Mei is a tank make her into one

General Discussion
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You get most value out of mei playing her as a second off tank rather than dps, most of her value comes from wall placement making sure it seperates enemies or blocks a lot of dmg.

She gets tankiness from being able to buy time and space for others to get cds by using her various abilities something tanks like sigma dva zarya do.

Also her icickle is basically orissa or sigma primary not good at securing but constant dmg.

When her biggest abilities are wall for space and setup, primary for CC and cryo for tankiness.

How can she be considered a dps.

Its best to move her to tank like doom in ow2 and let her flourish.

Right now im mostly playing mei and crushing teams like making them mald over mei, but i do only bronze dmg.

How can this hero not be a tank.

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She’s considered damage because she’s great at securing eliminations but can’t really afford to take that much damage.

She can take more damage than the average squishy, but can’t take nearly as much as a tank can. Her wall can be used to get out of a sticky situation, but then she doesn’t have it for tanking purposes. Her cryo freeze buys a lot of time, hut obviously the passive nature of it makes for poor offensive pressure.

Mei’s primary attack and secondary attack make her excellent at getting picks though, especially if used in combination with her wall. Mei is essentially what Roadhog would be as a damage character rather than a tank.

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it is a good question since they are planning on reworking doom to tank but keep some of his cc … so they have said

reasoning: tanks should have crowd control abilities and they like tanks to have those abilities… so naturally mei, being ALL about cc would be logical lol

ultimately its up to them tho so they may rework mei to be more dps like and increase damage or have some new abilities in OW2. would have to be a DRASTIC rework. well not really all they have to do is increase damage multipliers so its not drastic

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Mei as dps without her cc kit sounds boring.

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yea right i would rather have her as tank too. had so much fun in the april fools experimental i played tons of tank mei

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Mei as a Tank has been tried. She died if you walked at her. She’s not a Tank. Stop trying to make it happen.

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Her strength doesn’t really come from “making space”, rather denying enemy players the chance to retreat or forcing them out into the open (I.E. walling up a bunker comp into the air), from my own experience from maining her if you’re at the point you have to use your wall defensively you’re often in an unfavourable situation and most likely won’t win or you’re forced to retreat, or your tanks are morons so you have to do the damage mitigation instead

Only in double shield was she more “tanky” because her wall was part of the sustain, when the shields had finally been broken her wall was there to allow Sig/Orisa to recharge

Despite what many think, she’s far from a tank unless you’re comparing her to Roadhog, then she’s very much a tank, I really dislike the idea of reclassifying her because she offers a unique gameplay as a DPS and that will be gone for good if she is, I would much rather we make a Mei-like Tank instead, unfortunately I feel like we’re not going to be allowed to have current Mei in OW2

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I would love to see Mei become a tank but I believe it should only happen if they rework her completely.

Many players would hate this so I doubt it will happen. Blizz needs to avoid taking any half measures for things like this so any hero they move should get reworked to feel like they actually belong to the role they end up in.

  • Change Mei’s silhouette. Now that she is a fighter and not just a scientist, maybe she improves Snowball and turns him into a larger floating robot. This could give Mei a tank like look without changing her model
  • Change her abilities. They already did some of this for PVE… but stuff like cryo could be changed from an ice cube to a snowball. She needs to be able to make space and keep pressuring enemies so her kit should have more tools for that

That aside, I think Mei is fine as a dps. It gets boring when every hero in a role is just another shade of the same thing. Her having “tanknlike” tools just means damage players have options to adjust to a fight like Brig in support or Hog in tank. Roles need variety!

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I think that’s the issue, if your rework changes the hero soo much it’s not the same hero anymore, then you may as well just have made a new hero so I think when reworking heroes Blizzard to try to keep the “character identity” of that character which often what causes issues with their reworks

But this 100%, I really dislike how linear the damage role has become over the years, it used to have such a array of utility, yet it’s slowly being removed and for what benefit? Utility style DPS heroes like Mei, Sombra and Symmetra have never been problematic for ladder, it’s only OWL have they caused issues, it just seems like such a shame to remove a certain style of gameplay that isn’t really causing any major problems

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This.
Mei without her freeze would be genuinely unfun to play.

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Yeah, Tank Mei was really fun, and the good thing is that there were people saying April Mei was underpowered as a tank - which means that Tank Mei could get buffs like no size increase and a transpararent wall for her allies.

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… And genuinely fun to play against…

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Would people find Mei more enjoyable to fight if freeze was removed on primary? I imagine they’d still get very cross at the character as long as she has the power to split up the enemy team with a wall.

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Nobody’s fun to play against. Every decent hero in the game denies you the opportunity to murder them and these abilities are the ones people scream about.

I’m video games the enemy is supposed to stymie you. Every enemy hero is under control of a living breathing human being with thoughts and volition just like you. They aren’t machines for you to exercise your power fantasy on. They aren’t going to roll over and die because you’re just so much better than them. Frequently, you are worse. If you’d like a different experience I suggest playing vs bots.

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While I don’t play Mei myself I don’t really have a problem with her freeze since it is rather fair.
She mostly punishes bad positioning and isn’t really that dangerous as long as your team keeps the pressure high enough to stop her from getting close.

