https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20759240215?page=4#post-74
We can try to improve this. During development of Genji, the deflect hitbox used to be pixel perfect. The end result made it super unpredictable to deflect anything. We had to give some buffer to even make the ability usable. In the meantime, if he's deflecting, don't shoot at him ;)
Jeff's response to someone asking about this
What I'm going to say is probably the less popular. I feel strongly against increasing Ana's damage for 2 main reasons.
Firstly, this is a blatant power/damage creep, again. When Ana was introduced and became meta with her really strong healing, Mercy was changed from 50HPS to 60HPS, just because they set this as the new benchmark as a main healer when originally 50HPS was perfectly fine and not even low. It felt like a feeble attempt to force Mercy into relevancy and understates the impact of the change. What they should have done at that time was address Ana instead of trying to creep Mercy's base heal.
Secondly, Ana's low usage has barely anything to do with her damage in the pro scene. IIRC Ana has almost always been <50% win rate on the ladder at GM level, not that it means much, and pub players will tend to favor increasing her damage as it feels more fun and gives her more control. But that doesn't mean it's a good thing or the right approach. Before the Mercy rework, Ana still saw valid usage depending on maps and team composition, with the core lack of usage being attributed to D.Va and Winston negating her heals, and dive in general. Changing her damage addresses neither of the two key reasons.
Bumping up her damage feels like it's trying to force her to compete with Mercy, creep her into Zenyatta's damage specialization, and make her feel more 'fun' to play with. I feel that there is no need to meddle with Ana's damage at this point in time, especially without first completing their iteration with Mercy. 60HPS Mercy should have never been a thing, though its impact was never really pronounced with her lack of usage in tournaments. I strongly believe that 70 damage Ana shouldn't be a thing either. There is no need for that change to ensure her viability. More likely than not we'll get to see healthy usage of Ana when Mercy is toned down, unless dive with the new D.Va is still too oppressive for Ana.
TL;DR: Fix Mercy first before touching Ana's damage. Going to 70 damage introduces more problems than it solves. If / when Mercy is finalized, then should we be looking at Ana. Otherwise, heck no, stop interfering with 2 heroes that compete for the same slot in the current state.
The only issue I see here is that unless rez becomes much much less powerful Mercy will in general always be an easier healer to use than Ana. Barriers, D.Va, dive (now that Lucio is less used) all make her much less appealing than the point and click queen of long ass fights.
What this slight bump does is give Ana an extra tool to possibly pressure that Mercy rez and hopefully lessen it's impact, because yes Mercy is the problem. But Mercy in her current form of having rez as an ability isn't going away afaik and even with this tweak justification for picking Ana will still be difficult to validate.
I'd love for you to elaborate on why Ana having 70 dmg per shot is an issue since it still won't be an effective method of taking down opponents unless they're already low imo, and it boosts her viability when try to fend off the divers that have relatively free reign, since
Res will probably be a lot less powerful, that's likely a given from Jeff's posts. I don't really care about her appeal or accessibility to the player base. What matters is how strong her kit is right now. Giving her more damage to pressure Res means nothing. You might as well say give Lucio more damage to do the same thing. It doesn't make any relation.
Triple bodyshotting is, really easy if the target does not LOS you in time, and effective at all ranges. Though granted, that's not achievable for the player base but balance should be top down anyways. Not to mention, 2 shot + nade is an even more achievable combo that people might end up complaining about anyways.
But to clarify, I'm not 100% against 70 damage Ana. It's more of the timing to try it out is really bad and heavily blurs whatever meaningful usage impact it might have when Mercy changes are still ongoing. I'd be more in favour of testing 70 damage after Mercy is finalized. As a player myself I would enjoy playing Ana with 70 damage more for sure. If Ana continues to see limited niche after Mercy rework finishes, there would be more validity in doing that and allows for a much clearer picture as to what the impact of changing the damage would be. Otherwise, it'd be the same situation with 60HPS Mercy where some people didn't even know it happened, and we never get to know the full extent of what 60HPS affects. We all just end up rolling with 60HPS without questioning it as much as it should have been.
If we can safely deem Ana as rightfully weaker than she should be when variables are reduced, that would be a much better timing to test things out. While it might seem counter intuitive to push out such changes slowly, it is a better approach in the event that they do decide that 70 damage isn't the approach they want to take and then they have to take additional time to figure out what they need to do all over again. There isn't a strong necessity to need to have multiple changes ongoing right now wrt Ana and Mercy. Better albeit slower approach to doing the changes one after the other, with the limiting factor being Mercy changes. And really I doubt Ana changes will push through without first changing Mercy again. So why confound things when it isn't that much slower to immediately test changing Ana after Mercy anyway?
Also woooo rambling a little (haha) at 2am hope things sound right.
The timing I agree that it muddles the waters when trying to quantify the effects of the Mercy nerf, but the community vastly disagrees with your opinion that slower iterations is better, despite the compound effects they can cause.
A good Ana should be able to triple tap a 200 HP target, but the skill level of the target will more than likely be high enough to compensate. As she is currently, diving her is objectively easier than it's ever been, while Lucio has never had issues peeling for himself so the argument that giving him the extra dmg would be equivalent and thus irrelevant is incorrect imo. In a vacuum this increases her survivability but wouldn't realistically be enough to justify picking her over Mercy.
