How to make Mei more engaging to play as AND against

General Discussion
1

I play Mei from time to time (1400+ hours, GM most seasons since season 1) and I have a few things I hope the balance team takes a look at that will make Mei not necessarily better, but more fun.
There have been a lot of changes to Mei over the past 4 years and some of them were good, others were just absurdly strong, and others made mei really not fun at times. I’m going to quickly go over what I consider “good”, “absurdly broken”, and “not fun” so you get an idea of my usage of the word “good”.

Good Changes
Mei cleansing Ana's biotic grenade debuff

This was a good change as it made her cryo feel like a safety net as it was supposed to be. It took them the better half of two years to fix what they even admitted was a bug but once they got to it, it felt good.

  • Blizzard
    Now pierces shields

I honestly forgot they had to add this as it just feels expected. having a circle on the floor is different from having a sphere so it just makes sense that a sphere of ice would go around barriers whereas something like shatter would not.

  • Endothermic Blaster (Secondary Fire)
    Removing damage falloff

I initially though this wasn’t needed but after they added it I felt way more capable of dealing with Pharah’s or sometimes Widowmaker when I’m feeling idiotic enough to try which is always.

  • Ice Wall
    1. Large heroes fit through 1 wide gaps
    2. Breaking wall while dead

(1) This physically doesn’t make sense but it was a healthy change for the game as it lead to less frustrated main tanks and they need all the breaks they can get.
(2) This made Mei feel like less of a hinderance to her team as she isn’t just an obstacle ensuring her teams death after she dies.

Absurdly Broken

  • Patch 1.22.0.1, Endothermic Blaster (Primary Fire) Now pierces through enemies.

Oh good god what have they done…
This is a remnant of a dark time where endlessly hungering herbivores ruled the meta and nothing could stop them. The GOATS meta.
This change has made it possible to gain 80% ult charge in 2 seconds just hold down left click, and no, this is NOT an exaggeration. This is not as possible anymore since the other changes they did to her but it still had no right ever doing that in the first place. The value of getting 80% ult while ALSO fueling your teammates ult by letting them kill frozen enemies was absolutely beyond broken.

Not fun
Before I continue I just want to say I disagree with basically every change they’ve done to her blaster. I will explain why in the comments of each change.

  • Endothermic Blaster changes beyond that point
    Maximum ammo reduced from 200 to 120.

This was needed for the upcoming changes

  • Endothermic Blaster (Primary Fire) changes beyond that point

1. Damage increased from 2.25 to 2.75 (45 to 55 damage per second).
2. Slowing effect now reduces enemy movement speed from 20 to 70%, down from 30 to 90%.
3. Slowing effect duration reduced from 1.5 to 1.0s.
4. Freeze stun duration lowered from 1.5 to 1.3s.

(1) Damage was increased enabling Mei to do 55*6=330 potential damage per second. You’re probably saying “But it’s rare to freeze 6 people at once” which is true, so lets make it more realistic. 55*3.5=193 damage per second. This would give you around 35% ult charge in just one freeze but you typically were able to freeze twice in a row.
Not fun for Enemies, Fun for Mei
(2) This was a pretty good change as it made freeze appear shorter by not having the slow hit you like a truck.
Fun for Enemies, Neutral for Mei <= this is what you should strive for when making a nerf.
(3) This along with (2) was pretty harsh in my opinion, I think they should have done either but not both. 70% slow with 1.5s duration instead of 90% for 1s would have been the healthier of the two
Fun for enemies, Not fun for Mei
(2)(3)(4) could have been good if they didn’t effect Blizzard. these changes in a sense reverted the very first change they gave to Mei (Blizzard radius has been increased from 8 to 10m.). Most characters are able to just walk out even without a Lucio in most cases.
Fun for enemies, Not fun for Mei

  • Endothermic Blaster (Primary Fire) changes beyond that point
    1. Removed damage falloff.
    2. Ammo cost reduced from 20 to 10 per shot.

(1) I didn’t feel like this was needed at first but after it got added I felt more impactful against my counters. This didn’t make Mei stronger than Pharah or Widowmaker, but it made you feel like you stood a chance against them if you hit your shots.
(2) This made it so you should shoot 12 times instead of 10. 120/10 instead of 200/20 or even 200/25 like it was in the start.
This also made Primary Fire expensive as you can only use it for 6 seconds instead of 10 seconds. That means Mei can freeze 40% less with a weaker freeze from the changes in the previous segment.

Conclusion
While I do believe it was healthy to encourage the use of her Secondary Fire as I have said over the years how much I hated Mei being a left click bot. I believe right now she’s more of a reload bot. She can shoot more icicles than ever before but that’s about it. Reloading while in cryo was… a change… but not an impactful one by any means.

