That would be fun to have the first target receiving 100% heal, second 50%, third 25% etc… But I guess it’s way too op.
Okay you guys are getting this wrong
Ana should be able to position herself not escape.
Ana should be able to either outheal or outdps moira or atleast be 80% of moiras capabilities.
Making her shoot through allies won’t help. Make her pierce every enemy/ally or just pierce barriers
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Thanks for the clarity Geoff, it’s much appreciated when you guys have a presence on the forums.
I think where Ana is concerned however, one of the problems with applying that balance philosophy is that currently the way team composition pans out - at least on ladder as I have seen it - you cannot depend upon two supports being selected, and you can certainly not depend on basic organisation such as peeling for supports and so forth. That gives support hero’s such as Mercy, Moira, or Lucio a big advantage over Ana because they are more self sustainable that way.
Realistically, for the design philosophy you want to deliver for Overwatch to work in this instance, we’d need a more reliable way to ensure that the parameters enabling “allies to try to manage” a heroes weaknesses are strong within the game, such as a way to aid the construction of balanced team compositions so that it’s not simply down to luck of who ends up on a team from random matchmaking. In other words, for the Overwatch teams balance philosophy to work, we need some form of role selection option before matchmaking, or another system to facilitate more synergistic teams.
Oh, and as a side note, I think the buffs for Ana should be -
Lower Sleep Dart to 10 seconds and up how much ultimate percentage you receive for landing a dart.
Nano Boost also applies a 200HP heal to the nano target (maybe using nano could also heal Ana for say 75 health too?)
Well, Geoff, it really is too bad that I have never experienced teamplay in Competitive Overwatch haha. For real though, Guilds and team queue when?
Thank you so much for explaining the purpose of weaknesses/strengths and nerfs/buffs and the team’s concept of balance. I think it’s super important the community hear balance is not the same as making every hero “equal.”
Your team rocks! Keep up the good work! I hope OW stays strong for some time to come! (Unless of course the team decides to work on OW2 anytime 
)
I have no idea how it would work but I’d totally take OW2 as an MMO 
Rather than Horde/Alliance you could have Overwatch/Blackwatch/Talon as factions
Earn reputation with Los Muertos and The Shambali etc 
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Did you not read my post?
From the little time I have on Ana I can say shots piercing full health allies would be a god send. I’ve had so many situations where an ally walking in front of me has either resulted in the death of a teammate or myself. Trying to heal a teammate farther away and a tank decides to walk in front of me and the teammate dies because our tank body blocked the heals. Or I’m the only one that acknowledges the enemy team has a Widowmaker or Pharah. I’m about to kill them and an ally walks in the way saving the enemy and I end up dying instead.
I’ve had so many teammates where it’s like they are accidentally blocking my heals on purpose. I’ll try to move around them then they end up walking in front of me again. It’s just really frustrating to play Ana since she requires a completely unobstructed path to an ally to heal them. Except with her biotic grenade which gets blocked by friendly shields for whatever reason. LOS, enemy and friendly shields, teammates body blocking, and D.Va there’s just so many things working against Ana.
Some other buffs for her I’d like to see is
Biotic Rifle
- Self heal for 10 health every time you heal an ally (actual healing not just shooting an ally)
- Unscoped fire changed to hitscan from projectile
Sleep Dart
- Cooldown reduced to 10 seconds from 12
Biotic Grenade
- Cooldown reduced to 8 seconds from 10
Making her rifle completely hitscan would add some much needed consistency to her aiming requirements. Currently Ana has 4 different speeds for her weapons/abilities. I think 10 health for each heal would give her a small amount of sustain outside of her grenade and it’s completely dependent on accuracy.
Sleep dart and Biotic grenade are both great offensively and defensively. Both these abilities suffer badly from catch 22. If you use them offensively you won’t have them to defend yourself. But if you use them to defend yourself you can’t use them to help your team in a fight. Honestly it would be great to have 2 charges on both abilities but I know how unbalanced that would be. So a couple seconds cool down shaved from each ability would be nice.
Personally I feel like instead of the sleep dart cooldown being looked at that you rather set a damage threshold on a target slept, say about 25-50 damage. This would alleviate the undoing of a long cooldown skill based ability from a love tap by a Winston or D.Va.
I know that Ana’s kit as a whole can entirely change a teamfight but when every part of this kit takes some sort of mechanical skill to successfully pull off it shouldn’t be ruined so easily. Sure, completely immobilizing a target for nearly a teamfight is quite strong and having it almost guaranteed is really strong, but this is the kind of strength that should make up for her low self healing and long cooldowns on more challenging abilities.
2 Likes
Mercy has self-regen, because she can’t heal herself; other healers can heal themselves (Zen can’t either, but he has a blue healthbar, which regens).
Honestly, I’m always jumping up and throwing it so I know it will be more useful. But I’ve never personally noticed that, but that would be nice because you can can just throw it at the ground.
Just have it favor the cross hair if it’s actually on a teammate, opposed to hitting someone standing by you that doesn’t even have the crosshair on them but interferes anyway.
sucks when you’re hiding behind a tank trying to shoot someone in the distance, your not even aiming at the tank but its hitting them instead. needs smarter crosshair logic imo
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I really appreciate the explanation, but personally, I feel as though Ana falls into the “too many weaknesses compared to their strengths” category.
