Overwatch Playing Against Mei Guide

Overwatch Playing Against Mei Guide by aagpeng

Hello! I’m a pretty good Mei player and I would like to give some help for people who might be struggling against Mei now in the new update.

So Mei got a nice buff in the most recent update that made her ult far more consistent. However, her overall playstyle hasn’t changed that much and dealing with her now isn’t going to be as different or as difficult as some people might believe. So let’s get into it.

First of all, some things people can do to escape the ult on their own

• Zarya can save herself and a teammate
• Mercy can fly to someone outside of it
• Lucio’s amped up speed boost can get an entire team out
• Reaper can wraith out
• Pharah can fly out
• Widow can grapple
• Winston can jump
• Tracer can recall or blink out
• Genji can dash out
• D.Va can fly out
• Rein can charge out
• McCree can walk to the edge and roll out as long as he’s just a few steps away from the center
• Soldier can sprint out if he’s a few steps away from the center
• Junkrat can mine blast himself out
• Anyone can break the freeze effect by breaking line of sight with snowball

So 13 people can get out of their ult by doing something quite simple and practical.

Now down to the more specific things

1. Respect her space. Mei is built to control an area like all heroes classified in the defense category. She is made to control the area immediately surrounding her so if you see her, respect that area. If she’s playing aggressively, she’s going to try to impose that area onto you and force you to play in a zone where she has a strong advantage so always be wary of that and if she overextends, make sure it doesn’t go unpunished.
2. Know her role and how she fits into her team’s comp. Speaking from the standard 2/2/2 format, Mei typically replaces a tank since her damage is a bit lacking and inconsistent. So, if you see Mei, it’s usually safe to assume that she is replacing a tank. This means that the team running Mei is heavily dependent on Mei staying alive and getting the most out of her survivability because if she can’t get the most out of her survivability, that team essentially has a hero that isn’t sufficiently tanking or DPSing. So here’s how you take advantage of this situation. You want to make sure that at least one person is dedicated to keeping her shut down and don’t let up an inch on her. This puts the other tank they have under a lot more pressure to stay alive and their DPS is now more pressured to secure kills as they will have significantly less time to do it if you’re melting their tanks.
3. Countering Ice Block. With Mei’s new ult, you’re going to have to be really careful about crowding around that iceblock to kill her as she comes out. With the increased area and unlisted decreased start up time, being stuck in the center is going to be bad news for you. So here’s what you do differently. First of all, if you have no movement abilities, you’re going to want to step a bit back from that iceburg and shoot at her from a couple meters back. Basically you want to anticipate her immediately popping out and throwing her ult at her feet. So stay back but stay with your team. This is especially important if you play zarya and your self barrier is on CD. So if you see her jump into your team and go into iceblock, think of it as reaper using wraith to run right into your team. Anticipate an ult coming out. If you’re playing D.Va, one strategy can be to keep the matrix on the iceblock so if she comes out and screws up the drop cast* you can just eat it up and kill her.
4. Countering the ult. Here’s the biggest thing I can say. Mei has the potential to build her ult very fast. I think my fastest ult built time might be around 20 seconds and on average I think I can built it around once every 50 seconds, give or take. The point is that good Mei players will have their ult A LOT. So if you see a team is running Mei, always keep an ear out for that ult line. When you do hear the ult line, just scatter. Do not try to predict where it will be, just scatter. It’s going to catch you completely off if you spend too much time thinking about it. If you’re Zarya, use your self barrier to get out but look to see who needs the other barrier. Generally you want to give it to either a support or someone who doesn’t have a movement option like roadhog or McCree if he was too close to the center. You want to expend every option you can. If you’re a support role, you need to be especially wary of this. Lucio: amp up your speed boost and your team will most likely be able to safely escape. Mercy: fly to the first person you see who’s out or close to out and either run back to some safe area closer to your spawn or hide and wait to rez if they get a lot of people. Zenyatta: 90% of the time, you do not want to waste transcendence on countering this ult. A time where this rule wouldn’t apply would be in a situation like overtime where everyone is just throwing out ults or any other case where a team wipe would mean losing the entire round. The reason is that, people can still freeze in transcendence and when they’re frozen they’re still standing targets open for headshots, and are essentially just going to function as ult batteries for the entire enemy team. The biggest reason you don’t want to do this is simply just because of the fact that mei can build ult much faster than you can. So if you save everyone from one blizzard, what happens if a minute later mei has another ult up? You’re going to lose unless your other support uses theirs to counter the blizzard. Basically, if your team can’t escape blizzard, you need to have someone focus more on killing her and not blow support ults unless the situation absolutely demands it because if your team can’t escape the ult, they’re going to be wiped by it eventually. Better now when you can all just die, regroup and re push with your support ult to save from something like black hole instead of when it’s overtime and you’ve got nothing while the other team has all their ults charged.
5. Countering Mei. Reaper is Mei’s biggest counter right now. If mei is making your team struggle, whip him out and focus her down. Other counters are Zarya, Pharah, Junkrat, Ana, and Tracer (wouldn’t recommend using this one as a sole mei counter though). Don’t get tilted and just shoot her.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any more questions.

*drop cast is a technique where you can bypass D.Va’s defense matrix with your ult by putting it straight at your feet. Here is a video of it being done. This works with Zarya, Mei, and Tracer ults. Other uses can be Ana’s biotic grenade, McCree’s flashbang, and Junkrat’s Mine (but you have to blow it up immediately. Credits to ForceBoink for finding this.