OverwatchOverwatch Ana Guide and Overview

A long-time favorite of the Overwatch community, the sniper Support hero Ana is simple to play but difficult to master. Landing abilities is the biggest challenge facing any Ana player. Unlike many other Supports, Ana doesn’t have any free value or non-mechanically demanding utility. Ana is often a dive target for the enemy team since she lacks escape abilities, and her primary defense, Sleep Dart, has a long cooldown and can be difficult to land.

Due to her primary fire being used for both healing and damage, she can seamlessly switch between playing offense and defense. If a player can hit their shots, land Biotic Grenades, and Sleep Darts, Ana carries harder than any other Support. Nano Boost on its own is a great Ult to empower an ally to make a big play, and when combined with another Ult, it becomes your team's win condition.

With all long-range abilities, Ana typically wants to be positioned well behind the rest of her team. She assists her team from a safe distance, near cover, where it's difficult for the enemy to target her.

TLDR

Playing As

• Anti-nades are more impactful than healing nades. Even when you need to heal an ally, try to get an enemy with the splash damage of Biotic Nade.
• Scoping makes Ana an easy target. Only ADS when you need the extra precision to land shots and spend most of your time unscoped.
• Nano allies who are already in position to easily attack the enemy. If the enemy can stay away from your Nano’d ally, the ult gets completely wasted.

Playing Against

• Sleep Dart is Ana’s primary means of survival. If you see her shoot it or sleep an ally, that is your signal to go attack her.
• When playing Tank or any dive hero, you’ll need to play around anti-nades. Try to predict her timing and use your mitigation or evade ability to make sure you don’t get anti-healed.
• Don’t overcommit to trying to kill her Tank if she hasn’t used Nano in a while. After you use up your cooldowns trying to get the kill, she’ll Nano the Tank, and their counterattack will be too much for you to survive.

Strengths

Fight-winning abilities

Ana’s greatest strength lies in the potential power of Biotic Nade, Sleep Dart, and Nano Boost. Each of these abilities can single-handedly decide the outcome of a team fight. Sleeping an enemy during their ult can prevent a loss, landing the anti-heal on an aggressive tank stops them in their tracks, and a well-timed Nano can teamwipe. The difficulty of doing these things, however, is extremely high. Knowing when to use these abilities, then properly aiming and landing them, and on the right target are all difficult split-second decisions.

Balanced damage and healing

As opposed to most Supports, Ana provides her team with high amounts of damage and healing. Both Biotic Nade and Rifle can be used either defensively or offensively. Depending on what her team needs, she can focus on dealing damage or pumping her allies with healing.

Long Range support

Ana is the only true sniper Support. She possesses the sole ability to sit in the back of the map area while still providing max value. This also favors her in dive compositions because even though she lacks any mobility, she doesn’t need to physically follow an ally to enable them as they flank or dive the enemy squishies.

Weaknesses

Low survivability

Ana has very poor survivability. If she is isolated, she almost always loses 1v1 duels and has no way to deal with multiple threats simultaneously. Even if she sleeps an enemy flanker, she still struggles to kill them on her own upon waking up. Her best move is often to sleep, then run away.

High skill floor and ceiling

To get even basic value out of Ana, the player needs to be quite mechanically skilled. Genjis know better than any as they’ll jump around mashing “I need healing!” while accidentally dodging every healing shot from their Ana. Although Sleep Dart shuts down just about every ability in the game, its slow projectile speed and long cooldown make it difficult to use efficiently. Landing Anti-nades also often ends without any follow-up since your team only has 3 seconds of no healing to take advantage of.

No mobility

Ana's biggest weakness is her lack of mobility. OW has been steadily moving more and more towards a mobility meta game. There is no way for Ana to access high ground, escape from an enemy attack, or quickly reposition herself to follow up on her own team's aggression.

Primary Fire: Biotic Rifle

Tips for Biotic Rifle

• Healing or damage?
• • Ana will typically be her team's primary source of healing. Prioritize healing, and only deal damage for short windows where your allies aren’t in immediate danger of dying.
  • Both hipfire and ADS shots go through full HP allies to heal or damage anyone behind them.
• When to stay unscoped
• • When facing an enemy team with multiple flankers and no one on your team to peel for you, Ana should position closer up with her team.
  • Then, she doesn’t need to ADS and can better react to flank attempts. 
• When to ADS
• • Try to only ADS when necessary to land the shot. Ana’s strafe speed is significantly slower while scoped, and this makes her an easy target. You also take in a lot more information from the battlefield when unscoped. If you are close to your team or healing a large body hero like a Tank, it's usually better to remain unscoped. 
  • Switching between ADS and hip fire resists the rechamber animation between shots and makes Ana’s shots per second slower.
• Projectile size
• • The projectile hitbox sizes are affected by being unscoped, ADS, and whether an ally or enemy is targeted. 
  • ADS against enemies needs to be the most precise, as it has the smallest hitbox
  • Unscoped enemy and ally shots are the same medium-sized projectile
  • ADS for healing allies are the easiest shots to hit as the projectile is more than 3x the size of ADS damage shots.
• Damage ignores Armor
• • Ana is surprisingly good against enemies with armor health because the damage over time Biotic Rifle shots completely ignore armor's damage reduction.

