– The modern designs were dictated by the series of mistakes, a huge one of which was Ana. Extremely Right.
– Skill and strategy were superseded by individual hero powers. Extremely Right.
– 6v6 is probably better for the game overall - provided the platform for it is there. Extremely Right.
– Balancing around OWL/GM was a mistake. Extremely Right.
– An OG-like game mode should exist. Extremely Right.
There, fixed for you. Why? Because I said so.
This goes to illustrate what nonsense it is to throw something opinionated without any arguments and expect it to be taken seriously
Again, this is just my opinion, not facts by any means. Just my observations by comparing the OG (and so, OWC) with modern designs. Ana just did way too much way too good and worst of all, she also held a monopoly on some stuff she did.
She had a monopoly on:
– Burst healing. Someone up above told Amp with 50HPS is burst heal - sorry, that’s a sad joke. Compared to Ana who did 50% better HPS without any need for a CD it’s just sad. Her HPS with her CD? Yeah, you do the math. She was out-healing Mercy and Lucio combined during the moments when it counted most and only needed 1 hero slot.
– Anti-heals (duh). Not that by itself it made her broken - because back then heals were supportive, not decisive due to how scarce they were. Still, it definitely pushed the envelope and threw middle finger to stuff like Trans which were already struggling.
– Long-range hard CC. Nothing else in the game (apart from hook, I guess? but that usually was an OHK) was such a hard CC with such a long range. Sure, it requires skill, but come on, mid-range against a tank it’s not a skill-shot that requires GM. Far from it.
– Long-range (practically, unlimited range as far as maps are concerned) heals. No other healer could heal from so far away and so effectively. It also meant her biggest weakness, i.e. bad mobility = was largely diminished as positioning was key and her range allowed her to avoid most of the danger.
– Best ult synergy. On release with the speed-boost, her ult was the best hands down. But even without that, it’s hard to come up with another ult that synergizes with other ults so well.
The issue is that after Ana took the game by the storm, it set the new bar of expectations that high. And so new designs were forced to compete with her - because remember, there are only so many slots in the team roaster. It then also caused existing designs to evolve because otherwise they were left behind. In the end, it all converged to everyone doing everything and well.
So now we have auto-healing, huge HP pools, characters that do everything like Kiriko and Sigma and the unique traits - and most importantly - weaknesses - are much, much less pronounced. To be fair, Ana is not the one and only reason for it to be so. It’s that the devs were unwilling to recognize she is a problem - and then doubled down on designs that stem from Ana’s power instead of trimming that power down and bringing her down to the classic patterns of strength/weakness/tradeoff/situation.