I’m starting to think passive heal would be a little broken now.
The issue with Ana is that she’s a lot harder to play than Mercy or the other supports. She brings a lot to the table that other supports simply cannot bring, it’s just harder to do anything with her.
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She has the only anti-heal in the game
I’ve been picking up Ana lately and it’s insane how much utility this has. You can easily make a Mercy irrelevant with a well placed bionade. It can counter ultimate abilities and even pick up kills. It can heal you and anti-heal the enemy team while also healing your allies.
When I play Mercy there are many, many times I wish I could simply bionade myself to get the flanker off of me or to burst heal.
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She has one of the best CC abilities in the game, perhaps even the best.
Sleep dart is, in my opinion, easily one of the best abilities in the game. You can cancel ultimates, deny flankers, punish anyone out of position, or simply punish tanks for dropping shields.
A well placed sleep can be the difference-maker in a team-fight.
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She has both the most reliable long-range and burst healing
If Ana is positioned well she can, often times, heal everyone regardless of how far away they are. I have, personally, been able to heal a Rein across the map only to immediately afterwards look behind me and heal Genji.
No other support has this capability at this level.
Ana also has the best burst healing in the game, in my opinion. Her shots give burst and, when combined with bionade, the burst can be insane. I’ve kept people alive in situations where, if I was any other support, they would be dead.
So it would be very, very easy to over-tune or even break her. If you think Mercy is a must-pick now, then imagine an Ana with lower cool-downs, self-heal, or a movement ability.
Ana is already very, very good. There just aren’t many people who have her as their best support. Yes, there are glaring weaknesses that should be looked at, but they need to be addressed with care.
With all heroes there is a line where on one side you are underpowered and on the other side you are overpowered. Some heroes can stay within the line pretty well and consistently (Reinhardt comes to mind). I think Ana is the hardest to keep balanced or “in the line” because of her insane utility.
I want something done too, don’t get me wrong, I just don’t want her to become more broken than post-rework pre-nerf Mercy.
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Ana is a hero who is meant to be difficult to pick up but is good when mastered. Currently, her pickrate in GM is saw lower than it is in bronze and peaking mid rank.
Ana mains have been discussing what qol changes she needs and a sole survivability buff she needs. Most of us even state the weakness that would come with a mobility or self healing buff be it 1) mobility cancelled with damage or 2) healing that relies on healing allies which you can’t do when attacked.
She has the most weaknesses out of the support catagory that sleep dart is unable to make up for and that grenade is wasted on.
She doesn’t have a passive that she can count on to top herself off. She needs to use grenade twice on herself (once while fighting an attacker and once after) because otherwise the next time she’s attacked she’ll be below 200 or 100hp. Zen has shields, Moira can life steal, Brigetta has her self heal on attack, Lucio has his song, mercy has her regen. Ana requires a secondary healer.
She doesn’t have an ult she can pop to survive. Zen, Lucio, Moira, Brigetta, mercy can all up their own health of healing (or become invulnerable). Ana’s ult is solely for an ally.
She doesn’t have mobility to keep herself alive in a team fight. She wants to play in the back where she has to walk to or be unable to avoid anything in the fray. Mercy, Lucio, Moira, Brigetta all have a form of mobility to varying degrees (Moira becomes invulnerable and Brigetta has a shield as well)
She doesn’t have high dps like zen or even mercy; she has to use her entire kit to combo if the sleep lands and if grenade is on cd well too bad.
She doesn’t have low cds to rely on or easy stuns like Brigetta.
What we want is one weakness reduced and the best way without over powering her grenade/sleep dart or her damage is through a passive heal or slow vertical mobility.
PLUS qol.
Nano target range should be 200m
Grenade should go through full hp team mates and cannot hit a team member unless it is outside of her hitbox (prevent grenade ghosting)
Healing scoped shots should not have a tracer. It puts her at high risk for doing her job and forces her to lose her sniper position that she took the stairs for. (With a mobility buff she won’t need this)
Options to turn on or off shots/grenade going through full hp
Friendly Tanks (minus zarya and baby Dva) should have smaller hit box buffs. Also a percentage slider for tanks and the rest of the cast (current being max)
Her unscoped bullet size should be addressed. It is the smallest projectile in the game (almost hitscan) yet Bliz wouldn’t even acknowledge it.
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Again, all of this sounds amazing on paper but isn’t working as intended. Her weaknesses are destroying her positives. I’m not saying get rid of all but some got to go.
There is counterplay to anti nade as well. Sleep dart holds a big negative to it such has no thresh hold for damage instantly destroying its value.
The weakness that I would like reduced is self-sustain. Mobility can stay as weakness for her.
I would also prefer self sustain. Just mentioning the other big buff people seem to ask for Ana.
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I don’t see her having mobility but self-sustain makes sense and I believe every healer including future ones to have sustain. What is the other big buff people ask for? Because I mostly want reverts.
Damage back to 80 the nade lasting 5 seconds and 5mm but I definitely know that 100% healing boost for nade can never return.
You make it sound correct, and when most of your response is correct, Ana would be fine, if she was VIABLE and had competence vs. Mercy. See, a character is not fine if they are not even thought about in the starting screen. Mercy does mostly everything better than Ana. Ana could use:
Sleepdart (not much) but bigger hitbox
Give Fortify to the ultimate, because CC is becoming so prevalent. https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/8fsgla/a_different_ana_buff/
She should be able to Nano herself in whatever game.
