Overwatch Tips: How to Counter Mei

If you’ve been playing the Overwatch Beta these past few days, you’ve undoubtedly come across hordes of Mei. While an entire team playing as a single character isn’t usually the best course of action in a game like Overwatch, this instance has a particularly good reason. Mei is very powerful, and can stop even the biggest heroes dead in their tracks.

Her Endothermic Blaster can stop even fast characters immediately, and does enough damage to guarantee a kill, making her OP in the right player’s hands. On top of her insane offensive capabilities, her defensive skills are not to be trifled with. She can self heal while making herself completely invulnerable, block entire paths with huge walls of ice, and even send out a Blizzard drone.

She’s especially useful at close to mid-range, whether it be against a single hero or group of enemies, thanks to her move-set. This makes her a nightmare when trying to lock objectives down and score a victory.

Whether Blizzard gave her more attention due to the name of their company is unknown, but one thing that is known is that she’s a pain to play against. Thankfully, there are a few pieces of information that you can use to your advantage. 

Countering Mei

Range

While Mei may be exceptionally powerful, she has one major crack in her offense: Range. It’s pretty easy to stay out of her beam’s reach, allowing you to plug away at her from a safe distance once you locate her. She can still hit you with her alternate attack which has some good range on it, but dealing with that is much more manageable than getting frozen and killed. So stay out of her face if you can. If you do run into her head on, back up, shoot, and put some distance between you two.

Debuffs

Now that you know how to get around her ice blast, dealing with her impeccable defense is the next order of business. Your best bet is to burn her fast. There are a few heroes who are especially useful at this:

• Torb – Torb’s Turret is a good way to keep steady fire on Mei and serves as a defensive structure for you as well. Mei must deal with the turret if she wants to kill you allowing you to plug away at her. You can armor up if she gets to close while still wearing her down. She can’t defend herself and kill you at the same time.
• Zenyatta – The Orb of Discord amplifies the amount of damage done to Mei as long as you have eyes on her. This makes her easy pickings as you spam your combo fire.
• McCree – McCree’s fan fire is surprisingly useful against Mei. Use your combat Roll to get to her side, Flashbang her to stun her for a few seconds, and let your Peacekeeper rip right through her. She won’t have a chance to heal or put up a wall, and you get to walk away without becoming an ice block.

Fight Ice with Ice

The last counter is to just to be her. Mei does very well against Mei. It pretty much comes down to who saw her first in this case, so be on the lookout.