Her Biotic Grenade is an amazingly powerful tool, but it’s also her only form of self-sustain. Ana needs a second healer to make the most of her kit, and in Quick Play and sometimes even Competitive mode, it can be hard to get a second healer that is willing to keep Ana topped off.
Ana’s healing is strong, but it isn’t significantly stronger than Moira’s, and is only just stronger than Mercy’s. Ana has a potential healing output of about 50% greater than Mercy, but this is assuming Ana is hitting every single shot and grenade on her allies (i.e., not using it on herself). Most Ana players hover around 60-70% accuracy, meaning their healing is on-par with a Mercy, usually less, since they’re not holding down the fire button and sometimes they’re shooting the enemy.
Ana’s healing is on-par with Moira’s, but Moira has self-healing, Fade to get her out of danger, and tools to heal allies through barriers (I realize that her primary fire passing through enemy barriers is a bug, but her Orb is intended to go through barriers, and Moira can risk going through a barrier to help her teammate due to her self-sustain and escape tool).
I’m not saying that Ana doesn’t have her strengths. Long-range healing, a long-range stun, and the ability to block enemy healing give her immense playmaking potential and more utility than Moira. However, as an Ana player, these tools don’t feel impactful. Without a coordinated team, enemies just walk away and wait for the heal block to wear off. Sleeping enemies just wake up, either because there was no followup, or a teammate woke them up too early without killing them. Her range is nice, but range is a map-dependent strength. Most Ana players don’t play at range from their team. They sit relatively close so they can have the protection they need to survive and they can easily hit their grenade on themselves and multiple teammates.
I’d also like to take a moment to talk about the fantasy of Ana. She is a grizzled veteran who has lived through countless battles, saved countless teammates and watched many die, but she lives for the good fight. Ana is a survivor. Taking a bullet to the face didn’t kill her. It didn’t even cause her to retire. She recovered in secret and adopted a vigilante secret identity, and continued her work from the shadows.
In-game, Ana doesn’t sell that fantasy. She isn’t a survivor; she is a frail old woman who needs someone to help her get across the street without getting run over by flying mechs and angry apes. If she takes so much as a scratch, she needs to sacrifice potential healing to her teammates (either by selfishly using Biotic Grenade or taking attention away from the other healer). She has so much utility, but that utility is often wasted on simply keeping herself alive, and it doesn’t always work. She doesn’t fit the her identity of “Horus” or “The Ghost”, and I think she could be improved.
These incoming changes are amazing. They will make Ana feel so much better to play, and I’m so glad the Overwatch team has Ana on their radar as a hero that needs improvements. I just hope there are more improvements slated that can help capture the fantasy of “the healing sniper who just won’t die”.
3 Likes
why not give her a dash or a roll, some sort of evade atleast. she has nothing in her kit for her unlike every other healer… its so easy to remove her from a match with her low mobility and lack of mitigation. atleast moira can leech and fade to safety if necessary, and mercy can fly while still cranking out sick single target hps on a target and herself. ana has to land a 180 sleep dart in the 2 seconds it takes for anyone to pump out 200 damage… every hero is a huge threat to ana, a select few even phase brigette. I don’t think anyone expects perfect balance by any means but a little bit would be nice.
No. Ana’s Nano should always be used on a teammate. The solution to this is to make nano apply to herself AND one teammate she targets.
Ana’s healing is NOT on par with Moira OR Mercy. They both have a higher heal output throughout the game by far.
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Ana’s POTENTIAL healing is on-par with Moira. If Ana lands all of her shots at the maximum fire rate and all of her grenades on allies, she and Moira do roughly the same amount of healing output.
In reality, Ana players are not hitting all of there shots. They aren’t always shooting. They have to use their grenade to keep themselves alive or secure a kill instead of healing. That’s what I was saying. She has the potential to compete with the other main healers, but she rarely reaches that potential due to her glaring weaknesses.
Thank you!! #freeAna
She still is the most unfavourable support to pick with one of the lowest win rates out of all heroes in all ranks.
I’m sorry Jeff but I read your ‘philosophy’ on balance changes and I disagree completely. Yes all heroes must have weaknesses to balance the game out but not to the point where they are made obsolete. Healing through allies and more bullets are not solutions to her character’s defining problems.
Mobility and/or self heal. These are things the community have been asking in Ana for, for almost a year now. Even if she had these things I still doubt she’d be top tier but at least she’d have something to make her survivability less reliant on her teammates.
The longer you drag vital balance changes like this out the more you lose your playerbase. You guys seem to be very happy leaving low skill heroes like Mercy and Brigitte dominate; you reward low skill heroes over high skill heroes like Ana, and that will be, trust me, the downfall of this game if it isn’t already declining. Watching Mercy in OWL is tedious if you did not already get the memo on your declining viewership.
I’m taking a long break from this game until things get fixed. My friends have already burnout and Brigitte is only the icing of the problems in competitive Overwatch.
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No, but they’re a good start 
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