[SHIFT]: Sleep Dart

Tips for Sleep Dart

• Sleeping flankers
• • Enemies attempting to dive or flank Ana typically are prepared for Sleep Dart. Generally, it's better to save Sleep Dart until the enemy has used their counter abilities (Genji Deflect, Winston bubble, etc.).
  • Ana’s melee animation is visually similar to Sleep Dart's start-up animation and can be used to bait out enemy abilities who are watching to react with their cooldown (ex, Deflect, D.M. Barrier, Mobility cooldown to evade, etc.) 
• Stop enemy approaches
• • Whether it's a Ram in Nemesis Form, A Ball swinging in, or a Sojourn sliding right at you, Sleep Dart is the perfect counter to protect yourself and your team. 
  • If you suspect the enemy will use their cooldowns or ultimates to take space from your team, save Sleep until they are pushing in.
• Use carefully
• • You may often see Ana randomly blasting off a Sleep Dart into a group of enemies, hoping for a random sleep. These are ineffective and low-value, even when they hit. It is better to save the 14-second cooldown. 
• Ping your sleeping enemies
• • Because her abilities have a huge impact within small windows of time, pinging enemies you’ve slept, alerts your team that you need assistance.

[E]: Biotic Grenade

Tips for Biotic Grenade

• Anti or heal
• • The most powerful use of Biotic Nade is securing elims through anti-healing.
  • Look for the situation where the enemy target can’t retreat if hit by an anti-nade to give your team higher odds of getting the KO.
• Self-sustain
• • Nade is Ana’s only source of self-healing outside of the universal passive. In life-or-death situations, it's always best to use Nade on yourself to live.
  • However, if you often have to use Nade for self-healing, it indicates a mistake in your positioning. 
  • Focus on using cover to minimize damage taken, and give your ally Support time to heal you.
• Splash damage
• • Take advantage of the AoE splash of Nade when aiming against shields, barriers, cover, and damage mitigation abilities. 
  • Genji Deflect has a small hitbox, for example, and you can still Anti him by throwing the Nade on the ground and hitting him with the splash damage. 

Ultimate: Nano Boost

Tips for Nano Boost

• Take inventory of both teams’ resources before you Nano
• • The main thing you want to consider when choosing who and when to Nano is what resources are available to both teams. If you Nano a Genji with no Dash and no ult, he will need to waste precious time running around after being Nano’d. 
  • If you nano a Hog ult when the enemy has Transcendence available, you’ve lost two ults for one enemy ult. 
• Nano targets
• • The best Nano targets are heroes with high amounts of burst damage who are already in an offensive position to engage the enemy.
  • Also, anytime you have an ally with an ult to combo Nano with, such as Dragon Blade or Tac Visor, try to sync up the timing so you use them together.

Minor Perks

Groggy

• Best against dive
• • Ana is always a dive priority target, so anything that helps her counter their attacks is huge for her viability. 
  • The extra damage and slow debuff is basically a guaranteed kill against any hero without an invincible escape tool.
• Shutdown enemy ults
• • Sleep is already one of the best ability counters to ults in Overwatch, but the added slow can give your team the extra space they need to avoid the enemy ult after they awake.
  • Ex: Ram ulting at your team, Ana Sleeps him, and by the time he wakes up, then slow walks, your team can get out of his AoE and end his ult early.

Speed Serum

• Best when aggressive Nano targets like Reinhardt who struggle to chase down retreating enemies.
• If you absolutely need to, you can Nano the nearest or easiest target just to give yourself the speed boost if you will die otherwise.

Major Perks

Biotic Bounce

• Win button
• • Although the damage and healing are reduced on the 2nd bounce, the anti and heal buffs are the same.
  • Potentially, Ana can hit the enemy frontline with the first bounce, then mid or back enemies with the second bounce. Anti-healing on a majority of the enemy team 
• Hitting a nade into a wall next to or behind a target is also a very effective means of hitting tricky angles.

Headhunter

• Just to flex
• • Refer to the “Tips for Biotic Rifle” section, and you’ll see ADS shots against enemies have a significantly decreased bullet size. This makes landing headshots with Ana quite difficult.
  • Additionally, the multiplier is only 1.5x, so the return isn’t that great.
  • Head hurtboxes are mostly hidden when looking at the backs of heroes, and you’ll essentially always be looking at the backs of your teammates. Consequently, critical hits on allies are also impractical.

