The 26th hero of Overwatch, Moira, is among one of the easiest for new players to the game to pick up and have an immediate impact. Belonging to the support class, Moira has one of the largest volumes of healing resources while also being able to deal considerable damage in certain circumstances. Furthermore, in the current meta of the game, Moira has become one of the most viable and versatile support picks thanks to her ability to prop up heroes with large health pools, in addition to being able to consistently deal damage through barriers, a feat that many supports cannot accomplish. The following sections will arm you with some basic knowledge about Moira and her abilities, allowing you to take advantage of her in your ranked games.

Strengths:

• High survivability
• Group healing
• Large volume of healing resources
• Multiple self-peeling abilities
• Fast charging ultimate

Weaknesses:

• Little to no utility value
• Short range healing
• Low impact ultimate
• Low mobility

Abilities:

Biotic Grasp (primary fire)

An interesting aspect of Moira’s main ability, Biotic Grasp, is its dual nature. It can both heal or damage, depending if you are using its primary or secondary fire. The primary fire (typically bound to your mouse’s left-click), heals your teammates, appearing as a cloud of gaseous biotic energy. It heals at a rate of 80 hp/second while you have the cloud trained on your target. However, once you stop actively healing your teammate, they will still gain 65 hp over the next four seconds.

In order to counteract this high amount of healing, Moira has only a limited amount of her healing resource, Biotic Energy. At full capacity, you have 100 Biotic Energy, but this entire pool can be drained in under ten seconds if you are healing nonstop. That being said, Biotic Energy will passively regenerate at a rate of 2.4/second. However, damaging enemies with your Biotic Grasp secondary fire will also regenerate Biotic Energy at a rate of 10/second.

A couple final notes about this ability. It does well at healing teammates that are clumped together because the healing penetrates through targets. Meaning, if your Roadhog is standing between you and your Symmetra that needs healing, you can shoot your healing beam through the Roadhog in order to hit your Symmetra. Finally, this ability cannot heal through enemy barriers, as most forms of healing are unable to do.

Biotic Grasp (secondary fire)

And here we have the aforementioned damaging side of Moira’s main ability. It manifests itself in a thin purple tendril shooting out from your right hand and deals 80 damage/second to enemies. However, in addition to dealing damage, this ability also regenerates your Biotic Energy and heals yourself at a rate of 30 hp/second. Although this might sound like a negligible amount of healing, it can be used to great effect when dueling enemy squishies. The dual self-healing and damaging nature of this ability makes it particularly obnoxious to duel against, especially at lower levels of competitive play where people do not have as good mechanical aim.

Biotic Orb

Just as Biotic Grasp can both heal and damage, so too can Biotic Orb depending on which orb you choose to launch. However, regardless of orb choice, this ability is a throwable projectile that floats in whatever direction you cast it and ricochets off of map terrain. What makes this ability different from most other projectiles is that it can go through barriers, making it particularly useful in the current double shield meta. However, Biotic Orbs can still be interacted with by other abilities like Defense Matrix, Kinetic Grasp and Deflect.

The ability is on a 10 second cooldown and each orb will remain active on the map for a maximum of 10 seconds, however, depleting the entire healing or damage pool of an orb will make it disappear sooner. For the damage orb, this pool will be approximately 200 points while the healing orb is 300. In other words, the orb will last for 10 seconds unless you deal/heal 200/300 points of health first, in which case the orb will then disappear after that number is depleted.

A final note, unlike Biotic Grasp, this ability does not affect your Biotic Energy resource in any way. Healing or damaging with Biotic Orb neither replenishes nor depletes your biotic energy.

Fade

Fade is Moira’s only true escape tool or movement augmenting ability. This makes you invisible and invulnerable to the enemy team for a little less than a second while also granting you a burst of movement speed. In addition, while in the Fade animation, you may not be healed by your teammates.

Although on a relatively short six-second cooldown, managing Fade in the mid-fight phase is incredibly important because a Moira without Fade makes for an easy target to focus down. Considering the many other abilities you have to self-peel, Fade should most typically be used in the mid-fight as a last resort play to reposition yourself away from mortal danger.

Coalescence

Moira’s ultimate is among the more unique in the support class because of it being able to heal teammates, damage enemies and heal yourself. Manifesting itself in a long beam shooting straight out in front of you, Coalescence heals 120/second, damages 70/second, and heals self at 50/second for eight seconds.

This is typically among one of the fastest charging ultimates in a game of Overwatch due to the high amount of healing Moira can output in a short time span. That being said, Coalescence can viably be used in a multitude of situations to get good value. You could use it early in a team fight to help your team sustain an aggressive push by the enemy or unleash it in the middle of a fight to finish off low health enemies. These are just two of many ways that Coalescence can be used and learning the proper timings for this ultimate will ensure you maximize the value of picking this hero.

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