Ana is an incredibly diverse support sniper who can dish out damage and healing with equal potency.
Blizzard has finally revealed the first new hero for Overwatch, and it’s a 60 year-old woman. I don’t know about you, but I love that, and I love the fact that they made her such an incredible badass. Ana Amari is actually Pharah’s mother, and she was one of the original founding members of Overwatch. She fought bravely on the front-lines well into her fifties until she was taken out by none other than the eight-legged booty-bandit herself: Widowmaker. After an intense period of recuperation, during which the world thought her dead, Ana is back and ready to protect the ones she loves.
Ana wields a scoped rifle that fires up to six darts per magazine. Those darts will either heal allies or damage enemies over time. She’s not an all-out sniper, as headshots don’t seem to offer any bonus damage and damage output is fairly average. It looks like it’ll take about four shots to take down a typical offensive-style enemy.
Ana also has some incredibly useful abilities. A sleep dart will send enemies to sleep for a maximum of six seconds, and can even interrupt ultimates (say goodnight, McCree). Her biotic grenade does some quick splash damage or splash healing to foes or friends respectively, and those affected will either be cut off from all healing effects, or have all healing effects boosted for a short time (again, respective to friends and foes).
Ana’s ultimate is called Nano Boost, and it’s pretty terrifying. You can see in the gameplay trailer that I’ll embed below that a Nano-Boosted Reinhardt absolutely tears through an enemy team in no time, one-shotting everyone with his hammer. I’m not sure if Nano Boost will stack with other buffs, like Mercy’s damage boost, but if it does then that’s going to cause some serious chaos. Can you imagine a double-boosted, faster-moving, defense-enhanced Pharah or Junkrat barreling into your objective in the closing seconds of a match?
We’ll be able to use Ana very soon – Blizzard promises. Whenever the patch goes live I’m sure everyone will be choosing Ana for a week or so, so just prepare yourself for that. In the meantime feast your eyes on this gameplay trailer and get hyped!
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