I honestly believe that if they went back on the multi freeze change it would have fixed a large portion of the problems people were having with Mei. Adding multi freeze removed what I thought was a critical part of teamplay against Mei. If you’re a D.Va and you see your Lucio getting frozen, you could swoop in and take some freeze charge until your Lucio got his boop back to boop away the Mei and let you both escape.
In case you think this would never happen, this DID happen, to me! I was so impressed with their coordination as I’m sure they were too. That kind of team oriented counterplay felt really good as it wasn’t a factor of being limited by mechanics, but enabled by teamplay.

I’m not saying they should ONLY remove multi freeze. She would need her other changes reverted too. Here’s what I propose:

  • Endothermic Blaster
    Increase max ammo to 150
  • Endothermic Blaster (Secondary Fire)
    Increase Secondary Fire cost to 15
  • Endothermic Blaster (Primary Fire)
    1. No longer pierces enemies
    2. Decrease cost to 15
    3. Increase slow duration to 1.3 seconds
    4. Change slow strength to 10%-80%

(3) The problem with 1 second slow is the window to freeze someone is so tight that missing one tick of freeze can ensure they don’t freeze. The problem with 1.5 seconds is the window to freeze is so big that they’re often left slowed for a long time even after you’ve switched targets.
(4) Even at 20% I notice when I freeze someone they still get that feeling of being hit by a truck. Increasing the max freeze to 80% from 70% is to offset the weaker initial slow but mostly because I want to be selfish and torture people 10% more :smiling_imp:. The 80% is optional.

  • Blizzard
    1. Change slow strength to 30%-70%
    2. Decrease duration from 4.25 seconds to 4 seconds
    3. Increase cost by 5%

This may seem counter to what I said in the previous change, but Blizzard is an ultimate. This would really differentiate Primary Fire and Blizzard to make it feel more like a special ability and not just “bigger left click :crazy_face:”

There are other changes to Mei that I feel are okay such as cryo being treated as a wall (I hate that I can’t get Sound Barrier while inside but it is what it is.) but those changes are low priority in my opinion so I won’t go over them right now.

Over the years Mei has been seen as a “Brain dead hero”, “Satan”, “Basically useless”, “Overpowered”, and anywhere in between and that all comes down to Endothermic Blaster. Her Primary Fire the center of her kit, too overpowered and her other abilities go underused and ignored. Too underpowered and she turns into a weird McCree with walls and a Blizzard® from Dairy Queen®. Whenever I see a Mei using Primary Fire nowadays I just scoff because I know I’m probably not going to be frozen by them unless it’s a 1v1 on flat ground with no walls and the sun isn’t shining in her eyes.

I don’t want Mei to be meta or niche. I just want Mei to be fun. This isn’t to say you CAN’T have fun on Mei, but you could be having more fun playing AS and AGAINST Mei. I want the same for all Overwatch heroes. But I don’t play every Overwatch hero so I’m trying to do my part and give suggestions on the things I do know.

Thank you for taking to time to read this. Hopefully I haven’t made too many writing mistakes as this is probably the most I’ve ever written at once. Hope you have a lovely day :kissing_heart:

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2

That was actually something I asked for during the Dive meta, because Mei was irrelevant during a teamfight that wasn’t a sequential set of 1v1s.

That said, Mei should be a Tank.

Mei should be a Tank

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3

Mate check the slow changes it says “to % to %” not from/to or to/from

4

I do like some of the changes especially more ammo since I think that is what Mei needs currently.

I once suggested making her freeze a skill shot where head shots from her icicle or 2 body shots would freeze targets. In this change she would lose her primary and only have icicle shots.

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5

The multi-freeze was “fine” during goats because nothing could reasonably beat it. After role queue they should have reverted any change that was a direct target to that meta. I don’t this is how they should handle every meta shift, but for the goats meta they were trying to grasp at anything to make it balanced. They finally got it after they nerfed the synergy between the tanks at the time and Brigitte.

Whether or not they move her to the tank role is fine by me, she can currently be played like an off tank and I don’t mind it either way. The current experimental mode version of her being a tank is not it though, not that I would expect it to be, it is an april fools mode after all.

6

It’s not but people’s brains would explode if they buffed her up to Zarya/Roadhog tier in one day.

But at least it gets her on the path of getting there eventually.

Instead of getting swatted down to Torb tier every time she gets somewhat popular in OWL.

7

Giving her right clicks a freeze would be putting her on a slippery slope of having an overloaded right click. Hitting shots should be rewarded by having the enemy lose health as it does with most heroes (with the exception of Pharah, Sigma, Zarya Secondary Fire, and Junkrat, but these are explosives). Adding a slow, stun, hack, or anything like that on a long distance, high damage icicle would get extremely frustrating as it makes future shots easier to line up resulting in more CC and more damage. The good thing about Mei having freeze on Primary Fire is the limited range and damage.

