Overwatch's Ana Nerf Isn't Enough to Fix the Meta

In Overwatch, the current trend is to send three tanks against your opponent. This works best when accompanied by an Ana, the sniping healer of the game. Her ability to heal from long range is crucial to the meta (the best recognized team composition). This is mostly because the hit boxes for tanks are huge compared to other players. Her healing shots don't have a chance to miss them, regardless of how far she is from the action. Another reason she's great for this is that she has a biotic grenade that doubles healing for a few seconds while shutting off all healing to opponents caught in the blast. So in an attempt to fix this, Blizzard sent down a nerf to the broken healer.

Ana
Biotic Grenade

• Effect duration has been reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds
• Healing boost on allies has been decreased by 50%

Developer Comments: The healing boost from Ana’s Biotic Grenade was providing too much healing, especially when used on targets with large health pools.

Unfortunately, they ended up nerfing the wrong thing. Right now, her biotic grenade only provides and extra 50% of healing during its effect duration. That's fine and is likely a nerf that she needed. However, that wasn't the aspect that made her so powerful. What makes Ana a total beast is that she can heal considerable health from a far distance. Tanks have huge hit boxes already, and Blizzard has made them larger when Ana is trying to heal them. And since the other team has to get past a wall of three tanks to get to her, she's guaranteed to stay safe.

It was a valiant effort by Blizzard to rein in the uncontrollable Tank Meta, but this move isn't enough. As long as Ana is able to give consistent, major healing from afar, that meta is going nowhere. That's especially true considering that Roadhog also got a significant buff in the same update.