north harness
I've been playing Ana for a while but I just feel kind of stuck. I've been going on loss streaks and it's really affecting my morale and desire to play the game. Here's my last game in which I felt I did what I could, but lost anyway.
Replay code: 5XGGQ6
Battletag: AUsername
Heroes: Ana
Rank: Gold
Pc
native cloak
Hey, @north harness will you be available in the next few hours? I could talk it over with you in VC if you can, if not I'll just give a brief summary.
north harness
Unfortunately I won't be free to call
native cloak
Ok, I'll type out a few notes once I get through the replay. Judging from the first fight, you seem lost on what your priorities are as a Support.
There's a few things to unpack, but it's important to remember that your main priorities on Support are Keeping your team alive and enabling your team's killing potential by using your Sleep / Nade aggressively so your team can use it as an opportunity to be more aggressive.
Anti's mean no healing and burst damage for the enemy, but it also means they lose control of the space because they're now pressured (at risk of dying) because of it, so your tank can take space easier if you do so.
Same goes for sleeps, it puts an enemy out of the fight for 1.5s on tanks and 3s on DPS. Just getting a sleep is dangerous for the enemy, but if you're getting dove it's also your only escape option, so if you can hold onto sleep for situations like that, it's possible to solo squishies by yourself if need be.
Generally, you want to look for anti-nades as often as possible if your team isn't getting pressured hard (not taking much damage) and heal-nade your team vs higher pressure teams.
Posistioning is also key as any role but important for Supports in the sense that you'll want to be in places where your team can help you if they see you in trouble during fights, or in aggressive spots to pressure (set up for a kill or kill) the enemy team. You need to switch up between the two styles often depending on how a fight goes.
An easy way to get better at positioning is by paying attention to where your teammates are. It usually goes as follows:
Tank in Front
DPS on Sides/Middle
Supports in the Back
Anything past the tank is where the enemy is going to be and where you can easily be killed, but DPS will sometimes try to flank if possible. If that happens, you need to be near one of your dps or other support so that they can react and help you survive if that happens. The longer you can stay alive the more you can do.
Sorry for walls of text, but I think it's important to understand those concepts first, so that the rest of what I type out makes a bit more sense. (Might take a while though so forgive me for that.)
native cloak
First fight you start with healing the tank, but the minute your tank leaves your LOS (Line of sight) you need to start moving closer, reason why isn't just because of him moving further away, but because the enemy's position has moved in response to your tank.
So if your tank is playing on right side, the enemy is on the opposite side, which is where you were standing.
You don't get punished so that's good, you save your sombra and go for an anti and that's fine so far you have a moira so no problem. But you try to peek again after using your nade and try to pressure.
Problem is in the time you're doing this, your tank gets to Half HP and has to get closer to your and give up the space, making this fight more uncomfortable but maybe do-able.
At this point you need to start getting to a safer distance by backing up from your tank but still keeping them in your LOS to reduce the chank of dying, the aggressive nade is a 50/50 but after that you needed to disengage earlier. You stuck around and got a sleep on the soldier but died because you stayed in the same spot whereas your tank got to safety and left you behind.
The thing you might realize from reading this is how much the little things matter, because they start to add up. It's also what makes this game difficult to rank up in because even though you felt like you were having a lot of impact, in actuality you made it harder on yourself by allowing your tank to get low in the first place, because your tank getting low means the place you were in became a lot more dangerous and uncomfortable.
Besides keeping the sombra alive, the other things you did have little to no impact at all. To put in another perspective, this first fight took more than 45 seconds where you team got one kill at the start and still didn't win the fight off of it.
I'm analyzing this first fight deeply but again, it will give more background to why things are turning out the way they are.
(Might have to edit/fix a few things because i'm tired , sorry lol)
Second fight is kind of wacky not going to lie, most of this isn't your fault but a few nitpicks are the following:
You needed to nade aggressively and not accidently hit your dva here before the nano. This could have been huge for your D.Va even if he wasted your nano completely with a bomb, because now your flanking sombra and moira have a chance to get a kill or two and force abilities or ultimates out as a result.
After the dva bombs, your priority should be to keep d.va alive but you dps at the enemy instead and waste your chance at making the enemy have to give up space or potentially die from your re-meched dva.
The longer you can keep your team alive, the higher the odds of swinging the fight in your favor as a Support.
This death right after trying to help the Sombra is a hindsight 20/20 thing since you were in a bad spot and the enemy team walked over you. But you don't need to be here anyway since Sombra can always tp out, and even if she dies, you can still help your team out pushing the bot and have a chance at turning the fight around with them instead.
Occasionally plays like these are fine to do but I think it's only worth the risk if your team is the one with an advantage AND you have an escape plan.
5:15
This is a situation where you have two options with your abilities, instead of healing them from a distance which isn't enough for the damage Junker Queen has here for Dva to live through you could:
or
The Smarter of the two would be #2 because you can save your nano to swing the fight back if keeping her alive is not enough or if it's a lost fight like this one (JQ ult and Soldier Visor from behind) you can use it to help your team out in the next fight.
Resource Management is a key skill for climbing higher, but I won't go too deep into it here.
6:36
An improvement you can make her comes from looking at the kill-feed. Your Sombra killed two so you can afford to be more aggressive on this Junker Queen yourself since you have your moira with you to heal if needed.
The flank is not really necessary here since you have numbers advantage and it also put you in danger of getting killed by soldier if chose to fight earlier. (Watched his pov, he afk'd unsure what to do for the entirety of that fight.)
8:38
Up until this point I think you played reasonably well in this fight for the rank you're in, but as soon as D.Va got demeched and died, you needed to bail right after that.
Because with no tank, there's no space for you play safely in, so there's nothing stopping them from killing you here. But you stick around too long and get punished.
I could nitpick stuff before the de-mech and others could do so too, but really the most important thing here was this, because of what the enemy team gets from it now.
-They get Space and Map Control
-Your team's spawning at different times (Staggering)
-You're losing time to come back from this.
-They get Ult charge off of you.
I expect next fight will be tougher from this.
They actually won off that because of all the progress they made earlier, unfortunate but as you might have guessed, a lot of little things added up to that point and it made you lose this game.
Things i'd focus on are:
Everything else I think is lower priority for the moment, this should be enough to get you to Platinum.