[Mei-gathread] Does Mei feels balanced and underpowered at the same time?

General Discussion
1

• Mei tips from Jardio feat KarQ: 1 MEI TIP for EVERY HERO ft. Jardio - YouTube

Milestones

• MILESTONE 1: Mei cryofreeze not removing Ana’s grenade debuff bug fixed!
• MILESTONE 2: Force gaming supports the cause to buff Mei: Mei: A Year In 'F Tier' (Overwatch) - YouTube
• MILESTONE 3:

12/03/2017 11:52 AMPosted by Bill Warnecke
Hey folks thanks for the well written post and great discussion. Please continue to use this thread for Mei discussion and we’ll monitor it. Cheers.

• MILESTONE 4: devs addressed Mei bugs: https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/7ko6mx/comment/drggjwu

• MILESTONE 5: Jeff in the last developer update said Mei is going to be buffed/adjusted soon

• MILESTONE 6:
02/07/2018 05:44 PMPosted by Jeff Kaplan

We’re always evaluating all of the heroes. We don’t have any D.Va adjustments in the works. She gets played a lot and is very powerful but she’s not on our list currently.
These heroes are on our balance list:
Mei

• MILESTONE 7: Jeff confirms what we ever thought: Mei needs only small buffs and a lot of bug fixes:

02/12/2018 12:26 PMPosted by Jeff Kaplan
We disagree that Mei needs a major rework. We are trying some improvements to her but they are not major.

• MILESTONE 8: Mei buffed on PTR, we need all your feedbacks

• MILESTONE 9: Devs are fixing the "favor the shooter issue"

• MILESTONE 10: Mei PTR buffs live
•MILESTONE 11: New Mei buffs Incoming

•MILESTONE 12: Teasy teasers…

•MILESTONE 13: check PTR…

•MILESTONE 14: fixed Moira’s orbs interaction with Mei’s wall. Also Mei is more viable and has a defined anti mobility role. Enjoy yourself

•MILESTONE 15: Mei got a beta-like revert in PTR: the icicles don’t have anymore the falloff.
•MILESTONE 16: The removal of icicle fallof it’s live. Enjoy yourself
•MILESTONE 17: 1 Year of Mei-Gathread

Version 42:
Personally i think she’s pretty ok, but i think her bugs keeps her from performing well as she should, because there are bugs (an example the cryofreeze favoring the shooter and the ultimate disappearing) that makes her pretty unreliable compared to other heroes. Also i even feel she could have another 1 or 2 buffs, but my fear is she becomes quite OP, if she should be buffed the buffs should achieve to make her more useful without lowering much her skill floor.
Many players ask for the cryofreeze partially reloading ammos, but i don’t think this is pretty much necessary, i think the cooldowns need a bit some tweaking to make abilities like cryofreeze and icewall more present and consistent.
At least fixing all her bugs would make her much more reliable to use and less frustrating to play.
P.S: trying the new version of Aim Hero, setting Mei’s projectile settings i felt like 0.4 seconds of cast time were too fast, setting 0.8s matched her icicle cast time. Is it really that long the icicle cast time?

This is a list of QoL buffs and buff suggestions that could make her better, not all should be implemented at once, but only the most useful and impactful

QoL changes and bugs that needs a fix ASAP

Cryofreeze

  • Make Mei able to be healed by any healer in cryofreeze
    This increases her possibilities of surviving, and makes the healers action more effective
  • Make cryofreeze able to reload up to 100 ammos
    This isn’t a really needed buff but many players finds it useful, because often you get in cryofreeze without ammos and you have no possibility of reacting to enemies. This change would make her less vulnerable
  • Reduce cooldown if it’s not used completely (minimum cooldown 10 seconds)
    _ This allows Mei to have this ability more often, giving the player more freedom to use the cryofreeze to stall, to block AoE enemy abilities or to have a brief moment in a fight_

Ice wall

  • Make the blueprint visible to teammates (XodiaK’s idea: Overwatch Forums)
    This allows more coordination (for example reaching highground easier, prevent wrong walls) and could help prevent “wall trolling”, because teammates can see where their Mei is placing a wall
  • Reduce cooldown if it’s not used completely (minimum cooldown 7 seconds)
    _ This allows to have faster the wall if it has been placed in a wrong place and to have it again faster if not used for the entire duration, making this ability able to shape the battlefield more often_
  • Increase duration to 5 seconds *
    _ It’s quite odd, but i’d like to have half second more of duration. IDK if this would be useful or not_

Blizzard

  • After casting ultimate, it reloads completely the ammos
    Having istantly 200 ammos allows to fight and get the maximum value from the ultimate, there is still skill to freeze multiple targets and headshot them. This contributes to make the ultimate more reliable

Bug that need fixes
I link here a thread that made Bloggerman about the Mei’s bugs:
Mei bugs with videos. (+ new bugs)

Here another 2 threads about all the bugs Mei still has:

Sometimes i even wonder if this thread is dead, it’s so quiet, probably even because the different time zone (i write from Italy).

Below there is some stuff from the anniversary of the thread.

