The easy part of balancing Mei is that she’s mostly balanced from Plat to Bronze already.
So if she was to get nerfed, you’d want to focus on “coordination nerfs” that OWL tier players would use. Since coordination is world-class at OWL level.
So here’s an approach I would go for. Trying each one of these steps sequentially in a separate patch.
Step 1. Change her Primary Fire from a beam weapon to a projectile weapon
(i.e. Can be Matrixed/KineticGrasped/Reflected).
For OWL pros this opens up a lot of approaches with Dive, and coordinated counterplay.
Also might bring back some more Sigma and Hammond usage.
Additionally, D.va and Genji are crowd favourites. And Mei is really limiting Signa’s ability to be used.
Step 2. Primary Fire attacks no longer pierce through multiple enemies.
Similar, this also opens up some more reliant teamplay counterplay, where Tanks can bodyblock Mei freezes on squishier targets.
And since this is reliant on coordination, it would be more relevant in OWL.
Step 3. Change her Icewall to four 400hp pillars that are 25% wider.
Would make it easier to save a Tank by breaking only 1 segment of the wall, instead of needing to break 2.
This cuts the coordination effort needed to counter a wall by half.
Step 4. Move Mei to the Tank Role.
Might be the only way to prevent her Icewalls from being dominant, and her being used as a “Third Tank”.
Step 5. Adjust Mei in the Tank Role
Probably meaning more frequent but weaker icewalls. Also something to keep her HP up either higher base HP, or better self-heal.
If She’s going to be a Tank, might as well make sure she has Peel value. Since she’d probably be an offtank.
Yeah, well anyone who has their feet on the ground and isn’t a Mei player hates that damned wall. Because there’s nothing more fun than getting your main tank soloed off and watching them die slowly.
I think I would do a fall-off damage revert so she’s not charging Blizzard so quickly and easier to demolish at range before a category move. She had similar issues before the game even launched when she had no fall-off damage, and that is why she spent so long having it even though other deadlier projectiles didn’t have it.
I don’t think so at all. When I watched her matches her big value came from:
Wall, Blizzard, and Icicles in that order. Her ice block and primary were meh. They weren’t no value but it clearly wasn’t the same level of value as the other 3.
Icicles not only ensured that Blizzard had a high uptime, but they sometimes opened up fights with important picks because they can be 150 hp burst and high ranked Meis get that damage more consistently.
Which is fair. That’s kinda why I layed this out as sequential steps.
If she’s good at Step 1 or Step 2, stop there.
Well I don’t think her Blizzard is all that good (It’s like a slower version of D.va bomb that doesn’t even kill).
And the Iciciles are meh compared to other DPS damage.
If they did nerf the wall, I’d just go with changing it to 4 segments that are 400HP, and change the width so that it’s equivalent to the current wall width.
And I didn’t state it should be nerfed. But it is like a budget bomb and a budget shatter rolled into one ult. At worst it produces the level of value that a D.va bomb that didn’t kill anyone makes. At best it’s the game swinging potential of landing a shatter, where not only does the enemy team die but your allies get a lot of ult charge.
It’s a big portion of her power budget, and a big reason D.va is run over Zarya despite Zarya being better at handling the beam. Because D.va can eat the thing and deny it value completely rather than just mitigating it by saving one person reliably.
Having a good way to have that ult up a decent amount of time even when an enemy is keeping distance, and maybe even getting a good pick out of it, is why icicles with no fall-off are so strong. Despite them being inferior to other projectiles in the game. It’s just provides too much synergy with the rest of her kit.
Edit
It’s kinda like how lunge provides a deceptive amount of value to Hanzo’s kit. Icicles are the same. She had a similar issue in beta, I believe, and that’s one reason they put the fall-off on in the first place. At least that’s how it was described at the time to me by others.
How in the hell is she balanced in plat, are you absolutely kidding me? God awful hero that gets far above any value you can get from traditional DPS like mcree, tracer, soldier with 10% of the mental effort and 1% of the mechanical effort.
If extreme low skill floor hero like mei is meta and OP in the higher ranks than she is completely beyond reason busted in lower ranks.
I think it would solve the problem on ladder, but on league I think nerfing the icicles would have superior impact because it increases the efficiency of ranged heroes against her and also means that she’ll be forced to burn important cooldowns to get closer sometimes. Which if she mistimes they can capitalize on.
I also think the impact would be smaller on ladder nerfing the fall-off because of how much more value people get out of freeze here than they do in league.
That’s because the Tracers aren’t good, not because Mei is imbalanced. Even when Mei was bad and Tracer was dominating force at the top, Mei did better than Tracer in plat.
Part of playing a high skill hero is that you’re going to be bad at them until you actually have high skills.
Like it’s literally inherent to the nature of variable skill floors.