Ana has the same base HP as Malfurion and Stukov but cannot heal herself outside of her grenade ability. Her effective range is significantly higher than any other healer due though to her long AA range and the long range of her abilities.

Shrike is Ana’s passive, and applies a 5 second damage-over-time effect that stacks and refreshes its duration with every application. Shrike deals 4 damage instantly then ticks every 0.5 seconds for 5 seconds, which is a total of 11 ticks for 44 damage. At max stacks, Shrike does 20 damage per tick and 220 additional damage over the full duration.

If Ana is allowed to stand still and attack a target, she will fully stack her passive in 3 seconds and deal 150 physical damage and 100 spell damage—about 83.3 DPS. On a fully stacked target, Ana deals 93.3 DPS with 57% spell damage. As Ana spreads her attacks, spends more time moving, or uses other damaging abilities, the percentage of her damage that is magical increases.

The most important takeaway is Shrike ticks instantly. Attacking will never “skip” a tick and will always add more damage. This instant tick adds 13% more damage on the first stack and 67% more damage to attacks against enemies with 4 or 5 stacks. Overall, Ana’s trait makes her DPS moderately higher than other healers, and it’s quite consistent due to her longer attack range.

Healing Dart is Ana’s primary healing spell. Healing Dart, when perfectly aimed, provides 125 HPS at 7.5 mana per second. This is better than the median level of sustained healing and health to mana ratio in the game, but due to the low cooldown of Healing Dart, Ana will go through her mana substantially faster. The mana consumption figures here do not take into account spells other than each healer’s primary healing spell.

As a skillshot, Healing Dart has the unusual honor of not having any intro cast time. This means that as soon as Ana confirms the ability, the dart fires. Instead of the usual 1/8th second intro cast time, the delay is loaded onto the outro cast time as 1/16th of a second.

The healing dart has 12.75 range, measured from the center of Ana’s model, and takes about ~1/4th of a second to go its maximum range. This means that longer range shots will need to slightly lead targets, as an unhindered hero can move as much as ~1.1 meters during this travel time. The dart is not particularly wide at 1 meter, but neither is it extremely narrow.

Biotic Grenade provies Ana with an additional source of area of effect healing. The grenade heals each ally in the area for 175 and gives them +25% healing for 4 seconds. If used on enemies, it deals 60 damage and applies -100% healing for 2 seconds. The healing boost adds 62.5 health per healing dart, increasing the total to 312.5 HP.

Biotic Grenade is an interesting skillshot. The impact delay is based on how far Ana chooses to throw the grenade. The grenade starts out at a medium 21 m/s but has a noticeable deceleration of -7 m/s2, meaning it takes an entire 1.2 seconds for the skillshot to land at max range. For a target running directly away from Ana, the deceleration plus the cast time of 0.125 seconds reduces the effective range to ~9.3, as any target farther than that will outrun the grenade’s maximum range. This does not account for the damage radius of 2.25 which can slightly extend the max range.

Sleep Dart is Ana’s most powerful and hardest to land skillshot. If it hits, it disables the target for up to 3 seconds. This sleep cannot be broken by any pre-existing damage-over-time effects, but will automatically break if a new one such as Ana’s Shrike is applied. Sleep does NOT count as a stun or silence and cannot be removed by hero-specific Cleanses such as Tyrande's Celestial Attunement. The talent Cleanse will still lift the effects of sleep, though.

Landing the sleep dart itself is difficult. The dart has a 0.25 second cast time, which is double the default 0.125 second cast time. Even for a point blank cast, the 0.25 cast time allows for 1.1 meters of movement. On top of that, the projectile moves at a rather slow 24 meters per second. Combined, the cast time and travel speed reduce the effective range against a fleeing target to 8.5 meters. The width of Sleep Dart is the cherry on top—an incredibly narrow 0.5 meters.

Nanoboost is easily the most discussed part of Ana’s kit with much of the community theorizing about who the best Nanoboost targets are. My goal here is to provide an answer to this dilemma.

Nanoboost competes with Eye of Horus, which provides 2400 HP or deals 1400 damage over 8 shots. This base damage is sufficient to kill Jaina, Chromie, Probius, Li Ming, Falstad, Valla, Tracer, Murky, Abathur, or one of the Lost Vikings if Ana lands every shot and is equal to or greater in level. (See the spreadsheet for the exact breakdown). The healing output is even higher and enables Ana to significantly contribute to a fight on the other side of the map.

If Ana goes Grenade Build and picks up Air Strike, she can output a massive amount of healing and/or damage without being anywhere near a fight. However, Ana’s PvE is among the worst in the game, which means that the value of her being split from her team is almost none.

With that established, the initial goal should be at least to realistically add more than 1400 damage to a hero. The spellpower boost adds 30% more damage to a spell damage ultimate (except for Kel’thuzad due to his passive). The cooldown reduction drops ability cooldowns to 40% of their base, which translates to 150% more casts. This is multiplicative with the spellpower boosts, so Nanoboost increases the damage throughput of basic abilities by 225%. Thus, from basic abilities alone, the base damage output only needs to be 430.8 over 8 seconds, which is extremely achievable for almost every single hero.

Even on tanks and supports, Nanoboost has tremendous power. The CDR works well with CC effects and the spell power boost also increases healing and shielding. The relative power of Eye of Horus comes from the option between healing and damage dealing, the global range, and not relying on a teammate to properly use Nanoboost. Otherwise, Nanoboost seems to be a clear winner here.

Once Nanoboost has been selected, who is the best target? The choice of who to boost is a difficult one. Players have to decide whether to boost an allied mage’s damage, to add CC, or to massively increase the output of an allied support. However, the actual viability of picking a hero as a Nanoboost target is much more contingent on how well they fit into the composition. Since Ana cannot heal herself very well, we can probably assume this is probably a double support composition and that Nanoboost will work best on high damage targets.

