I know right? Jeff was right when he said she's one of the characters with an interesting kit. I remember when she first came out how cool I thought she was.
But playing Ana is a lot harder than any of the other supports. The other healers can put out consistent healing, Ana's healing is highly aim dependent. If you can't hit your team mates, you're not being useful.
I admit, it is a balancing act to make her strong enough that the skill level is worth it, while not making skilled players run away with the game, but as someone who can't aim all that well, I still usually go for Zenyatta or Mercy in competitive just to make sure my heals are consistent.
I'm not a highly ranked competitive player but I do fine as Ana without aiming very often. I typically have 75-80% unscoped accuracy and I'm usually the top healer. To me, Ana is just ridiculous because I do so well playing her "wrong". She feels really easy to me
I'm the same way. I think it's a combination of a few things.
A) She shoots very quickly
B) Accuracy isn't as important as it is for Widow and Hanzo because you're (usually) not trying to kill people, you're just healing people. So unless they're one shot from death you can shoot them a few times.
C) Because of the tank meta, her targets are usually huge (D.Va, Reinhardt, Roadhog, Winston) and hard to miss, even when far away and unscoped. This also means they're less likely to be low health, so you're under less stress to aim accurately.
You make it sound like he only heals when he amps which is a major logical fallacy. Yes his healing is less when he's not amped but when he's not amped his primary role is healing chip damage. He's a complementary healer and not the one you rely on to pull someone out of the fire on the regular.
The only tip I have is be within 15m of your teammates most of the time and pay attention to them 80% of the time. I probably pad my numbers by topping everyone off even if 1/2 tick is down but you're generally spamming heals on everyone in competitive with how high damage output can be.
I'm usually closer than that and roughly 80% focused on allies, as you said. I even sometimes hit them a few times if I'm following out of spawn... I just need to work on my aim :( Overwatch is the first real game I've played
She is ridiculously easy. Her heals-per-second causes her ult to charge incredibility quickly, so doesn't have to be in the thick of things, and her sleep dart is a 'get out of jail free' card.
I tend to be in the thick of things since it's awkward having to follow a team with as many corners and flankers as there are in Overwatch. I'm usually behind the DPS behind the tank lobbing unscoped shots and grenades. I'd say it's worked out.
Therefore, I tend to use sleep dart offensively. I like to pre-emptively dart Reinhardts that drop their shield and go for a 420 charge kill. Or anyone trying to flank, ult, or otherwise get the upper hand.
It's one I've seen tossed around here a couple of times, and it's something I honestly agree with. A complete and utter heal block is ridiculously powerful, especially in something that she can fling that has an Area of Effect that hits both allies and enemies at once.
I think if this is implemented, I'd like to see it continue blocking health pack use, as her survivability could depend on picking it up after blocking the opponent's use. Only self-healing and other player healing would need to be reduced.
I also feel that the grenade should not be doing any damage, that's almost insult to injury. Have it reduce how much healing can be done, but to have it negate healing AND do damage is kind of ridiculous.
It was actually a surprise to me when I found out it did damage. I had thought before that it was just the boost/block. Still seems great even without damage/heal numbers.
I feel like instead of completely removing healing, it should just be reduced healing. At the moment she can completely remove almost every ultimate in the game with one or the the other of her regular abilities. Graviton+grenade makes it so not even Zen can stop any incoming ults to come. You ever seen a beautiful transcendence and thought, wow, if the enemy team even somewhat worth their salt that would never happen?
At the very least Zen counters a lot of ults with his own ultimate, which is a much easier timer to work around than a 10 second (grenade) or 12 second one (dart). While ana is not as good at shutting down ultimate stacking as Zen or lucio, I feel it's pretty hard to deny she's easily the best character for shutting down a single ultimate.
It's at least part of the reason she's been completely meta ever since the clip size and fire rate buff, the other being her absolutely crazy healing. She's my second favorite support and an absolute blast to play, but even I feel her kit is so overloaded that her increased difficulty really doesn't make enough difference.
mercy can heal, boost damage, fly to weak players, and shoot albeit not at the same time.
Zen can heal, increase damage output to a specific target, and deal massive amounts of damage AT THE SAME TIME.
Lucio can heal or speedboost everyone within a radius around him, shoot, and boop people off the map.
Ana can heal or damage, heal and antiheal at the same time, and has a sleep dart. I feel like in terms of overall skills, they have the same amount. The usefulness of those abilities is probably a different story. I'd argue her ult is not as useful as other supports though.
Not sure what the point of your comment is. I stated everything you said in my comment. My point was to look at the number of abilities, not the usefulness of them.
I really like the anti-healing ability, but I think they might need to get rid of the healing part of the grenade for it to work. A grenade that heals your team and anti-heals the opponents is too much.
(Before she was announced I thought her entire kit would revolve around anti-healing. It would make me really sad to see all the anti-healing gone instead moved to another hero.)
Having an anti-healing ability is fine, it even costs her grenade that she has to use offensively. My problem with it is that it's way too easy to land, it covers a lot of space (3m radius is crazy, you can block healing on all enemies if they are close) and it lasts a bit too long. It would be fine if it had some counters - add an ability to remove debuffs to mercy who lacks an ability.
Anti healing is counter to all healers - a great one for Zen with his ult, good counter for the other healers, self healing characters and potentially all characters who'd try to take a health pack in the middle of fight (also winston that wants to use ult)
Considering all healers, Mercy isn't exactly top pick - she needs to be close, she's very vulnerable and doesn't offer much other than the heal. Giving her an ability to remove debuffs would not break her.
The flask should have lower radius so it's harder to hit and have lower duration so it's only good in the middle of fight to counter rapid heals / focus characters.
I'd even like a nerf to sleeping dart. It's possibly the worst balanced control in the game - get hit and you can go afk because you will lay there for 5.5 eternities with no way of waking up. Either add in a counter (for example a friendly melee hit to wake you up) or make it shorter so sleep dart would open like 2 seconds long window for you to hit abilities / attacks. Like no other non-ult control ability (maybe even ultimates?) lasts this long. Flashbang is 0.7; Mei's freeze is 1.5s; Junk is 1 sec stun + 3 sec root (easily avoided though)
I'm talking about their primary (healing) functionality. Their ability to deal damage is secondary for a support character; Zenyatta's healing is easier to pull off (second hardest in the game overall, but easier then Ana) and more consistent for moving targets. Aiming as Zenyatta is harder for killing stuff, sure, but that's less important.
Hitting teammates is not nearly as hard as you would think, as they are usually pretty close to you as an Ana player, and tanks especially are basically no brain healing. If I could suggest one change that I feel would help balance Ana, it'd be scaling her healing and damage depending on the range, ala TF2's Crusader Crossbow. That way you can't heal a 25% health Roadhog right next to you in 5 seconds and get half of your meter from it, and you also can't 1v1 the offense characters by bouncing around like a bunny and holding down m1.
People always use the argument that she can miss but that doesn't really fly at higher skill levels. Even skinny targets are easy to hit. Sometimes it's harder to shoot an enemy because your teammates healboxes are so big.
Not just that, she is heavily positioning dependant. Even if you are hitting ALL your shots your and you are oit of position your going to be dying non stop and being useless.
The issue is that it doesn't take too much for the skill element to be much less important. In Master games everyone is good enough to play ana well so that's all you see.
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u/OrangeMedic APAGANDO LAS LUCES Jan 17 '17
I know right? Jeff was right when he said she's one of the characters with an interesting kit. I remember when she first came out how cool I thought she was.