Best Maps

• King’s Row
• • Ana does extremely well on both defense and offense on every point of King’s Row. The many walls throughout the map provide great natural cover for Ana to play around and stay safe while still assisting her team. On defense, try to take high-ground positions before team fights begin so you have more ways to respond to enemy attacks. 
• Junkertown
• • The combination of long sightlines and buildings makes for a great map to play Ana on. The open areas make it difficult for flankers to close the distance on Ana deep in the backline, so generally, this is a map where she can safely position well behind the rest of her team and focus on damage/healing output. 
• Blizzard World
• • Whether running a more brawly or dive team comp, Ana fits into both on Blizzard World. If you have a brawl tank holding the tight chokes or pressing W, stick nearby and hold the ground with them. If your team is mobility-oriented, take a strong position on the perimeter and provide long-range support.

Worst Maps

• New Junk City
• • High-mobility comps dominate New Junk City because of the map's large size. Ana struggles to keep up and often finds herself arriving after the team fight has already been lost. When your team already has control, she does okay, but even then the available positions don’t pair well with Ana’s kit. 
• Paraíso
• • Attacking on Paraíso with Ana feels like a near-impossible task. The defending high ground positions are extremely strong, and the chokes are tight and dangerous for Ana to walk through. Defense can work out okay for her since she can already position herself on high ground. Even then, she still has difficulty keeping up with the fight during rotations, and if she dies first or second, the point is lost since it will take her so long to get back into position. 
• Antarctic Peninsula
• • The three objectives on Antarctic Peninsula only offer Ana two realistic choices. One would be to take a passive position near the back of her team's side of the objective, where she can only get LoS on about 40% of the battle area. The other is to position aggressively forward with the team, where you can provide full support, but are going to be extremely exposed with no escape options.

The combination of high healing output and high impact abilities, but also being easy to eliminate, means Ana needs a team that can keep her alive. She can pair great with any team comp, but needs an ally dedicated to peeling for her when being focused. In dive comps, she’s often paired with a Brig to keep her alive against the dive. For poke and brawl comps, she’ll be best paired with Baptiste or Lucio to keep her alive.

Individual synergies with other heroes

Reinhardt

• Ana gives Reinhardt the perfect amount of burst healing for him to be able to position and swing aggressively. When Rein has Earth Shatter, landing an anti-nade on the stunned opponents pretty much guarantees the fight win. Nano Boost also gets great value when given to a Reinhardt, making his swings two-tap every sub 300hp hero! When facing a Rein mirror, having an Ana to sleep and anti-heal the enemy Rein makes for an easy “tank diff.”

Genji

• Nanoblade. The synergy of Ana and Genji lies entirely in the game-winning potential of combining their two ults. Nanoblade is one of the hardest ult combos to counter in all of Overwatch and can single-handedly carry games. Ana’s long-range healing also does well to keep Genji up when he is diving the enemy backline.

Brigitte

• As stated above, Brigitte’s job in any team comp with Ana is to keep Ana alive and safe against enemy dives. Brig can shut down enemy attacks against Ana so well that Ana is free to focus on supporting her team with healing, damage, and Biotic Nades that carry her team to victory.

When playing against Ana, no matter your role, you need to keep track of Sleep Dart and Biotic Nade cooldowns. Each is over 12 seconds and gives your team a large window of opportunity to exploit while she doesn’t have them.

When she doesn’t have either, you can safely aggress on her with almost zero risk of dying. The other thing you want to do as often as possible is play out of her LoS. Her lack of mobility means that she can’t follow allies or enemies that are rotating around the map. If you can get her allies to attack you out of her LoS you’ll be at a massive advantage.

Specific Hero Counters

Sigma

• Sigma’s shield and Kinetic Grasp absorb every single one of Ana’s abilities. The best move for Sigma against an Ana is usually to push his shield between the Ana and the rest of her team. Doing so forces her to reposition since her poke damage is too low to quickly break the shield. Ana has very few counterplay options against Sigma as he can predict when Sleep and Nade will be used and block their effects.

Sombra

• Sombra is one of the easiest heroes to consistently harass and eliminate Ana with. Stealth → Hack → Virus → shoot, wipes Ana and makes it very difficult to reactively Sleep Sombra.

Kiriko

• Protection Suzu instantly cleanses Ana’s best abilities: Sleep and Nade. Suzu even cleanses Ana’s primary fire damage over time and can save a hero just before they lose health. Kiriko also tends to win in 1v1 duels against Ana because she can get in, Suzu, then TP out after getting the kill.