taken by healing during this time by two-thirds. If you were to use Biotic Grenade, you can get your healing per shot up to 112.5. Instead of taking 112.5 from the meter, it would only take the normal 75.

As for damage, it would affect the meter in the exact same way. When Ana does 70 damage with a shot, the meter is drained by 70. If any gets a finishing blow for only 60 damage before the target dies, the meter will only drain by sixty. The final shot will be at full damage even if there is not enough resource.

Changing her simple 10 shots to a reloadable meter would make Ana significantly more flexible as a healer. This would not be a tiny change. It would be a buff, as it would give Ana more shots per clip. Hopefully, this could be the change that brings Ana out of the shadow realm and back into competitive viability.

Let Nanoboost Amp Healing by 50% and have it heal the target to full

Honestly, I don’t know why this isn’t in the game yet. It might make Boostio a viable option. If Beyblade is too strong again, simply disable the effect on self-healing. A full heal isn’t in Overwatch yet, and giving it to an ultimate would probably be the best way to implement it.

Let Ana detonate Biotic Grenade in her hand

Allowing Ana to detonate her grenade without it becoming a projectile would give her the buff versus D.Va and to a lesser extent Genji she needs. Buffing Defense Matirx effectively killed Ana, and this change should help her without hurting D.Va too much.

Hopefully my rambling wasn’t too much. To me, Ana should be the number one healer in Overwatch at the highest level, where her skillcap is reached. Personally I cannot play Ana, I simply don’t like her kit. However, some of these changes may be able to pull her out of the pit she currently finds herself in.

Note: These are not changes designed to be implemented together. These are a list of possible changes that Ana could get in order to boost her performance. I understand that implementing all of these would probably make Ana excessively broken again.

15 Likes
2

Creative ideas but I don’t think Ana should have anything more than small tweaks.

  • Tracer can recall the 2nd shot.
  • Having the Nanoboost full heal could be seen as a res, the idea of bringing a tank from 100 to 500 might be OP. I think healing amp could be good though.

Honestly it’s just unfortunate that Dive is the meta, because I think Ana is really good when there aren’t 4 heroes that can contest her. It’s a bit of issue because it only encourages Dive even more, as opposed to Quad Tank where Ana can nade and heal from high ground without that much pressure.

3

Tracer is forced to recall the second shot instead of the third, that is the idea. Nanoboost is an ultimate. Other ultimates(Primal Rage, Self-Destruct) already give psuedo full heals. Nanoboost would also have to be used before a target dies, unlike Ressurect. Honestly though you’re probably better off nanoing a full health target anyway because they probably aren’t being focused down.

4 Likes
4

You note that these shouldn’t be implemented together, but I would note just one of these certainly wouldn’t be enough either…

her ultimates fine… it could use some special sauce to make it more effective for sure (I like the idea that when she uses it on an ally, she uses another on herself), but her biggest problem is her mid-game…

her extreme drivability and her very low self sustain compound the issues with her, but it’s not like she is doing the craziest healing and her damage is so-so with how much aim it requires…

Against what you suggest, I think some mobility would do her good… specifically vertical mobility, rather then anything speed or invulrablity related… she’s a sniper and some verticality would solve so many of her problems. (something like a small wall jump allowing an Ana to hop to a slightly high elevation, nothing too crazy)

that, alongside some quality of life changes and anything take makes sleep dart more likely to find its target in a pinch, and I think she’ll finally find her niche as a ranged healer with some decent assist damage

4 Likes
5

Honestly I have felt for awhile they need to go back, and possibly rework the older heroes as all the newer ones have passive effects. However the older heroes mostly do not.

For Ana I like the idea that’s been thrown around of giving her a passive that heals her for 5-10 HP for each Effective heal she lands. This rewards, actively supporting her team while helping her mid game. If she takes a hit or 2 and then breaks LoS but is still healing her team she doesn’t need to waste her Grenade to heal herself.

Possibly add it so she if full can gain maybe max 25 extra HP as temporary as long as she is still healing when at max health.

Also possibly she could get a Grenade or Sleep Dart, I lean towards SD even though I still miss a lot with it. CD reset when she gets a kill, or assists with a kill, as a example I mean she shoots them and does damage just before they die not heal a DPS that kills them.

These simple tweaks would maintain her skilled level while adding more depth and helping her when she survives skirmishes at 25hp…

Just a thought.