8

Nah, freeze piercing or how you call it “multifreeze” was a much needed healthy change. Lucio and Tracer shouldn’t hard counter Mei who has 0 mobility by denying her kills on frozen targets that easily. Bodyblocking is still possible just more risky and all it did is add some risk when people are staying in a straight line against the beam. If anything, they’d need to add even more range and make it wider if they plan to make her a Tank. Also the cryo nerf they called a bugfix was something which makes her unplayable to this day
The only way multifreeze could be removed is if they massively reduced the time to freeze a target, doesn’t seem like a good idea as it reduces reaction time needed to counter it.

9

The bugfix was to enemy biotic grenades keeping the debuff during cryofreeze, her current state of being unable to get Sound Barrier, friendly Ana buffs, or other targeted abilities was from recently when they made her ice block act like a wall.

The multi freeze was healthy for the time (goats meta) but after that died, she got left with an extremely overpowered left click that granted absurd amounts of ult charge for the Mei and her team. Lucio doesn’t counter Mei by any means and Tracer should counter Mei, Tracer should counter anyone if she’s using her blinks right. Given the human factor, Mei shoots one icicle into Tracers head and she dies. On average Mei has 6 opportunities to kill Tracer. If she spends her time taking freeze off of somebody, she’s drastically increasing her odds of dying as freeze would last 1.3 seconds. 1.3 seconds is life or death as a Tracer. In this case 8/10 times death.

If they plan to make her a tank, they could still go with my changes but give her

1. Increase health to 300
2. Decrease the health of Ice Wall's pillars to 300 from 400
3. Decrease Ice Wall's cooldown 13 seconds to 10 seconds
4. Let her be targeted by teammates in cryo
10

How about 400hp
Don’t change the wall hp
10 sec cooldown on wall
And can be healed in Cryo

11

Cryofreeze was fine for years and didn’t need any bugfix. I was saying that the change they made last year “to make cryo act like a wall” was an actual nerf where they made her interaction with supports nonexistent, basically an ability which takes her makes her team not able to enable her in any way.

The multifreeze was not a goats buff. They gave that to her in April 2018 and goats came in the game like 4 months later, when they had no idea that would happen.

Lucio counters Mei by existing the same way he enables her when he’s playing as an ally.
Tracer and Mei are actual even match-ups.

Her left click / freeze seemed overpowered that time, but that’s mostly because she needed one of those 4 primary nerfs they did last year (but not all 4 at once) and she should be a Tank character, not a Damage one

12

It got “fixed” because devs were lazy about fixing Symmetra turrets appearing underneath a Cryo Mei.

13

I think your wish of Mei being more engaging can be accomplished with:

  • Reassign her to the Tank role
  • Increase her character scale by 15%
  • Increase her health from 250 to 400
14

I would be hesitant on giving her too much HP because she has her walls, cryo and her HP to hide behind, and the deadliest Mei is an alive Mei. The reason I would lower the wall HP is because when playing her as an off tank more than a dps, you’re going to be focusing on using your walls more to enable allies to do the brunt of the damage. The current downside of playing like this is with 250 HP you’re vulnerable to burst damage once that wall breaks behind a target while you’re trying to freeze. Having weaker walls with higher player HP AND cryo lets her act as a second and third layer of wall (body blocking with cryo and a 400 health pool) basically guaranteeing a kill at the cost of cooldowns that will most cases be made up for by main tank peel.

But I would be all for them throwing it up on experimental to see which feels better.

15

Considering all the spam damage in this game 400HP could not even be enough tbh for a tank. Even if it that tank has wall on demand.

16

Well you’d need a minimum of 325 to not get nuked by Widow.
So maybe more like 350 would make sense.

If they want to add any more survival, reducing cryo cooldown, or adding cryo healing, would work.

17

So basically a Mei who can’t go in and have to play off distance? She will be a weird version of Ashe or Mcree then. The piercing is the one gives her a chance to go brawling and contribute to her team while accomplishing objective.

18

please give me proof, cause when that change was made she still had 45 dps endo so even 6 people for 2 seconds would only amount to 540 damage and i know her ult cost being increased to 1610 is a recent thing but getting a 12% ult cost increase reverted isnt gonna suddenly make it 80% ult charge

This is a nicely made post overall but saying the very much exaggeration is not exaggeration without some proof backing it doesnt sit right with me

though I do think piercing Endo might not have been the best decision I don’t think its piercing damage factor should go only the piercing freeze factor imo

19

Blizzard has always ignored shields. This patch note actually means that snowball the projectile now pierces shields when you throw it. The blizzard effect itself was not changed.