At this point it’s no secret they’ve struggled to make her relevant in comparison to Mercy and Moira. It’s hard to see how she will ever be able to stack up against them with all of her downsides. She has to aim and reload, they don’t; she has no way to move around, they both do; she has no way to heal herself other than using her best cooldown on her feet, they both get regeneration passively or from using their primary attacks.
Basically she lacks all of the versatility that they have, they are mobile and bounce back easily, she is stuck in one place and destroyed by chip damage. She also requires much more in the way of mechanical aiming to heal, reducing her overall healing potential, and even her full potential isn’t that much higher than theirs. At this point I don’t see how she’ll ever work as a main healer when that healing can be achieved with much less effort by two other heroes.
So maybe it’s time to think about increasing her damage and playing up the utility aspect of her kit a little, at the expense of some healing? Allow her to become a DPS/support hybrid in the same way Zen is. I think this would not only make her more entertaining to play, but it would solve the problem of trying to fit her into a role that her kit isn’t a natural fit for.
Ana is a niche hero that has to compete with more generalist heroes. Ana should be better than Moira but people use Moira’s healing like a crutch to take bad positioning. Ana needs something that makes her unique and accessible.
Or…they could just buff her properly and make her payoff high enough again? I mean, I can see your reasoning but personally, I’d absolutely despise to see the most interesting design of the “main” healers go to waste.
I’m not sure buffing her kit’s advantages will move her to a place where she’ll be viable for the majority of the player base without being overpowered at the top.
Then she’ll actually be ABLE to use her utility for the TEAM
If you play Ana, and are 100% free to use your Grenade for the team, and against enemies without people trying to focus you down Ana feels AMAZING and a solid pick
That drops off INSANE when you take chip damage, or the enemy team brings up people to make you HAVE to burn your grenade on yourself
I do get what you’re saying, because I definitely agree that her kit is way more interesting than the other main healers. The problem was, trying to fit high healing numbers into a kit that contains so much utility calls for heavy downsides, and those downsides are killing her at the moment.
I guess when I look at Ana’s kit, it looks to me like it should be an off support kit, but they’re trying to force the main healer role on it, and that’s where the issues are coming from.
Her kit itself doesn’t really need buffed (besides possibly a small one to Nano), perhaps minor rework would be a more correct term. Ana has far more drawbacks than any other Support, those need to be lessened.
She has no self-sustain, no mobility, and requires extremely good aim not only to heal, but to have any chance of defending herself. She needs either some vertical mobility or self-sustain, lacking both is completely unfair when her competition has both.
Eh, I think it’s quite fixable. The problem in my mind is, her potential used be enough to compensate for all her drawbacks but after all the nerfs (and some were fair), the payoff simply isn’t high enough to justify picking her anymore.
She lost speed boost on Nano, damage, and most importantly, 50% healing and a second off the duration of nade, that needed adjusted and compensated for. She has three (or four maybe actually) major drawbacks; one needs reduced/removed.
Yeah, the problem with his philosophy is that none of the other Supports (or heroes for that matter) weaknesses reach the multitude of Ana’s and her strengths simply aren’t strong enough to out-weigh them. Other supports have just as many strengths yet have far fewer weaknesses.
And eh, besides being dead wrong on this score, Geoff often goes back on these things.