4 Likes
6

Personally I’m an advocate for wall climb. It’s a single buff that limits the number of heroes that can get at her, allows her to heal over the heads of her own team and does much on helping her deal with her biggest problem without changing any other stat assigned to her — survivability.

One buff. One single buff to cover most of her shortcomings. Plus, it’s perfectly suited to her both as a sniper and as Pharah’s mom.

5 Likes
7

I personally believe Ana should remain in the ‘skill tier’ where Widow and Mccree reside, but the one thing that really drives me away from playing Ana is the delay when scoped in after a shot. I know this is designed so she cannot hip fire into fully-charged scoped hitscan for 150+ healing almost instantly, but can we get rid of the delay time and instead add a ramp-up time on the power of her scoped healing (similar to widow). This ramp-up time doesn’t necessarily need to happen between every scoped shot, but potentially only for the initial scope in time.
Currently, the delay time is very frustrating when trying to help your team from a ranged and also play in a position that is safe for you, but if she was able to do 150+ healing in 2 back-to-back shots it would be far too powerful, and I think a ramp-up time would feel much better if the damage/healing is tuned correctly.

2 Likes
8

I do think her shots should go through shields, but only to heal. I also think when Ana nanos someone she should grow wings and fly around with constant self heal! No! Wait! Give her 2 Nades!

9

lol this is pretty funny

10

if they make the reload like gears of war and like perform a perfect reload that could be cool and speed up reload and could also do more healing/damage on First shot if done right.

either that or increase the nade radius would help alot

11

Recently watched the ‘Your Overwatch’ video they posted about Ana and how buffs would be nice. I liked some of the idea like being able to shoot through barriers and healing through teammates but at the same time I acknowledge blizzards position of how buffing her too much would take her and the tank meta back to common play which = snooze. I thought maybe a way to balance the buffing would be to give anas rifle 2 firing modes. Like stun or kill on a Star Trek phaser. Then you could either damage or heal and the different shots could have different physics. Let me know what you think.

1 Like
12

She should be able to shoot through barriers. In my design, it would look something like this:

-Shooting a barrier will cause the damage to hit the barrier.
-a healing projectile(or hitscan, depending if you zoomed in or not) will then continue past the barrier until interrupted by:
-Any impenetrable object
-Another barrier (deals no damage or heal)
-an enemy (deals no damage or heal)
-or a teammate (heals)

The extended heal dart looks the same to teammates, but it looks orange to enemies, the dart does nothing on contact with an enemy.

That’s what I would do to buff her. A few minor tweaks like s few seconds off her sleep would be nice too.

13

Didn’t read post

But amazing pun my dude :+1:

2 Likes
14

She needs to be able to heal without having to aim much. Her heals are extremely unreliable compared to all of the other healers. She was only popular in tank meta because her targets were huge & easy to hit.

15

Here’s a silly idea, let her wall jump! Allow her to jump from one wall to another for a total of two wall jumps, like a sub-par version of lucio’s wall jumping to maximum height, lol.

Edit: Think parkour. Let her wall jump, slide, etc. lol.

3 Likes
16

What i thought Ana could benefit from a lot was changing her Biotic grenade change it so you get 50% up front and %50 over 2secs this would allow ana to initiate fights (throw grenade down allow team to roll in) meaning no body blockers and also allow her to reload a little more safely giving her a chance to heal while doing so. theres nothing worse than having to reload during a fight only to watch a teammate die by the time youve done so.

17

The ability to consistently hit shots is something that ana players have to put a lot of work into. Having a high mechanical skill cap is totally fine imo. You just have to make sure that players are REWARDED for putting the time into working on their aim instead of letting half the cast have ways to easily deny her healing.

18

I think they should keep her immobile and keep the shield problem. Just make it so that headshot heals critically heal. Then most tanks would have to look back to get the crit and it would be in line with the “aiming rewards healing” tone of the character.

19

Her problem isn’t that her healing throughput is low. Her problem is survivability which affects her healing throughput. You see, dead Ana’s can’t heal no matter how much you buff their healing.

They either need to buff her survivability or nerf every dive hero to fix her. In this case I think to buff her is far easier than nerfing everyone else.

1 Like
20

I liked your meter idea, but I have a question: does this system ignore missed shots? Like, other than wasting time, missing shots would not have a negative impact on your meter, right?