EDIT: This has been now updated and added to the BETA feedback forums I didn’t know existed when I first made this thread (Thanks u/Ceiu for making me aware of this). If you have access to it and agree with me, I would very much appreciate if you hearted it over there too https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/extensive-ow2-mei-feedback/666413
This is a BETA, a BETA exists to give feedback. I am giving EXTENSIVE feedback on Mei who IMO is currently the worst hero in the BETA (yes, worse than Sym and I play Sym a fair amount so I know what I’m talking about when making this comparison and even have video evidence for those who don’t believe me). This is feedback based on playing her since day 1 of the BETA for over 10 hours collectively and I make this out of love for the hero.
BUG REPORT
First she has a pretty game breaking bug in that her wall will fling her off it sometimes:
Please fix this.
Also I’m still being shot through the wall, it’s been 6 years Blizzard. Please.
Mei in her current state has 2 major problems, she doesn’t do anything better than any other existing hero and also isn’t fun to play. The changes that she has had are as followed;
Nerfs:
- Freeze has been removed from left click.
- Wall deploy distance has been lowered from 35m-20m (almost halved).
- Blizzard has been indirectly nerfed through the roof. DPS move faster so they all walk out of it. Tanks abilities that eat it have had uptime increase (Matrix). Tank abilities that negate it’s effects have been buffed in things like uptime/effectiveness (Zarya bubble, Hammond shield, Orisa fortify). Freeze removed so you can’t freeze stragglers who just got out.
- Cryo no longer protects her from Gravitic Flux (GJ making the only consistent bit of her kit where she is immune in cryo no longer consistent).
edit: She doesn’t take damage from flux. She just can’t use cryo to escape from it lifting her but she’ll be immune. Thanks flotaku for explaining this one. - Ice wall pillars HP have gone from 400hp-250hp (Cass can now right click once to destroy them).
- Blizzard ultimate cost increased by 15%
Buffs:
- Left click has increased damage.
- Ammo pool has been substantially increased.
BUFFS
Let’s start with the best bit of OW2 Mei, ammo pool increase. After playing reload simulator for years, it’s nice to finally not need to reload 24/7. It is the one aspect of her whole kit that I really appreciate in OW2 and I cannot put into words how good it is to not constantly be reloading. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from here.
Next the “damage”, what a joke. Did you know that if you put a Sym VS a Mei killing a 200hp hero and you time the MOMENT both heroes press Mouse 1 to the moment that hero dies, Mei beats Sym by 1/10th of a second assuming you don’t miss a single tick on Mei. This is from Symettra starting at 0 charge btw.
Sym also has more range and it’s hitscan so you are going to miss left click ticks on Mei trying to hit anyone even remotely moving as you need to predict their movement while Sym you just need to track AND when you have killed the target on Sym, you are now doing 120 DPS which will buff again to 180 meaning you actually kill stuff. Why on earth would anyone ever use Mei over Sym for using left click? This isn’t even taking into account how you can stack right click immediately into left click on Sym, something impossible on Mei.
NERFS
Removal of freeze:
First thing lets address the elephant in the room, the left click freeze removal. This has substantial ramifications across her entire kit affecting her ultimate, style of play, decision making and removing utility from her. I don’t have a problem with the removal of freeze, it was an annoying ability that noone wanted to go up against. My problem is with the execution which is the laziest possible thing you could’ve done with complete disregard for how it affects her as a hero.
Currently in OW1 freeze isn’t very good for actually freezing in most situations. But those situations where it is useful, it gives the user 2 potential attack methods. “Do I freeze my target, locking them in place and making the final blow easier but have it take longer to kill them, or do I right click them to death which is faster but harder to do”. These two decisions do not exist in OW2, left click is so bad that it is NEVER better to use it than right click. It is only good for attacking through abilities that can’t block it like deflect but the second they stop using those abilities, going back to right clicking is better. Any sort of healing of any kind instantly makes her left click completely useless, even if it’s something like a Lucio aura. It’s like your using an uncharged Sym/Zarya beam 24/7 while is also isn’t hitscan so you need to lead your targets with it. Here’s is usually what happens when you try and use the left click:
If you are being left clicked, just shoot Mei. Yes, it can pierce but I would honestly take a hitscan, extremely high power beam with much more range like Sym/Zarya over a slow, low damage, low range (lower when you are chasing people due to the nature of it being a projectile) beam that can penetrate. The penetration doesn’t offset the fact the rest of it’s stats are just terrible.
