before I start, don’t get me wrong. Ana is my favorite hero to play in the game.
I see people say she’s overpowered and ruined the heal ceiling, and I also recognize how strong she is with her incredible ranged healing, amazing stun, and anti-heal/heavy-heal.
but why does she exist in the first place? Were the devs unhappy with the amount of healing the current roster of healers could do? It seems rather heavy handed of them to just up and add a healer with actually insane levels of healing into the game for no reason.
Cause she’s a cool concept. But yeah I definitely agree that ANA is what started ruining the game, literally her inclusion said “We can have higher level supports, but then we have to give them more healing and more utility.”
Not every role needed to have the same skill expression as DPS if you ask me…
The game had 3 healing supports and 4 supports overall at the time. The devs probably wanted to add a support that would entice more dps loving players to the role and gave her all her little bonuses to even out the idea that someone with a sniper would be hard to heal with.
She and probably Sombra were kinda just launch heroes they didn’t have time to finish, being released only 2 months after the game launched (you do have to keep in mind how bare bones launch OW was. They hadn’t yet figured out the ranking system or the competitive ruleset, you had only 4 buttons on the main menu, etc.). She’s probably in the “this would be cool to do, we’ll see how it shakes out later” category of hero than the “dive OP, let’s fix it” meta changing category.
In 2016, everyone played sniper, and nobody healed. She was a good way to trick people like me into healing. This is just a facetious post, by the way, no intention of being inappropriate towards anyone by explaining why Ana was made. Please don’t remove.
Ana is anyway okay, she is like one of the most liked support out there
At the risk of dragging off topic, we should instead be asking why does Moira exist? She has been eclipsed by Baptiste and her niche has been reduced to that she is just more survivable
she made more sense back at overwatch launch. There were only three healers and the initial numbers make sense from a “she heals more but unlike all other healers she can miss”. She was overtuned and they did nerf her (nade used to give double healing), but then they decided to buff mercy to compete when the problem was emrcy’s kit and not her actual hps
You do know that Ana has been in the game for over five years now? Why are you making it sound like they just added her by that line “up and add a healer”?
Characters should be improved, not brought down to other bad characters.
I think Ana just fits the niche of skilled support healer. Mercy is your intro and very accessible hero.
Ana is your hero that is modeled off the sniper which in traditional FPS games has always been seen as a hard character to play compared to the run-n-gun spray-pray methods of SMGs, LMGs, and ARs.
She has a very strong single target healing that needed to be stronger than Mercy, but under the expectation the average thinned out to be around the same as Mercy. Filling a unique gap of being able to heal from safety in the back.
Why they went with nano boost, biotic grenade, and sleep dart? No idea. Probably just to fill out the bio-healing tech I think Mercy developed.
To be fair, if there was to be any healbot support, I’d rather use ana any time of the day. Being a healbot with other supports like moira/bap are more mundane and feels like a job. With ana, it feels like less of a burden to healbot because you’re in a way still shooting and shooting in fun. Except you’re shooting teammates instead of opponents.
I agree. You can do some cool nade throws from long-distrance if you know the setup/spots. Something you can’t really do with other supports.
Try playing bap, that decision for him is ana on steroids. Since with bap, you have damage fall-off so you’re kind of forced to aim for the head to get any value out of your gun. Bap is probably the hardest DPS hero I’ve ever used. I know he’s not a DPS hero but he requires more skill than majority of DPS heroes imo.
Bap was also considered a throw pick as well in lauch (or so I’ve heard). He’s only viable now because of the buffs. But some of the buffs made him a bit too strong so those got reverted or nerfed. I think he’s in a good spot now other than his Immortality Field. Which I’m not saying is OP but I can see the reason for the complaints. His high AOE healing compaints, I can also somewhat understand. But everything else people are complaining about him like his damage and mobility are just salty excuses for losing to him in a duel.
Same reason they added Bap and Moth!Mercy and Brig and Sigma. They don’t know how to make a basic, steamlined support or tank kit look appealing, so they stack on the APM, but they have to make those overloaded abilities look impactful so they give them high power as well.
It just kind of blows my mind that, in a game where existing support heroes had maybe one utility–two if they sacrificed both high heals and high damage–they decided to add a hero with one fire-and-forget ability that has two utilities plus damage plus heals on one easy-to-land ability, plus another strong cc utility. And on top of that give her strong heals and strong damage. Like obviously she’s fun to play with a completely overloaded kit.
Ana being a ranged main healer was a natural progression. There weren’t any ranged healers before she was introduced. Also she was considered awful when first introduced, then as people got better at her, she became OP and had to be nerfed multiple times. She is now one of the most balanced heroes in the game.
It seems rather heavy handed of them to just up and add a healer with actually insane levels of healing into the game for no reason.
but enough about Moira and Baptiste…
They wanted a support that appealed to a DPS players. There was Zen but during Ana’s development he was 1) Trash 2) Covered another niche; high damage low heals, while Ana is the opposite.
The other options at the time were Lucio and Mercy, both of whom have very little appeal to people who enjoy shooting in their shooter game.
Ana’s heals aren’t even that insane outside of hard pocketing a bionaded ally tank. Keep in mind she’s the only support even somewhat likely to miss her heals which is why she scales so well with rank. This is the mythical “DEVS BALANCE FOR THE 99% PLS” the forums always begs for; if they nerfed her heals, she’d be mediocre at high ranks since she’d not be worth the effort over Bap and Mercy, and bad at mid ranks.
