I’ll admit it’s been a while, but off the top of my head I’m pretty sure Lucio auras don’t stack with themselves. 5 Lucios won’t heal you any faster than 1 Lucio (except in the sense of having greater uptime on Amp)
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If there are several who accomplish similar healing for example, then it’ll make for more balanced discussion to at least mention others in the roster.
No heroes are played in a vacuum.
And for context, ana supposedly also had “amazing damage” as well, which is even more debatable within the support heroes.
It all depends on what one considers as a threshold for “amazing” I guess.
The game relies too much on constant healing. This is why making a character unhealable is guaranteed loss.
Not only that but nade can also heal almost instantly to full HP at the same time.
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It’s a 5v5 problem
The bionade was designed for 6v6 and had to overcome strong barriers as well multiple tanks.
5v5 stealth buffed Ana because her counters got weaker it more mobility tools put in the game and support tools to negate being dived.
It’s hard for one of her biggest counters, DVA, to get to her if Ana is pocketed by a pylon, the high burst dmg of 5v5 and strong healing tools to make a risky play in the nade.
The changes in 5v5 give Ana and other heroes a lot more space to control. Especially if the lone enemy tank gets hit by a sleep dart.
The full roster is not balanced for a 5v5 composition. That’s the problem not only an Ana problem.
All of them. Healing is strong and damage is strong. They coexist together in this weird dynamic where either something dies instantly or doesn’t die at all. So what happens when you get rid off healing? You disengage instantly or die. Since it’s pretty easy to land and last for a long time you have ability that forces you off for 3.5s or outright kills you every 10 seconds with not that much skill involved.
If you nerf healing you also have to nerf damage from probably like half of the roster. Then things will die from constant poke, but won’t die instantly from just peeking the corner at the wrong time. In return no more immortal pockets and standing in front of people afk because support is pocketing you. Only then maaaybe nade won’t feel so terrible because game won’t be reliant on healing as much to survive. Probably still will feel bad but not as much as it is now. You can also just nerf the nade xD
Oh, okay, I see where you’re coming from now. Well, despite Ana’s healing being single target and not AoE, it still sets a baseline for what the healing ceiling should look like. Going from 50 HPS → 88 HPS sets a standard for the level of healing that Moira should do because she’s meant to be able to dump a lot of healing. That and being survivable are The Things That She Does™ so it’s not surprising when she’s released and can compete with Ana in single-target scenarios.
It has been a long time, right? I thought that they stacked, but my memory isn’t the best so I’m happy to take your word for it since it works in my favour anyway. 
There’s a lot of complaints about Bap and Illari at the moment due to the amount of value in their kits. Great healing, great damage, killer cooldowns, good ults. So I think it’s fair to say that at time of writing, those two at the very least are amazing. Ana’s not far off herself but people tend to ring-fence her.
I’ll agree that Ana doesn’t have amazing damage in terms of raw damage done but at the same time, let’s not play down how dang useful it is to have a support weapon, with no fall-off, that can deliver 70 damage over a short time, with the ability to become hitscan on zoom-in. Her gun certainly doesn’t feel like a weakness, and SidewaysGTS’ point seemed to be that Ana has too many strengths compared to her weaknesses.
She has been mostly meta her entire career. While not a top pick in all ranks, she was nearly always a strong choice with her only “Draw back” was lack of mobility. Something other supports suffer from as well.
88hps by primary fire AND having extra abilities to dump even more healing. Moira healing strong but even better with Moira orb. Bap healing strong but even better with shift. Brig decent AoE with massive radius but even more with armor packs. They want strong healing with situationally outstanding healing. Kiriko has strong baseline and great peel tool, LW as well.
Mercy, Lucio or Zen are shy when they see all of that lol
Exactly, Ana really set the ball rolling when it comes to puking out a ton of healing.
I don’t miss only having four supports to choose from, but I do wish they’d controlled themselves a bit with the healing outputs.
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That’s how powercreep is, new hero needs to be better than old ones or why bother learning them. Pretty much every released hero was broken except LW and they needed many nerfs after to stabilize. They even talked about they don’t want to release heroes weak anymore. I’m okay with that, but it just takes way too damn long to make meaningful nerfs.
And they are too stubborn to nerf things and instead they buff underdogs which further increase powercreep. Like with Soldier - he never really needed buffs but other A and S tier heroes overperform so he was competing with Ashe, Widow, Sojourn or 25m Cass for the spot.
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Yes, yes, and yes
Mainly from my point of view, the support heroes are relatively balanced with each other. There are no real throw picks anymore after LW got buffed etc.
“Amazing xyz” would mean to me that its almost unique to that hero. But that’s not really the case there.
And well, Anas strengths/powerlevel is often overblown here IMO, when compared to the rest of support heroes.
More nuanced discussion would be about dmg&heal throughput combined, how the strength of cooldowns works etc (which is even more subjective)
I was merely eluding to some bias in regards to the overall state of ana- but about this:
Yes, it is. At the time of her release it was the highest in the game by no small margin- again she was capable of healing a single target faster than the other 3 supports combined outside of like zenyattas ultimate.
Even now she has an on the trigger healing of over 90 a second, with bursts of 140 healing per second.
Her single target healing is still basically the best in the game. Illari had that momentarily but lost it with her nerfs.
Baptist and kiriko both do under 80 a second.
Can Baptiste and Moira heal multiple targets? Of course.