Freeze was also great to cancel channelling ultimate’s and this is the biggest nerf. This was huge utility for Mei and she could cancel any ultimate like whole hog, flux, coalescence etc. This is something Sombra maintained with her hack nerf because the devs knew it was important for Sombra to keep it, so why did she get to keep it but Mei didn’t? Sombra had extensive reworking of her hack to make it not only maintain it’s utility, but give it extra utility ontop of damage. Mei has her utility stripped and just got damage that is a worse version of Symettra/Zarya.
Blizzard+Freeze Removal:
Freeze also made Blizzard a good ultimate. Blizzard on it’s own is pretty meh, it’s got one of the longest cast times in the game of which you throw it, then snowball lands, then snowball begins to levitate before Blizzard actually takes effect all the while Mei cannot do anything and people are already halfway out the ult before it’s effects even take place. This is how the average Blizzard goes down:
Since it stacked with Blizzard, anyone who walked out of blizzard could be quickly finished off by finishing the freeze with left click and headshotting. Not anymore, they walk out of Blizzard and that’s it, it’s done. Which in a game where all DPS are moving faster, all tanks have a movement ability or a way to fortify themselves means you aren’t freezing anyone except supports like Ana and Zen who are the only ones who don’t have movement. Most Blizzards result in you throwing Blizzard and watching everyone walk out of it or use one of 90 movement abilities to get out of it. So this change alone has made Blizzard useless for anything but throwing on a point to temporarily get people off it and even that as shown in the video doesn’t deter people touching the point, they just step out for a second and step back on the point while it’s still going because you can’t maintain freezing on them with left click once they leave. Not even mentioning the increase to it’s cost to earn it.
As a result, you might as well just right click as I’ve genuinely found no use for left click outside of finishing off a super low targets which old left click did anyway or freezing people quicker in your Blizzard which is still a thing:
But right clicking on Mei is a projectile version of Cree’s left click so is substantially harder and more inconsistent to land shots on. At that point, why am I playing Mei and not Cree or a hero like Hanzo who can 1shot headshot enemies? The effort needed to secure these kills on Mei vs any other hero are night and day. I’m not going to bother putting in 10x the effort for 1/10th the reward.
The execution of removing left click has destroyed utility, given her a substantially worse version of something 2 heroes already have, nerfed her ultimate even more, removed a decision dumbing her down overall and made her more boring to play.
Let’s compare this to a hero you did a similar thing to but actually did it well, Sombra. You removed her 5 second hack or whatever it was which like freeze, was an annoying CC ability noone liked fighting into. Only with Sombra, you gave her a 40% damage increase to the enemies (similar to Mei), you kept it cancelling abilities so she keeps the utility of hack (Mei never got anything remotely close to this), AND the targets are wallhacked during this period for the whole team. You’ve ADDED EXTRA utility to Sombra’s yet taken away utility from Mei. You also buffed her ultimate accordingly by removing the HP shield removal feature but gave it a flat 40% damage getting taken off the enemy instantly while having the features from her right click hack.
Why did you quite clearly really care about making Sombra substantially less annoying to fight but still really good and keeping her utility and thinking how it affects her kit as a whole, yet decided to do the bare minimum with Mei and not remotely care how removing the most pivotal bit from her would affect her?
