Overwatch

I tried her for about 45 minutes. Initial impression of just 45mins on PTR with bad team comp, and playing against Master and Grandmasters....she is fun to play mechanically and her kit is nice in theory. I don't think it translate well in actual play, and came away very unimpressed with her.

I played some more PTR last night about 3 hours or so. I did QP, got Moira a few times, and was able to see her in action played on my team or against me.

I'll revise my initial reaction, she's pretty good, but not very easy to play. So hard to judge though since team are made of vastly different SR...from bronze to master. So some games were 1 sided in a way I've never seen before.

So this is my take on her abilities, having played her, played with her, and against her.

Fade: This is her movement ability, and it's good, and by good I mean great. It's on a 6 seconds cooldown which is pretty short. You become, invisible, invulnerable and move very fast for short time. This is NOT a teleport, you are actually in full control of her movement while fading, you can turn corners etc. The really interesting part, and what makes it so good is that there is absolutely no visual indication of which direction she fades toward. When Tracer blinks there is a small effect that lets you see which direction she blinking toward, allowing you to somewhat track her movement. This doesn't happen with Moira's Fade ability, making it very easy to lose track of her.

Biotic Orbs: This is her "E" ability, it's on 10 seconds cooldown I think. She can throw 2 orbs, one that heals for 300, or one that deals 200 damage. The orbs duration is 10 seconds, or until they have done their healing or damage. The orbs move very fast until they start healing or damaging someone, at that point they slow down to about a hero movement speed, might be slightly slower or faster I don't have hard numbers but felt like character regular movement speed. The orbs also bounce off everything, no matter how small which makes them very tricky to use. They are very useful in any enclosed area, corridors, etc...where they can bounce and remain within a small confined area. They can also go through shields. I think that proper usage of the orbs is what will differentiate between good and great Moira players. You main heal from Biotic grasp is on a resource meter, so good usage of the healing to complement it will be crucial for Moira's sustain healing capability. One more thing about the orb, when you press "E" you're presented with the option to press right or left click to select which orb you want to use, but if you're already healing or damaging with right and left click, it will automatically cast the appropriate orb. So if you're healing with left click and press "E", an healing will be used without having to chose.


Biotic Grasp: Her main ability, Left Click heals in a cone similar to Mei's Left Click. The HPS is similar to Ana, but is an AOE cone, not very big but you can heal a few people at a time, it is a significant heal...but it comes at a cost. It has a resource meter, that depletes fairly fast. It refills extremely slowly over time, you use the Right Click damage ability to refill it and it does so fairly quickly. It's not a lock on ability so you need to target and somewhat lead a moving target to heal them properly. It is a very good heal, used in conjunction with the healing orb, it might be some of the best burst heal in the game(Not including ultimates, especially if you're healing 2-3+ people at once. Her Right Click ability is a deceptively long range beam similar to Symmetra, without the autolock, it has a little bit of autolock, but not much you need to actually target it. It does damage kinda low damage, dev mentioned similar to Winston's Tesla Canon. It also heals you a little, and more importantly refills your healing resource. That means Moira needs to be involved in fights and do regular damage to be heal.

Coalescence: Her ultimate ability, a somewhat narrow beam of energy with very long range that heals allies and damage enemies. It goes through shields also like her orb. It is more of a heal than damage, I don't have numbers but the damage is not that big. The heal is pretty good though. Your group gets caught in a Graviton from Zarya...Fade out of it, throw a healing orb in the group and Coalescence and they might just survive it, also forces the enemy to move out of the way.

That's it for abilities, so how does she play. Well for one thing she’s a lot of fun.

She’s not easy, her orbs are hard to control, the management of her healing ressource is an added complexity not present in Overwatch. She needs to do damage to be able to sustain her healing, so she needs to be in the fight. I think she will be hard to play in unorganized group that split all over the place. I think she will be at her best on KotH, and CP maps which usually keep the group together in a fairly enclose area.

If she’s somewhere where she can use her orbs well, she can fairly easily kill most flankers or escape. Out in the open she’s easy to kill, I hooked her more than any other healer with Roadhog because of her need to be involved in a fight. Her right click has a really long range, and can deal with Pharah in maps where she has to fly low.

She’s probably going to appeal to players who like Zenyetta, even though she’s really different and has different strength and weaknesses. I think in the end the biggest appeal she has aside from being an evil healer is the fact that she is probably one of the hardest healer to dive, or kill solo by flankers. In an enclosed area, with her damage orb and her life leech right click she melts low hp hero.

Her impact on the meta will most likely be more dependent on the Mercy nerf than anything else.