Mei-Gathread Hall of Fame

Here’s a list of many notable players who supported the Mei-gathread in a particular way and gave many buff ideas:

  • Bloggerman, as second most active player on the Mei-gathread and as bug tester
  • Mack, long time supporter from the old forum
  • IconicPixel
  • WhyAlwaysMe, long time supporter from the old forum
  • GhostofKafka, long time supporter from the old forum
  • GMan, as admin of The cult of Mei, promoting on his page the Mei-gathread
  • XodiaK, very active player on the old thread, he also proposed to make the wall blueprint visible to the teammates
  • Jinxed, another great supporter
  • Destian, a guy who did another thread alongside mine to explain why dive was popular and why Mei suffered from her state and that meta
  • MoonBurst, long time supporter from the old forum
  • MeiPureQT, long time supporter from the old forum
  • JokerPenguin, long time supporter from the old forum
  • Many other players who supported the Mei-Gathread
Mei-Gathread archive

First ever Mei-Gathread: Overwatch Forums?
Continuation of the Mei-Gathread: Overwatch Forums? (i know this had a cringy title, but i didn’t edited the title in time before the migration)
XodiaK’s ice wall idea: Overwatch Forums
Destian’s explainations of relation between Mei and dive: Overwatch Forums
Bloggerman’s Mei bug list: Overwatch Forums

TL;DR

  • The icicle falloff removal is totally deserved, and makes Mei more powerful without being OP, and as side effect the ultimate charges faster
  • She needs fixes, mainly for cryofreeze and blizzard

(Sorry for the wall of text)

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i feel like there isn’t even a like button anymore. why is it hidden like that?

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Awesome! A new Mei-gathread.
Thank you for making one :+1:

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Idk, there is a love button but there aren’t downvotes (i think). BTW it’s damn refreshing start in a new forum

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Recently I was able to WASD out of nearly the center of Mei’s ult while ulting as Moira. It didn’t used to be that easy to escape, even with speedboosts - around the time they were fiddling with its size, its freeze speed seems to have gotten slower.

Oh and it’d be nice if her partial freeze affected mobility skills and jump height.

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I had to do it absolutely. I still have the results of the poll and the ways to escape Mei’s ultimate, i don’t know and i don’t think it’s necessary repost them

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This will never die!

Help Mei!

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Phew thank god you made this post. Glad you’re continuing it.

Only thing Im worried about is the cap of the thread, guess youd have to request to uncap it again?

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I don’t know if this new platform has cap, but i will request in case to uncap it

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And this is to go even further beyond!

DONG ZHU! BUXU ZAAAAA!.

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The PTR changes will not help Mei.
I’m sorry, but it won’t.
I doubt she will even be more balanced in the current character roster.

She need more than just more icicle shots and longer slow effect with her freeze ability.

  • Her Ultimate has an enormous cast time (not cast animation).
  • Her ultimate is easy to cancel thanks to the long cast time.
  • Thanks to latency does it often seems her already-thrown ultimate disappear out of existence.
  • Cryo-Freeze has a bug that allows heroes like Roadhog to cancel it and put it on cooldown.
  • The Fall-off damage is too much on her secondary fire.
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I’m surprised they didn’t touch her ultimate. It can get canceled so much easier now that it ruins any functionality it had, if any, as a projectile. Very disappointed.

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The daily posts limit will do tho…

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:laughing: Yay I was waiting for this to be re-posted!

I like that we can use emotes now lol

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it’s awesome to see you here as well Str1ker. I am really glad that you are one of us fighting for Mei.

Was happy to see “[Mei-gathread]” in here. Was also quite impressed to see another older Mei thread from someone else here.

I makes me feel good to see that Mei is not forgotten and I am not the only one being disappointed by the “buffs” and people telling us that Blizz should not overtune her while at the same instance they overtune Sombra.

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I don’t think they will buff Mei any time soon after the PTR changes hit live, even though she will not be more balanced and viable after it has hit live.

Right now do I want bugfixes for Mei. She has just too many bugs that hasn’t been addressed in a long time.
Roadhog being able to pull Mei out Cryo-Freeze just feels unfair.

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Let’s not exaggerate. Of course it will help. Will it help enough thought? I don’t think so.

Mei is balanced around two unique and potentially very powerful things: Her ability to stun repeatedly with her primary fire, and her wall. These are the potentially strongest non-ult CC in the game, and in fact icewall can situationally be better than an ultimate.

This is what I imagine Jeff means by “she can feel oppressive”. In compensation, her stun effect (freeze) is very slow and limited, and her damage is weak.

In the end, Mei is only a viable pick if you can get significant value from your icewall. Otherwise, you’d do better on another hero. Getting that good icewall value is hard though, relying heavily on certain map geometry, and almost completely negated by mobile heroes.

I don’t know what solution would make everyone happy. But I think this situation of “give a hero good CC, then make her UP so people don’t hate it” is really bad.

My best suggestion is to buff icewall in particular ways, like making it wider, which would boost it’s effectiveness in open areas. However, at chokes where it is strong, it wouldn’t be impacted, as it can all ready cross them. This would help “normalize” out the power of icewall over different maps and areas.

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Was waitiing for this to be re posted! :slight_smile:

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I think they should address Mei’s Cryo-Freeze and Ultimate.

Having a 1.5 second cast time on a projectile Ultimate is a bit too much. This makes it very easy to cancel it for enemies by simply stunning Mei.

Her Cry-Freeze is often a death penalty and is probably more used to bait abilities like hook and flashbang, but thanks to a bug is it no longer a reliable tool to bait abilities with it. (And having a slow ammo reload in Cryo-Freeze would be nice as well.)

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Thanks for reviving the megapost.
We still have hope in Mei :smiley:

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