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

General Discussion
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Alright, let me rephrase:
In any rank, an ultimate should be similarly consistent as other ults at that rank.
It’s natural that an ultimate is gonna become inconsistent the lower the rank is.
The issue here is not that Mei’s ult is inconsistent only in lower ranks but that it’s inconsistent compared to most other ults at the same rank.
=> Thereby you cannot attribute inconsistent ultimates (only) to wrong application.

Hold on…the statement “a death in GM usually means you misplayed” applies to everyone! Not just when Mei dies! No cherry-picking here!
If a Mei throwing her ult only dies due to a misplay, then her opponents are also only gonna die to her ult due to a misplay on their part. Otherwise it’s an unfair comparison/matchup.

True. However this is less the case for a lot of other ults, which are usually easier to get value from.
Which is why you end up with an underpowered ult as long as you don’t assume Mei always uses it perfectly and her opponents never counter it perfectly, which again would be an unfair comparison/matchup.

When I pick a card ONCE, yes.
But the more I repeat picking one of three cards the less I’m gonna end up with 100% or 0% of the time but with 33.3% of the time. I don’t get where you wanna go with that card example…
Is this a philosophical discussion about the right wording? And that “probability” is the wrong word and we should go with “statistically on average”? I don’t really care. Also works. Let me rephrase my original statement;
The problem though is if statistically on average it becomes frequent compared to other ults that a bad play leads to your ult charge just vanishing without getting value in return.

And please - if you think that this is only due to people not knowing how to use the ult correctly, give me an argument why it should only be due to that.

Exactly. Isn’t that alarming?
If it fails a lot statistically - and the statistics are not only gonna include the worst misplays there possibly can be but all plays - then maybe it is just too hard to consistently pull off the perfect ult usage you were talking about.
It’s not like the playerbase figured out all ults in the game so they were able to statistically make fairly good usage of their ults, except for Mei’s ult where everybody is still left puzzled about how to use it correctly. It’s not like this is the single one ultimate in the game where people just have to wake up and realize how to use it correctly.
If exceptionally many people use it “incorrectly”, then there seems to be something too hard to pull off about it.

Example: Imagine Genji’s ult would require you to track the opponents head for the whole slash animation duration in order to get any damage done. This would result in everybody using the ult “incorrectly” because statistically on average they are barely gonna be able to kill anything with it.
You could now argue that this is gonna be worse in lower ranks and thereby it’s the player’s fault for not having enough skill to track heads while dashing around wildly.
You could argue that IF your ultimate is used perfectly, you are always gonna kill 6 people, and it’s “just” difficult to use and there might not always be an opportunity to pull that off, however that the opportunity appears “a lot more often than you’d think”.
You could argue that IF your ultimate is used perfectly, the enemy is 0% of the time gonna be able to kill you before your teamwipe is complete and everytime you die you just used your ult incorrectly and thus your misplay and not the ult’s overall viability is to blame for your ult not yielding any value.
However that would be insane. The scenario I described would be a straight nerf for Genji’s ult. The missing viability would be due to the nerf and not (only) due to people making misplays and imperfect ults.

It’s not like there’s never a (near) perfect opportunity to use it. However it involves a lot of circumstances - much more than most other ults - for it to be an opportunity that is worth thinking about. Look at all the countering abilities in the game. Most ults have a few of them. Mei’s ult has a whole bunch of them.
Wouldn’t you argue that the opportunity you were talking about is harder to find the more counters there are/the more often statistically there’s gonna be something available that can counter it?

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203

If they ever want Mei to use her primary fire more, they need to change Cryo freeze. Having to be pretty much melee range, with 50 extra hp, and a 150 heal that requires your team to 5 v 6 for 4 freaking seconds just isn’t good enough to really get in the fight and freeze people up.

She does have a lot of survivability, but not the kind she needs to really get those freezes off, and that’s why the good mei players still primarily use her off-fire.

Because while cryo is bad to use in melee, it’s a lot better to use as ranged, as people won’t be able to surround you, nor line up any of the many insta-kills that’re available in this game.

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I’m just wondering if blizzard is still looking into mei or think that she will be fine for a another year just like how they were with sombras first set of buffs

Hopefully when Brigitte creates deathball meta we can see some mei

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205

I’ve got $100 on Blizz not touching Mei again for at least the next 6 months, other than a bug fix or 2 (but probably only the Hook/Cryo bug they already talked about).

It doesn’t seem like they actually care about Mei at all. The “buffs” she was given were more like little placebos to make us go away, they couldn’t have possibly believed that they would help Mei in any serious way.

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Mei is actually quite good against deathball comps as she can split them up a lot easier and be more disruptive. The problem right now is that we are seeing a lot of dive comps and her wall is significantly less effective than it is against deathball. I’d imagine they are being careful not to make her too strong against deathball comps.

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Cryo typically shouldn’t be used for healing, you have healers to do that and if you don’t have any healers, usually you shouldn’t be engaged in a fight anyway. Regarding her having to be ‘pretty much in melee range’, if you look at how Pro Mei players play her, they’ll use right click a lot more because it has more range, does more damage and thus you get your ultimate faster whilst putting less strain on your healers.

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I (somewhat) get this reasoning, but there is also no definitive proof that Mei is even effective against deathball in her current state.

There was never a time where Mei didn’t have her old (more powerful) ult and Deathball was prevalent.

Mei was strong when Deathball was strong because her ult was larger and it charged insanely quick, I’m not convinced that her ability to split a deathball every now and then is enough to make her good, especially when Sombra is now a much better disruptor.