In the end I don't know what the rez changes will be but I'm making the blind assumption that the Ana change will have little to no impact in regards to Mercy unless she gets nerfed so hard that she becomes irrelevant. I think it just adds an option if you can take advantage of it, because it will still be more difficult to get value out of the sniper than the point and clicker.
the problem is they can't touch mercy because money. Which I disagree with but understand. It's a very valuable hero for Blizzard and so the only way they can address Mercy is to have other heroes creep into her space.
The ultimate fix for mercy is to keep or lower her skill floor and rework her so she works for idiots and then introduce dramatic new mechanics to raise her skill ceiling to where Ana's is. I don't think this has really been discussed at all.
It'd be interesting to see if they could lower the effectiveness of her primary weapon or something like lower the HPS and then give her alternate weapon new abilities that might act like Ana's in a way. Have the primary weapon be significantly reduced in power but its incredibly easy or effective for like topping off targets between fights and then the pistol (or maybe something new) does Ana level healing or whatever and therefor you're raising her skill ceiling. She would need a SIGNIFICANT redesign for this to be even remotely balanced but I think that's ultimately the best choice for her. As is, they can't weaken her without upsetting people but she can't be stronger because she is just too easy...
I'm thinking Blizzard is hitting a brick wall when it comes to finding a good balanced kit for Mercy, which is why they're pushing changes to Ana, although they're very welcome in my eyes if it makes her more playable.
As a tank main (most of which is Winston), Mercy heals are my bane, literally frustrating at times when there's no follow up damage. Ana's heals are counterable with bubbles or anti nades of your own for example.
Plus Ana has an infinitely higher skill floor and ceiling than Mercy ever will, ergo she's more challenging (=fun for me) and more satisfying to pull off. Plus better entertainment value when watching pro players come up with amazing clutch plays.
yeah, I've been trying to push the idea that Mercy as a character is flawed. She's just out of place in the game. Every other character, even the easy ones, promote improving mechanics but Mercy just doesn't.
For example, besides Mercy (and Symmetra but she doesn't count), probably the lowest skill ceilings in the game are Lucio, Winston, Rein, and Reaper. Notably, all of them have much HIGHER skill ceilings than Mercy as well though. More importantly, each teaches you a lot of skills that will translate well into other heroes. They each teach you aggression, aim, positioning and timing. The tanks and Lucio teach you shot calling and leading your team. All of those skills are super valuable for other heroes as well. What does Mercy teach it's players that's valuable for other heroes? Even her positioning is just following someone else for the most part which is useless for all the other heroes. She is the ultimate 1 trick in that it's almost impossible to slide into another role with her skill set.
I completely agree with your last part about Mercy. Not totally about the rest.
I think the heroes you named have low skill floor, as in they don't need to do a lot to make them work in most tiers (hold shield, amp up on weak allies, leaping on the backline are not very hard concepts). Lucio especially is top 3 in skill ceiling imo, so many ways you can win fights with good understanding of the hero.
The tanks you mentioned don't require much mechanical skill, but cooldown management, timing and decision making are not something anyone can pull off, moreso when there are so many ways to individually counter them.
I agree with you on Reaper though, one of the easiest heroes as well.
this change on ana could be quiet impactful.
i dont know why u guys talk about being able to 3 shot some1 could be big (not many opportunities for that?!). the biggest point of this change would be that you can 2-tap 200 hps if they are anti healed.
cant count the times i hit a genji, naded him and hit him again but he dashed away 20 hp.
make her nade do slightly more dmg aswell (lift it up to 70 id say) and i would be pretty happy i guess :)
With the increased weapon damage she now has 70x2 + 60 = 200 dmg. She doesn't need more dmg on her nade imo. The anti heal is the main focus of the ability anyways, and three taping a 200 HP hero is very doable if they can't get out of your LOS fast enough and even though the skill required scales with the skill of your enemy it's still relatively easy to achieve.
Ana is the reason why I got into OW, when I first started playing the game I didn't really enjoy playing anybody in the game except for her. It kept me around long enough to fall in love with Lucio and start messing around with Winston and Rein.
So for that reason I can only be greedy and gobble up any buff Blizzard throw at us! I kinda get how the Junkrat mains all feel now. Fingers crossed it makes it to the live patch.
I really enjoyed reading the above thread of comments, I'd probably agree with the no buff til Mercy is fixed side of things but unfortunately I'm too blinded by love so GIVE ME THAT DAMAGE!
The official patch notes are out for the PTR. Mercy's rez now has a 1.75 cast time, up from being instant. The cast time is removed (back to instant cast) when she's in Valk form.
What I think this will mean:
Dying while over extended will most likely be costly since she can't swoop in and rez you as easily. If she does pull off the rez though her GA will pretty much be off CD so her chances of getting away remain if you haven't been able to kill her while she was stuck to the body.
Getting picks into the enemy team still won't mean much if the target was close to the group. So she'll probably remain a mandatory pick on defense and will really promote a more defensive style since offensive mistakes will be more costly.
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