Wall:
The wall nerf was completely unnecessary. Wall is basically the only reason you even pick her anymore on live right now and now 6 years of muscle memory knowing how far I can place it have flown right out the window. The tank buffs mean that walling off a tank is pointless now since you simply aren’t killing them fast enough for it to be worthwhile. Every DPS can just turn around and break the pillar now because yoou halved the HP and there is no risk of them being frozen anymore (except Mei ironically but she will just cryo to survive or wall herself off to survive). Ontop of all of this you STILL haven’t fixed the bug where it just doesn’t place randomly, but you somehow managed to add a bug where you get launched off it as seen at the start of the post so well done with that one.
It can still be useful in very select situations, like walling, throwing blizzard into it to stop heroes like DVA from eating it. You can still wall off supports but they are playing in the back on their team so this isn’t useful. The only thing it retains is blocking ultimates which is still fun to do, Earthshatter, Meteor Strike, Deadeye etc. So now you’ve destroyed the annoying, meh bit of her kit, destroyed her already meh ultimate and destroyed the only reason you pick Mei.
What is Mei actually good at now?
Right now Mei can only do 3 things really effectively and that’s stall, block enemies from contesting and block ultimates. She still has the ability to sit on a point, when she’s low wall herself off and when that get’s broken cryo to give your team about 8 seconds to try and retouch a point. She also has the ability to wall an enemy off from their spawn exit then cryo on a broken pillar to prevent them retouching a point. Both things that don’t happen for 99% of the match and have also been nerfed due to the pillar nerf so you’ll be picking her for cancelling ults. It’s just not worth it to pick her over any other hero.
Suggestions:
Here are some off the top of my head to drastically improve the hero:
- Revert the wall nerfs.
- Improve her right clicks rate of fire or damage, this will make mastering this worth while and not have it be out DPS’d by other heroes who take significantly less effort to deal the same damage.
- Have her left click freeze WHEN SHE ULTs! This way, the indirect Blizzard nerfs will not be so drastic and will make Blizzard a worthwhile ult (maybe make her glow when this is happening so it’s obvious when she can/can’t freeze to players). This change alone may be all it takes to make Blizzard a worthwhile ult.
- Her left click should have a velocity increase+damage increase (even if it’s over time) OR have it cancel abilities for a frame once you fill up a bar. This way it retains the utility of freeze without freezing the enemy. It doesn’t need to lock them out of abilities like hack, just cancel whichever one is active at the time it’s filled and give the enemy an indicator it’s happening.
Closing Statement
I have 428 hours on Mei on live OW out of 1434 hours played, she is my main hero and the reason I boot up the game so I am very much invested in her not sucking in OW2. But I also have over 1k hours across other heroes so can make logical comparisons to other heroes without being biased because I haven’t played them. On live right now, Mei is not amazing and certainly isn’t META but I still played her daily because she was fun. She offered a unique experience I don’t get from any other shooter game and it really made OW standout for me. I would rather a hero be bad but enjoyable than META and boring. But as it stands, Mei has no purpose, has had nerfs across her entire kit to the point of every single ability being near useless and isn’t fun to play. She’s been hit with about 12 nerfs over the past few years in OW1 and you’ve just hit her with countless more. She has no burst damage, terrible sustain damage and no movement ability outside a wall she gets every 12 seconds. Why would ANYBODY play this hero over literally anyone else on the roster? It doesn’t matter what situation I am in, I can get more value playing any other DPS hero at any time than I can on the hero I have invested 6 years into learning the ins and outs of. She wasn’t even META or good and you decided she still needed gutting across the board. Seeing what they have done to Mei where they drop kick her entire kit into irrelevency, yet hyper mobility heroes like Genji have 90% of their counters flatout removed from the game and he remains completely unchanged is ridiculous. Why is Genji allowed to have hyper mobility, insanely high burst damage and one of the best ultimate’s in the game and Mei can’t even realistically out damage a Zenyatta Orb with her primary fire while having 0 mobility and her entire kit nerfed when she wasn’t even META and hasn’t been for years? All Mei has going for her is sustain and all it does is make you last longer on the battlefield getting no value. No, I don’t want heroes like Genji to be useless, I want my hero to feel like she has an actual purpose.
I’ll finish it off with the only passable plays I have gotten so far in the time I’ve been playing this BETA on Mei:
