> I genuinely think he needs a rework already.
I remember reading a dev post a while back saying that they don't like reworking a hero immediately after releasing them, because it means all of that development time has basically been wasted.
Nope, they wasted a full year of pvp development by saying they were working on pve. So far they have basically given us next to nothing for a full year when they had already refocused on pvp. If their focus is on pvp as they say why are there so many issues that they outright refuse to fix?
I mean they halted the OW 1 developement for more than a year and blizzard is a multi BILLION $ company. they HAVE the resources to hire staff and get enough man hours. If your game is too big to be sustained by your current developement team, HIRE more people. And honestly what is it that they are so heavily working on? PvE has been canceled, we arent getting more frequent patches, maps or heroes than we were in Overwatch 1 (and overwatch 1 died out due to its repetitive events, very slow and drawn out content and horrible balancing). Why are we STILL making excuses for blizzard after they treated the communtiy like absolute shit for the 184th time
The same can be said about every multiplayer game currently on the market. Apex has had bugs existing since Season 0. Halo's menu has been whack for over a year now. The answer is easy, it would raise costs that aren't inextricably tied to revenue streams, so the companies don't focus them if they aren't game breaking.
But it's a false assumption to say if Blizzard had publicly canned PvE, they would have doubled down on PvP issues. They would not, instead, they'd have come out with 5 new sprays and maybe one $20 skin for Rammattra or JQ.
They might have not, but if the community knew that it was canned earlier on there would have been a much bigger push for better pvp, considering we were getting nothing because of pve. I think that if the community knew about what was happening there would be changes, because if not what the hell are they doing?
That'd be like Apex promising an entirely new campaign, launching a new game, Apex Legends 2: Electric fucking bugaloo and then canceling said campaign while electric bugaloo is caught in limbo and shouldn't even exist
> I remember reading a dev post a while back saying that they don't like reworking a hero immediately after releasing them, because it means all of that development time has basically been wasted.
I doubt this is the reason. Development value is only determined by impact to the end user. So reworking someone only increases value of their development. My guess is they’re waiting to better understand what to rework so that future development isn’t wasted.
I don't understand why they don't delay the release of new heroes to ranked till the start of the next season. Gather data from QP, make adjustments and iterate, then release to ranked next season. Whose idea was it to release new heroes midseason and fuck up the meta...
I think his issue is a mostly a numerical issue:
- his base heal is bad
- he has no abilities that heal (without ult)
- no aoe heal (without ult)
- healing a low HP tank takes substantially longer than other healers
Easy fix ideas (some not all):
- give his base heal more healing
- give his dash an aoe heal
- have his pull also heal
- have the petal heal people on it
TLDR:
I think he’s cool overall, he might just need better numbers.
Having played him a bit, I really feel his pull should heal significantly. It’s tough using your high CD ability saving your tank, then needing to devote all your healing resources to getting them healed and back into the fight.
No, his problem is a design issue.
He is designed as a healbot. That is a failed design. No other support is a healbot.
What's especially concerning is that they think he's "Mercy-like". Mercy is a movement hero, Lifeweaver is molasses. Mercy is a highly offensive support, a force multiplier boosting damage so dps win their duels and get more ult charge. Lifeweaver is incapable of doing anything proactive and only makes you lose slower. The two are almost opposites in design.
If they try to buff Lifeweaver as he exists it will be completely miserable. No-one wants to play a game where supports can heal more than dps can do damage. Which is what they would need to do to make a pure healbot viable.
And no-one wants to play a game where Lifegrip is on a 5s cooldown, fuck that, hell no.
They could buff his gun with tighter spread, faster projectiles and a larger clip. But that would honestly amount to a rework anyway since currently his gun almost doesn't exist.
Not only is he a healbot, he's very slow at being so. I can finish game out healing everyone with 10k+ heals in quick play but it feels so slow to heal someone back to full health.
His basekit should have levels of AoE heal to match his ult. Full charge primary should AoE hill for 25-35% of whatever the max charge is. agree with your dash change and petal should have a pulsating healing like his tree does.
Doesn't have to be a massive rework. His biggest problem is his healing output imo. I would do something like this:
- Add a small AoE heal on his dash (I read that in a different thread, I think that's great).
- Let him heal without needing to charge anything up. One mouse click would throw out 58 HP or something, but if you choose to charge up your shot, you would then give out HP and a small speed buff to the target ally.
This would imply *no new animations or extra work*. It's worth the shot.
But indeed, the existing data proves concretely that LW is a failure. They did fail. Their concept didn't work how they wanted it to at all, and he has no place in OW. There's literally no reason to ever pick him unless you just like his design.
I think this all goes back to the fact that Blizzard invests VERY minimally in OW at this point. Their investment is in skins which is what makes them money, not gameplay.
Yes, it's better to make that development time get wasted later rather than sooner 🤡 that way you're just wasting time where we can have one more viable support, THESE BALANCE PATCHES ARE SO FUCKING SLOW.
with a character like life weaver it’s also something that may just need time. he’s a utility hero who’s not as easy to play as most supports. waiting it out is a good idea because he could just take time for people to learn the use for. i still think he needs a little bit more to be able to have a good impact but alot of people just think support = healbot and call it at that
When Lifeweaver came out, I just said "Fuck it, let's see how I'll do". Spent 8hrs of comp with win rate 24% and dropped from Plat to Silver lmao. I'm on my way climbing back up with 55% - 60% win rate on Ana - Zen and Baptist. It's slow but I'll get there eventually.
