Like if the Ana player is on fire most of the match and is picking off the enemy heroes and landing wicked sleep darts and anti healing grenades and giving great nano boosts…
Maybe you shouldn’t resort to literally mob jumping on them and assuming they didn’t help.
Playing Mercy and Ana extensively at this point… I sincerely feel that I contribute more playing Ana than I do Mercy. Maybe I heal a few thousand less, but I give more utility many times over.
I also notice it in my commendations. I get WAY fewer on Ana than I have in the past on Mercy.
The meta is so entrenched in people’s minds that they don’t even listen or accept that someone is more comfortable on a non-meta hero. Before I played Ana extensively and got good at her, sure, you had a point.
But now I can reliably heal my team and pick off out of position enemies and land my nades I find it asinine that I am degraded because of my pick.
Yea, I feel like people are over exaggerating her current state balance wise when they say she is trash. I’m pretty sure they are only comparing Ana to Mercy and not Ana as its own single hero.
I just recently started using her and the biggest problem for ana isnt her kit it’s her allies. Her sleep dart is the only thing she has to save herself and allies forget that all the time and just leave her to 1 vs 1 whatever is trying to kill her. I’m not mad at my allies until they complain i dont heal them, kinda hard for a dead woman to participate.
LOL. Healing output doesn’t really matter much for supports. Mercy is picked for her damage boost and rez utility not her healing. When I play Mercy, I try to heal as little as I can get away with. I think having 2-3K damage amped makes up for losing 1-2k healing, and plus letting your off supports heal gives them their ults faster, which are usually more impactful than Valk
Tbh I consider it a lucky game when people pick healers of their own volition. If you’re doing your job, no complaints should be had against a healer. Same for any role, but still. The cards will fall as they may. Win, or lose.
In most of my games with Ana I lose, but I think that is due to the ever changing game dynamics. What I mean by that is there are simple game elements that prevent Ana from being played based around the geometry, sight lines, and even the enemy team composition. With every new hero addition or map patch we see subtle nerfs to Ana which may inhibit the flow of her gameplay. An example of this would be the recently released “Wrecking Ball” who (despite being an easy target) can detain Ana under almost any circumstance. Being capable to land grenades and sleep darts are very valuable, but with the constantly varying team compositions you might see a double shield comp with Rein Orisa or a simple dive comp with Winston D.va, but with each of these comps comes inherent difficulties which completely negate Ana’s ability to use certain abilities to the fullest. An example would be if the enemy team ran a Reinhardt with Zarya and a set of other heroes. because of the shielding capabilities of both Rein and Zarya it would be considered almost impossible to line up a sleep dart, especially if such players were competent enough to look for it. In such scenario maybe the grenade can be used, but can it be used offensively or defensively? It comes back to map geometry where on a map like Kings Row Ana can easily line up grenades at offensive and defensive angles.
A personal belief of mine is that if you play Ana in the state the game is in currently you are impeding both yourself and your team as a result of her kit and because of how much simpler it is to play Mercy and gain value from her kit more consistently than Ana’s. That is not to say that Ana is by any means a bad hero, she is definitely one of the best, but it’s hard to make use of her in any meaningful way.
On another note, I think people need to realize that each hero has their own weaknesses rather than strengths. That would definitely help players understand the position and role each person is in on an individual hero level. I say this mostly to help spread the fact that Ana is easier to play with if you know her weaknesses, people will hate what they don’t understand.
A person’s take on Ana is directly proportional to their bracket. Go on Overbuff and look at her win rates per bracket. You’ll find that she’s in the middle of the pack at grand masters. At platinum she’s serviceable but rough going. Anything below plat she’s pretty much a masochist’s dream on suffering — she requires skill atypical for the bracket, there’s plenty of dive and almost no peel to speak of.
She needs something that lower brackets can use that becomes easier to circumvent as brackets, personal skills and team coordination’s improve.
That’s the direct opposite of the Bastion experience – a hero that’s a terror at the low end but ultra trivial at grand masters. That hero needs a skill difficult for low brackets to master but would nonetheless keeps him viable later on when he hits grand master play. Same too with Ana but in reverse.
There are skills and passives they can introduce that scale as such. Why they don’t is a mystery to me. As is Ana’s too much of a sitting duck to dive. Not until she gets something that addresses her survivability issues she wont be back in the meta. She lacks mobility, self sustain, self defense and has a pinpoint accuracy requirement that pretty much guarantees her as easy pickings to dive – especially in the lower brackets where there is no peal. These heroes move faster than her, hit harder than her and have very lax to hit requirements when compared to her.
So here we are in a game where dive hard counters Ana overall. We started off with just four dive heroes – Winston, D.VA, Tracer and Genji. Since her creation every other hero they’ve added to the game only added to the dive roster – Sombra, Doomfist and Now Hammond. Each time they add a dive hero she gets harder to keep in the field. Believe me the dive roster can only continue to grow. Do they really want her to always be countered by dive – a hero pool that keeps getting larger?
Maybe if they gave Ana a Ghillie Suit she wouldn’t be so easy to dive. One sniper already has a nest to shoot from. Why can’t the other have some camo gear to stealth from in the back unseen?
The DEVs stated that they’re not interested on improving her weaknesses — not her mobility nor her self heal.
It’s probably the same problem as blaming the Widowmaker. Ana requires good mechanical aim and gamesense to get any value just like Widow, and I feel all of us have had that one Widow who insisted that they were “good” and proceeded to get maybe 3 bodyshots (maybe even a headshot if the stars align perfectly). Some Ana players are like this too, who miss every shot and only get any healing done with biotic grenade.