Shorten her reload time.
I think that would be amazing to her kit.
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The theory of Ana hardly matches the reality of her. You’re posting best case scenarios as though it is commonplace.
Better numbers to use are those found on Overbuff. Compare her win rate and healing against other supports and depending on the bracket she’ll either be woeful or middle of the pack.
A person has to be extraordinarily good with her to get nominal numbers. In all practical sense she’s not that great, mate.
They keep doing a Shell game with her and buff all the wrong parts. We get that she’s a no mobility / low self heal hero but she’s also a weak self defense hero too; and that’s what’s killing her.
If they fix that then she should have enough presence in a game to be on par with the others. As is without a fully committed team to keep her separately healed and body guarded you’re better off using another support.
Ana’s a support who needs support. Without that you’re not going to get what you hope for from her. That’s the reality.
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I mostly agree. My post said as much too.
The point of listing her positives like that was to show how much of a pain it must be to balance Ana.
One little thing could cause her to be OP in my opinion. that’s what I was trying to illustrate.
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Exactly I hate hearing all these so called great amazing things Ana can do. Because people keep using it but the evidence shows she bad.
It’s like people want Ana to stay bad (Not saying you Composedjam). So they say these amazing things she can do when in reality it doesn’t go down like that in game.
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You may find this hard to believe, but I didn’t realize how easy it was to interpret my earlier post as an example of this.
It wasn’t, clearly, but it could easily be seen that way.
My bad. I just hate how much people try to sugarcoat Ana like she’s amazing when she’s not performing like it.
theory and reality are 2 different things…reality is that she’s just too hard to get full potential out of … why bother when you can get basically the same value with less effort with other healers? which is probs the reason why even the pros don’t bother with her, despite her having some awesome things in her kit ![:confused:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/confused.png?v=5" ":confused:")
Exactly! That’s why I said she needs her value’s worth for the skill you put in for her.
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A little idea on how to make Ana stronger while still keeping her high skill ceiling nature (so no self heal, jumping, rolling, armor/shield bs some people want):
- Decrease her reload animation from 1.25 secs to 1/0.75 secs. Gives less window for those “reloading of death” moment that make you watch a swinging Rein die in agony
- Give a passive to her normal shots; give a temporary buff to allies hit that gives 5 hp/s heal. Buff disappears when the player gets hit by any source of damage. Reasoning; gives you more chances to make offensive shots because you don’t need to fully top off people outside of battle. Remember those times you heal someone but they have 10-20hp left from max? Yeah goodbye to those. NOTE: it’s not an unlimited zen orb. 5hp/s is less than 10 hp/s from the payload, and it disappears on damage taken. This just gives you more window for offensive shots.
- Either one of these:
a) Offensive primary shots gives a 5hp/s damage overtime, until target receives healing. Basically the reverse of the healing passive, it forces solo flankers to do whatever they want to do quicker, and forces your enemy team to seek for healing if they don’t want to wither to death. 5hp/s isn’t much, but damage OT is still damage.
b) Offensive shots gives the same healing block effect as nade, for 1 sec duration. Ana’s offensive shots rate of fire is between 0.8-1.25s. Quickly doing offensive shots on carefully chosen targets will give immense pressure for cover because pocket healing would be severely cut. Could be extremely frightening under the right hands.
All the above ideas don’t conform to people’s expectation for mobility and self regen, but imo are in the the right direction if they want to push the “make Ana’s strong points stronger rather than removing her weaknesses”. This would also extremely reward high skill plays and decision making.
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All i want is a passive self heal. You may wanna call that BS but I call it BS when Junkrat’s weakness was completely removed and I’m all asking is for one weakness removed.
Your idea is still good though.
I wouldn’t mind a self heal! But it’s clear that that’s not the dev’s intentions as they mentioned numerous times. Making a character stronger isn’t always about removing their weaknesses. Also… sleep dart, self nade PLUS a passive healing. Wouldn’t that be abit too powerful considering the nade +50% healing effect?
10% self heal from every damage dealt/heal done is a possible idea. Would translate to 7 hp per shot. Not too overtuned, just gets rid of trash damage without needing to burn nade for self heal. Also, increases the higher skilled you are. The problem with the shield idea is that it rewards you without doing anything, which should be the opposite of her nature.
They lied about that concept and kept doing it over and over again. They will change their minds if people keep bugging them over and over again. Like how they got rid of Symmetra lock on gun because so many people hated it or scatter arrow, mass rez.
Also look at Reaper who they said would be broken if he was able to cancel his Wraith and on top of it they gave him a completely new passive so yeah…I’m not buying their bullsh*t
Trust me they will give in eventually because so far they showed that they have. I made a long post about their way. Called “WHY DO YOU HAVE A BACKBONE FOR THE WRONG REASONS?”
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The new nerf to Mercy and the Nano buff will make her great again.
In any case we have to wait and try her after changes go live. She might be still less effective in low SR, but that’s the idea of a high skill heroe.
i doubt Mercy nerf will make that much of a dent in either of their pickrates but…yeah, i gotta agree we should wait and see…
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