I know her left click had its damage buffed but without the freeze>headshot combo she no longer functions as a flank-killing assassin. And despite her utility with the wall, she just doesn’t make sense as a pick anymore. I don’t understand how I’m supposed to play her, and it’s one of the most disappointing parts of the beta so far.
Move Mei to tank, nerf primary fire dmg and it also builds shields when she uses it. Spray ground to ice skate. Tank Mei is the only way.
18 Likes
I have nearly 1,000 hours with Mei, over that time I’ve gotten pretty good at using her icicle, in fact I spam it every second of every game. I only use my freeze when I’m forced to against mobile characters. I’ve always wanted them to do away with the freeze gun, to get people to stop complaining about it, and buff her left click.
In other words, she’s perfectly viable if you can aim the icicle and hit consistent headshots.
14 Likes
She lost a lot of flavor. I’m hesitant to give another DPS a movement buff, but spraying the ground to iceskate sounds like a way to give her some flavor back.
4 Likes
I think this is the problem
Icicle does up to 150 per second, but spray is much easier to hit for 100 per second + slowdown, so there really isn’t much reason to use icicle unless you’re far away or wanna burst a tracer down
Freeze doesn’t do 100 damage per second, or anywhere close to it.
In the beta it does.
Ah okay, I thought you meant in the original. Well then it looks like I’m not getting the buff I wanted after all, if the icicle does up to 150 damage…that’s already what you got with headshots.
Oh well.
1 Like
ice Skate would be an awesome passive and bring out as you said, her flavor.
2 Likes
Oh yeh that’s what I meant
Ow2 has m1 do 100dps and icicle is unchanged, which makes Mei IMO feel pretty bland, specially with the last nerf to snowball where it takes some time to freeze people
I really think Tank Mei will be worse than you all think. Essentially, for Mei to be a viable tank, she has to have CC on her M1, get health from that, do no actual tanking, and summon a wall that blocks everyone’s LOS?
Does that really sound like fun gameplay to you? For me, I think she should just get her freeze back, or get a skill where she can point at an enemy, and have Snowball do ice damage to them. If Snowball is chilling the enemy, and she’s freezing them, the enemy will freeze.
True plus I was training since they day these changes were discussed. I would add that her ULT still freezes so there is that.
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Not only that but her spray tends to kill people at the same speed of her right click. So you may as well just stay at range and fling icicles at people. Which if you’re going to do that you’d be better off just playing Hanzo.
3 Likes
I realy like the versatility. Beam for close range icicle for far away.
That one is fine as it wasn’t really particularly strong and it wasted ammo, so there was a trade off. Not sure why it didn’t stick.
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I’m sure the devs never had a good idea what they wanted Mei to be. The same applies to Symmetra. Both failed in the concept stage, not because of the meta.
It’s almost like they got drunk in a planning session, and pulled a bunch of random ice themed powers out of their… hats, and then the main designer picked the ones that sounded easy to implement.
- Short range freeze ray as primary, the only solid idea
- Kill shot with unlimited range, and huge delay for no reason (Why make her a pseudo sniper?)
- Instant walls that trap your own team (Just how drunk were they?)
- “Hey, what about that tragic stasis accident in her backstory that gave her PTSD? Like, what if she could do that, but as a move, and be like Can’t touch me lolollolol Dude, we’re so putting that into the game! XD”
Half of her kit is like something I would invent as a joke.
She needed a rework from day 1.
Not so bad, frankly speaking. Now Mei can use spray for zone control in some areas. Because spray damage is high
Less shields in this game. Overwatch 2 feels 5% faster than OW1 - better for icicles aiming.
And Mei still can tanking
I’m the biggest Mei hater on the planet, nothing would make me happier than seeing this vile beast erased from existence, but after playing a few rounds even I have to admit she’s just kinda sad.
I think converting her beam to hitscan would fix a lot of her problems, since on paper a 100dps piercing beam that instantly slows the target is really good, but in reality it has an effective range of like 3 meters if they aren’t moving in a straight line to/from you.
I can kinda see the purpose of the wall HP nerfs since there are less people on the other side to break it, but not the range nerf.
I also don’t get why Mei’s iceblock doesn’t instantly reload like Reaper and Cassidy. Maybe give it a slightly longer cooldown to compensate for this.
1 Like
IMO, Mei’s primary should still freeze and all, but be on a resource meter. Something she has to use sparingly. Freeze isn’t ‘for headshots’. It’s ‘to block ults and open doors for her own ult’.
You see Roadhog ulting, ice wall will break in an instant. Freeze stops it.
You see Dva remeching, freeze her so she can be frozen as soon as her animation is done.
Stop the healing from Sigma’s grasp shield,
stall out a Nano Rein.
Sometimes get Lucio on the ground.
Force Dva’s matrix down to be able to ult
It’s not just ‘freeze all the time’. There’s key points where it’s good. Even being ‘100 dps’. Comare that to McCree, Soldier, Tracer, etc. In the same range, what’ll their DPS be? AND they have more range on top of that.
I mean if they have to stay with in the constraints of how she works right now exactly then yeah this might be one of the ways they’d have to do it. They don’t have to though. Orisa shows rework shows they’re not shy of changing the character significantly.