It seems like a bit of a con to tell us we might be better against a comp we don’t know will ever be meta again, there’s no guarantee Brigette is going to single-handedly change the meta, and there is little evidence to support Mei being in a better position should it rise to the top regardless.

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Seeing as dive can jump over the wall because it has so much mobility, Mei’s wall is significantly less effective. Mei’s wall is incredibly effective at separating a Reinhardt out from their team due to Reinhardt’s slow movement and him being at the front.

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That’s exactly my point. Blizzard seems to want us to mainly use our left click, and they’re trying to have us do so by giving our right click all kinds of kirks, with delayed shots, projectile and even falloff damage.

But as you said, and as I meant, she doesn’t have what it takes to go into melee. So no matter what they do to our right click, it’s the only way to use Mei in a somewhat viable way.

That’s why I think they need to change cryo into something that gives us a bit of sustain in a melee situation, so we can use our primary fire as our… actual primary fire, instead of a situational thing to use.

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But her right click is a really strong projectile. Much stronger than using her left click, even at close range.

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Just because her wall would be more effective against deathball than it is against dive doesn’t mean Mei is immediately effective against deathball.

If deathball became the meta tomorrow, and it was everywhere, there is no guarantee that Mei would become significantly better, there’s nothing to suggest she would suddenly become a viable hero.

That’s what I was trying to explain. Back when Mei was D-Tier (viable) during a deathball/heavy tank meta her ult had a larger radius and charged insanely quick, there is no evidence to prove that Mei without this much more powerful ult would be effective against a return of deathball.

Just because Mei could use her wall to split a deathball, doesn’t mean she would be an effective hero or in a better spot than she is now, she still brings relatively little to the table compared with other DPS, and Sombra would be able to disrupt the same comps much more often than a wall every 10 seconds.

We’re all in here praying for a return of the deathball meta as if there is some kind of evidence that it would fix us, but again, there is every reason to believe that we were in a decent spot back then because of our ult (which we no longer have), not because we have a wall.

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213

It’s best not to think of heroes as having tiers, but rather seeing them as the right pick in certain situations.
I’ve played Mei against Dive comp and against deathball comp in competitive and I do significantly better against deathball due to the lack of mobility in deathball. Mei’s wall is just designed to be good at stopping that sort of thing, it’s not really anything to do with her ultimate. Her ultimate has the same radius as it did back then so it is no less viable than it was Season 2 other than it doesn’t charge up in half a teamfight anymore, more like 1 teamfight per ultimate if you are good with the right click. It still is an extremely strong ultimate against deathball.

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You’re really not getting it so I’ll just leave it here.

Just because Mei is more effective against a deathball comp than a dive comp in your experience, doesn’t mean she is actually effective.

It’s not hard to be more effective than basically not effective at all.

I 100% agree with you that Mei is better against a deathball comp than she is against a dive comp, but we aren’t in a vacuum where the only thing that exists is Mei, what is important is if Mei is better than other heroes against deathball, and there’s no evidence to suggest that she is a better pick than most of the DPS roster against a deathball meta.

Even when deathball was prevalent and we had 1.5 ults every teamfight, Mei still wasn’t a must pick, and her pickrate was on the low side of average.

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The point I’m making is that Mei is a really strong pick against deathball comps. Her ability to separate the enemy team into chunks for your team to effective 2v6/3v6 them is really powerful. You just can’t do that as well against dive comp but she’s a very strong pick against deathball and you could make her work even at GM level. Think of her as Symmetra or Torbjorn, you don’t want to pick her every game but in some situations she’s a really viable pick. She doesn’t have to be a must pick or anything like Dva sort of is right now.

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I guess Mei’s skins are selling well enough (only reason they make hero changes) that they don’t need to fix her bugs (hello hook through cryo) or improve the user experience at all.

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People seriously need to stop with this conspiracy theory stuff about the developers not caring about the balance of the game so that characters like Genji and Tracer are in the meta all the time to make big plays more common at E-Sports events. They probably are hesitant to buff Mei too much because Mei isn’t actually in a terrible spot right now, she’s just a somewhat difficult character to play really well.

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Sorry. Lets go back to comparing whose deathball strats are better.

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I’m not trying to turn this thread into a major argument, I’m sorry if I come across that way. I understand people play Mei in different ways and have different opinions on her power level, but the fact is that Mei is capable of being played at high levels with a high winrate. Jardio is in the top 100 players consistently and has a very high winrate on Mei, even at the 4500 SR range. If Mei was ‘F-’ as so many people make her out to be, that wouldn’t be possible. The fact is she is just difficult to play and people need to stop viewing her as bad because of how difficult she is to play effectively.

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Every hero can be played at high ranked. Even broken Doomfist and underpowered Symmetra are being played at high ranks.
And its not always appreciated.

And about Jardio. He is the only top 500 Mei player. This doesn’t mean Mei is viable and balanced. This means that Jardio has mastered a skill level with a hero that most of us will never achieve. I mean, there were a few top 500 Doomfist players when his entire kit was one big buggy mess. We all know he wasn’t balanced.

Yes, Mei is difficult to play. She is even a 3 star hero. But that alone doesn’t make it okay to have a hero underperforming since season 2 compared to other heroes from the defense class and other classes.

She is a F-tier hero, whether you agree or not. Multiple meta reports and stats highlights this. Junkrat and Sombra were also F-tier and those 2 became more viable after their buffs. Mei not.

She needs more help. Not much and nothinf major like a rework, but she does need more help.

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A new videos from Overwatch Central about Mei’s current state:

https://youtu.be/FDLTVlq9vxI

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