If you let her get in freezing range, then you deserve the icicle to the head :woman_shrugging:

I don’t want the core design of my favorite heroes changed just as much as anyone else, so Mei should definitely not lose her freeze over this 5v5 garbage.

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With forced 2-2-2, you actually need more tanky DPSes and supports to complement the real tanks.

The way Role Queue works, when you pick tank, the tanks are stuck in that role whether they’re actually any good or not and cannot switch out if it’s a map they’re weak at or forced to use a tank they don’t know how to use.

In QPC if we have a bad tank, i swap to tank and take over.

In QP, if you have a bad tank, your team is screwed unless you swap to a tanky DPS and help them out.

You seriously cannot play Overwatch and expect pro level tanks every game, in fact, between the forced 2-2-2, loose MMR, ticket farmers, queue jumpers, etc. bad tanks are pretty much the norm. You need tanky heroes in other roles to atleast give your team a better chance when the tanks are lacking.

“the goats nerfs are fine, it’ll actually make tanks more challenging”

  • tank mains left

“nerfing Orisa into the ground actually made her more fun!”

  • said some Idiot with a name starting with “S”
  • also forced ladder into Rein/Zarya prison for two years.

“So what if tanks left, 2-2-2 will force DPSes to learn to tank!”

  • this did not happen

“The ticket system is great! It’ll force DPSes to learn to tank!”

  • this did not happen

“The game is the most balanced it’s ever been!”

  • Tanks are balanced for the top 1% and horrible to play. Meaning, tanks have become significantly harder for the playerbase, but the tank mains that actually have the experience to make tanks work have given up and left, replaced by DPSes queue jumpers/ticket farmers that don’t know, nor care about tanking.

In the game’s “balanced” state, you actually need a third tank to keep your team from getting repeatedly run over in the very likely event that atleast one of your tanks is a dud.

This will actually be even worse in OW2 as you’ll only have one chance to have a good tank. With the removal of the off tank, you’ll need tankier DPSes to support the tank.

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Mei is not a tank. She is not good enough as a tank to be put into the tank role and therefor doing it would kill an already dead hero. She gets value working with her tanks and works well because she is a meh tank in the DPS slot. As soon as she has to replace one of the 2 tanks, the value you get from her compared to any other tank will not be worth it. Then OW2 with just 1 tank she will be so useless noone but Mei one tricks will play her.

What are you talking about? Her icicle is high poke damage. Orisa is low consistent damage, they aren’t even remotely the same. Sigma’s is also hard hitting, short distance. Mei with combination with a Mercy or Zen can be used like Hanzo, something Orisa and Sig definitely can’t do.

You literally just listed all her abilities as her biggest abilities… And really, you’re listing her CC? Her CC is objectively one of the worst things in this game right now because it’s been nerfed so much. It’s so bad any passable Mei rarely uses this thing anymore.

Ah yes, putting a meh tank as the solo tank in OW2 will definitely make her flourish -_-

Moving Mei to tank role will destroy a large part of what makes her fun and useful which is your team not needing to rely on you frontlining the entire time just to keep up the team. Her kit is not good enough to be used as a solo tank. Her wall is on a long cooldown and can’t be shot through making using it as a shield useless, would also make using it for mobility essentially throwing since it must always be used for your team. She can’t work with her other tanks to actually get value (the only way to get value out of her these days) because they wont exist. Her pick potential is terrible compared to a tank like hog. Her sustain damage is terrible compared to every other tank (tanks these days are just DPS with more damage and health, neither things Mei is good at). She hasn’t got the disruptive capabilities of Hammond.

Mei works because she is a really bad tank in the DPS role that has great poke damage. Mei will not work as a really bad tank in the tank role.

Then you can’t aim the right click.

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Mei needs to be Damage because its the closest thing the role has to providing barriers.

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All the tanks are supposed to be reworked to be similar to Roadhog in OW2. So I’d say she fits right alongside them if this is the metric we’re going by.

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Probably because they don’t want to improve the queues for dps (which would get only better by giving tanks more options). As someone who plays tank a lot, I’d play that role even more if they gave her as an option there.

They should let go and come clean about this topic already, they’ve been teasing us with her tank rework since this April only to give no info at all these months. Not to mention it has been asked for years. Is tank Mei still a thing they’re working on or not?..

It’s only going to get worse in OW2 because to balance her as a dps they’d need to nerf her wall even more than it already is (2 additional seconds than it should be) which makes the hero too clunky. You don’t normally use her for damage, you use her for point control which seems like they don’t wanna fully take her in that direction.

For reference - she has worse pickrate than Bastion and worse winrate than Cassidy - so she needs some kind of rework anyway. If they just make her beam no freeze with extra damage this will dumpster the hero completely. Anyone can try her OW2 changes in custom games vs AI or with friends and see how see plays out - it’s horrible. She has a beam with travel time (others being hitscan) and lowest range out of every beam hero but with even worse damage compared to them.

Mei haters will never be happy until they remove her freeze, her wall and playmaking potential and give her worst damage which will turn her unplayable. It’s ironic maining Rein who has 3 forms of CC yet complain about Mei’s single form of CC imo. Makes him look like a fool, but what do I know, he thinks she’s easy and her cryo is a get out of jail card lol.

1 Like