Channeled abilities and spells with long cast times are less favorable because they do not properly benefit from the CDR. Kel’thuzad in particular suffers from the double whammy of long cast times and the effect of the spellpower being mitigated by his passive. However, Kel’thuzad is happy with the power of Sleep Dart to set up his combo.

Murky’s output with Slime build is actually incredible, but the murloc can simply be killed while he is mashing Q. Conversely, Nanoboosting a Muradin won’t add that much damage, but it will let him stun someone every 4 seconds, use Thunder Clap every 3.2 seconds, and jump every 4 seconds. The added damage from this will be fairly low, but it will provide an incredible amount of disruption that may be preferable for countering an enemy hypercarry like a Genji or Butcher.

If you do get into a situation where you want to boost a support, the results can also be incredible. For example, boosting a Medivh reduces the cooldown of Force of Will to 2 seconds and Arcane Rift to 0.8s (0.4 with Master’s Touch completed).

Detachable Box Magazine increases the max stacks of dose from 20 damage per tick to 30 damage (40 to 60 DPS), and increases the total damage from 5 stacks from 220 to 330. The active reload is worth 750 points of healing if used immediately, or worth 500 points of healing if not immediately used. This is because the first charge is a cooldown reset which must be utilized, while the other two charges are a genuine extra reserve of healing.

Grenade Calibration’s first reward adds 45 damage per allied or enemy hero hit with the first part. The second reward increases the heal radius from 2.25 to 4.5, and provides a 200% uptime increase on the 25% healing buff. This buff increases the uptime from 25% to 75%. Combined with Air Strike at 4, uptime is 100%. The added duration is enough to fit in 4 additional Healing Darts, which is a total of 250 additional healing.

Piercing Darts increases the range of Sleep Dart from 11.75m to 17.25m, increasing the range by 5.5m, and increases the range of Healing Dart from 12.75m to 18.75m, increasing the range by 6m.

Aim Down Sights increases Ana’s sight range from 12.65m to 24.65m, her basic attack range from 6.5m to 8.5m, and decreases her movespeed from ~4.4 m/s to ~3.5 m/s. This is automatically cancelled when Ana goes to mount so there’s no interaction of “slower mount speed but longer vision range”.

Air Strike adds an alternative casting option to Biotic Grenade, increasing the range from 15m to 45m but adding a static 4 second impact delay rather than the base projectile instant to ~1.2s delay of the regular cast. In addition, no matter how Biotic Grenade is cast, the cooldown is now 12 seconds instead of 16. This cooldown decrease is a “small” 25% drop is the threshold between getting a second cast off in a medium-length fight or not.

Overdose adds 88 damage over 5 seconds to Sleep Dart and Biotic Grenade, while heavily synergizing with other passive-based talents at later tiers. Furthermore, this talent heavily upgrades Ana’s waveclear by more than doubling the base damage of her Biotic Grenade.

Debilitating Dart fires a dart that travels about half as fast as Sleep Dart but is as narrow and has the same 0.25s cast time. Landing the dart rewards a 50% damage reduction for 4 seconds, which is a Shrink Ray without the move speed slow.

Mind-Numbing Agent reduces the target’s spell power by 15% per stack of Shrike for a total of 75% spellpower reduction at 5 stacks. Spell power reduction works on both spell damage and healing. Combined with Overdose at 4, simply throwing grenade at the enemy support will drop their healing output by 30% for 5 seconds.

Temporary Blindness adds another 2s of disable to Ana’s Sleep Dart. This allows for up to 5 seconds of AA disables, which hard counters attack-based heroes like Illidan and Butcher.

Purifying Darts adds a slow/root Cleanse to her Healing Dart and adds 50 healing when she does. This added healing is additive with the healing boosts at level 16.

Smelling Salts adds an anti-stun Cleanse to Healing Dart and provides 50 armor for 2 seconds when she does so. While this may look much worse than Uther’s Guardian of Ancient Kings since it only triggers on stuns rather than silences and roots, triggering off of Healing Dart is much stronger than waiting on Uther’s long cooldowns.

Speed Serum adds ~1.65 meters of movement to the targeted hero.

Sharpshooter, over the 10 shots it takes to fully stack, adds an average of 22.5% more healing per dart. That’s 56.25 healing per dart and takes 20 seconds to fully stack, in addition to not missing a single shot.

Concentrated Doses adds 25 healing to Healing Dart per stack of Doses. With Overdose at level 4, hitting 2 enemies with grenade instantly increases her healing by 40%.

Contact Healing adds 52.5 healing per enemy or ally hit by the grenade. This synergizes with the grenade healing radius from Grenade Calibration at level 1.

Ballistic Advantage adds a 2.5 radius splash centered on the target’s center to Eye of Horus. The splash heal is equal to the base heal, but the damage is slightly worse (175 primary target but 150 secondary).

Custom Optics improves the range upgrade from 8.5m to 10.5m, allowing her to outrange almost anyone. Only sieged Sgt. Hammer can outrange her with 11.55 range in base siege mode.

Dynamic Shooting gives up to +100% attack speed to Ana, reducing her attack period from 0.75 to 0.375 and increasing her attack speed from 1.33 to 2.66.

Nano Infusion adds 50% spell vamp to Nanoboosted targets, giving them 8 seconds of significant healing.

Somnolent Doses adds a 2 second sleep to Ana’s passive that does NOT synergize with Temporary Blindness at level 7. Using just basic attacks, it takes 3 seconds to apply this sleep. With Overdose at 4, you can combo Sleeping Dart, Grenade, and another auto to put an enemy to sleep for 5 straight seconds!