Can ana get a tank back from critical health to full faster than anyone else? Yes.
And she’s doing it with a straight firing projectile or hitscan rifle at her choosing.
Her healing is amazing.
There is nothing just “ok” about her damage.
Yes bap and illari also do amazing damage- that doesn’t mean ana doesn’t also do amazing.
Yes illari and kiriko can 2 tap (though this is far less common with kiriko), that still doesn’t mean ana also does amazing damage.
Her range and 70 damage single hits put big pressure on the enemy- and again due to the nature of her kit, she can and should be dealing this out constantly.
Her damage is amazing.
So basically every team fight, sometimes more than once a fight.
That’s not an insignificant amount of opportunities to disable someone for that long.
Neat. It’s still a very powerful ability. It is literally one of if not the strongest Cc base abilities in the game. Especially with in the context for how it’s actually used regularly.
You can sit here and talk about all these hypothetical downsides as much as you’d like my friend- here’s the thing however. We’re taking about ana. This isn’t a weak hero. This isn’t a niche hero who just has some uses.
Ana is literally the most picked hero in the game. Has been for years. From high ranks, to low ranks. This isn’t just because “well she’s just so fun!”. Players don’t just pick a hero “because omg it’s so fun :D”, most players pick what they pick because they feel it’s what they’re strongest with. If you did absolutely nothing to her mechanics but nerfed her numbers- players would stop picking her. There is no broad loyalty to the hero because of her playstyle. They pick her because they feel strong with her.
Ana is undeniably, consistently, the strongest overall hero in this game.
It’s not. It’d be Doomfist. A hero I have on multiple occasions in the past advocated for nerfs or changes to when he was too strong or too frustrating.
Have a good day 
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Seems more like a damage problem to me?
Im not sure why people go back to launch overwatch state. That was already 7 years ago. The game also didnt have role lock back then.
So you could have games with no healers in them or whatever, it was quite different times.
Never said she was. But, there are other heroes in support category who are also strong.
And unlike bap/kiriko/illari for example, she cant do both without downtime to one or another. Bap can weave heals between dmg, illari has pylon for that and Kiriko can weave as well.
All this is subjective. imo it’s not “amazing” relative to other supports in the game. it’s not absolutely weak either.
Figures
edit: I’ll add that i’m not opposed to support nerfs in general.
And also (more on topic), to me, anti nade is the least interesting part of Anas kit. I wouldn’t care if the anti part of her nade was removed altogether.
all in all, imo the game should reduce healing and damage across board to some extent.
because it proves you didnt need that much healing for the game to thrive.
the fact we have to go back 6-7 years to reach the last time overwatch was actually popular is sad but it proves the point that most people dont want to play an fps with this much healing output.
the only reason we even have role lock is because we had so much healing it overly enabled the tanks making the dps role useless.
but they never solved the original problem they just put a bandaid on it and hoped no one would notice. (which then contributed too double shield meta, and every bad meta we have had thus far in ow2)
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Well, the game was just released back then and was a completely new thing to everyone. Ana was after all released just about 2? months after release as the first post-release hero.
So did the game immediately drop in popularity after the first two months? (outside of what naturally happens to any game)
I’d say the game balance was all sorts of out of whack around launch time
Yes ofcourse. Those two months, half of which was spent without a designated competitive mode with no limits being the default. Golden age of balance
its kinda both but its mostly a healing problem.
the design at launch (ow1) was very different then now. in the old days you used cover 99.9999% of the time and would run to health packs if needed because you didnt have alot of healing in game. today you still use cover but you can rely on the healing and dmg mit abilities to survive alot longer so when something like anti gets thrown out…you are now out of position and ready to crumble.
something that people always misinterpret is that outside of certain heroes, the dmg numbers in game are lower or the same. plus we have 1 less person on the field so the dmg numbers are even lower then that. so the outgoing dmg today is similar to overwatch’s glory days, with only a handful of power crept heroes existing.
but since 2016 the amount of healing output in game kept rising. more and more high hps + defensive cd heroes added in
and this lead to burst heavy meta’s in ow2 and more power creep for the dmg numbers. for instance why was soldiers weapon changed in 2021? because his weapon when it forced you to burst fire couldnt kill people quick enough without perfect aim. so they made it a laser and overall buffed his potential dps at range. this is also why echo does so much dmg or why sojourn launched with a 260 railgun headshot.
if your standing out in the open with no healing you should die. but people got used too 100hps + immo field and such that all they do is complain about anti being too strong when its only strong because of the power of healing.
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overwatch was popular for almost 2 years.
no game stays at 100% forever (as you already said), but it was healthy and very popular (according to blizzards own numbers) long after launch.
it wasnt until moira+ brig had both been added that we saw fall offs in popularity. longer queue times, fewer people talking about the game and so on.
balance at launch wasnt perfect, but they did fix alot of it pretty fast. by 2017 they had solved most major problems
but they went on to create more with the mercy rework, moira later that year aswell with brig at the start of 2018.
the easiest way to tell if a game is popular is if you see the more “super” casual gamers talking about it and even playing it.
in 2016 and 2017 you had a bunch of youtubers and streamers that wernt “overwatch” streamers playing the game and promoting it.
youd see people irl that were wearing overwatch merch.
but by 2019 all of that was gone. overwatch became just a bubble filled with people like us and the outside world no longer cared bout it