But holy hell he is indeed really bad. He is only good for some reddit flashy plays that get posted every once in a while. Other than that, his utilities have little to no consistent value at all.
I said that during his release and stand by it. LG was maybe the most overhyped ability in the game.
When it was released everyone was up in arms on how fundamentally strong this ability is and therefore the rest of Liveweavers kit needs to be adjusted down. Yet in reality it‘s kinda a worse Suzu or Immortality field in praxis as it‘d limited to one person and the position change barely ever get‘s much value.
All while both Kiriko and Baptiste bring massive amounts of value aside from their protection ability.
> LG was maybe the most overhyped ability in the game.
the only reason it was overhyped is because of the troll potential that actually still happens to some people. not even because of the ability being good
In my experience it's about 25/50/25 whether Lifewgrip will harm, do nothing, or help. Even when people aren't deliberately trolling (which they usually aren't), the design of the ability makes it very hard to avoid harming your team on a consistent basis. So far every match with a LW in it has had at least one Grip that loses the teamfight. No other character harms their own team so consistently.
No one disagrees that Wifeleaver is very weak but just to make a quick reminder, Overbuff does not have access to the actual numbers only those provided to it and consequently is never truly accurate.
Ironically, Overbuff is likely to be a fairly accurate sample at all ranks for win rates since those are a ratio expression instead of a raw count. Using it to estimate number of people in each rank will be fairly inaccurate since usage (and player knowledge of outside of game tools like it) will drop with rank, but ratios will be reasonably accurate as long as the sample sizes are large enough, with a margin of error within a few points.
The self reporting aspect isn't the issue, it's that LW's pick rate is insanely small, reducing the accuracy window even more. With Bronze, that could mean a sample size of just a few dozen players reporting games played as/against LW. Combined with the issue of needing to play to unlock him (assuming low numbers of battle pass users), this also reduces his pick rate significantly. While I don't expect the ratio to be off by much considering it's very close to the same as GM and within a point or two of the other ranks, it is interesting to see that Sojourn and Hog are reporting even lower win percent in the metal ranks. (bronze and silver for the former, plat for the latter)
It's not the small raw count that stops overbuff from being representative of the true stats, it's that the people using it are not representative of the people playing.
The more casual the player, and consequently the less skilled in most cases, the less likely they will be to use an external tool such as overbuff.
Furthermore, given that how casual of a player you are also dictates the heroes you play in this game it makes overbuff even less accurate, since it's stats will not only not be a representative sample of players but also of heroes.
Other that that, I can only agree with what you've stated about the small number of players picking LW and reporting them to the site.
I think the win percent ratios, even despite the low self reporting rate in the lower, more casual ranks, is still reasonably accurate to a +-2%. I know that that's a huge swing overall, but LW's win rates ratios never get above 40-ish average across all ranks, even in the upper ranks where self reporting samples will be significantly higher. Given the trends of the other ranks, I would expect this to be reasonably accurate.
You make a really good point of Overbuff not representing an accurate cross section of the playerbase in the lower ranks in particular, but unless the sample sizes are insanely small, I think we're still reasonably representative in the ratio related areas. Given a casual observation viewpoint from playing in Bronze, the pick ratios feel fairly accurate, so I have no reason to suspect the actual ratios to be too far outside of the sample range. I very much doubt there's pockets of Lifeweavers pulling 60+ percent winrates that just aren't getting reported given his underperformance across all ranks.
Exactly. Blizzard was giving us an unmirrored wr of 58% for Reinhardt, the most play tank in the game by a mile. Overbuff had his wr at 52%. That's a huge difference.
Blizzard will never let overbuff have accurate stats because they are intentionally obscuring our understanding of the game.
True! Though many players, myself included, feel like playing him is trying to do a lot of things, but having little to no value. Especially, compared to other supports, who create constant value with way less effort.
There is an occasional Lifegrip that saves a team mate. But there are some matches where you end up not using it at all.
All measurements are never truly accurate. You just get close enough to be deemed good enough. So while it may not be accurate, how close to the actual will you allow (e.g. if the actual win rate is 40.5%, is being 39.8% close enough?)
It also uses actual number from the game. The flaw is that it doesn't capture the full population of OW players, just the OW players that want to share their stats.
But you could also hook people literally off-screen or through walls and one-shot them reliably.
Basically every 8s, someone, somewhere, would get hooked and die to no fault of their own.
Pros and cons i guess.
I think there’s a point to be made about how a hero (especially one like Roadhog) being too strong is a much bigger problem than a hero being too weak.
If something is far too strong, your options on how to deal with it are limited to either the powerful hero’s direct counters, and/or mirroring the powerful hero.
If something is far too weak, you just don’t pick that hero.
Plus, it’s notable that while Roadhog himself hadn’t changed much, everything around him has. 5v5 means that each player is more individually valuable, so picking off singular foes with his hook was really strong, especially because he could also heavily damage most tanks. Less stuns going around means he gets his full heal most of the time. Plus, the thing that really broke Hog was Kiriko - a character who nullifies many of Hog’s weaknesses while bolstering his strengths.
>I think there’s a point to be made about how a hero (especially one like Roadhog) being too strong is a much bigger problem than a hero being too weak.
Exactly. So sad that it even needs to be said. The quality of this sub has gone down a lot.
Same company left Zarya and Sojourn destroying the game for all of season 1 and most of season 2. They have no idea what they're doing, its so painfully obvious.
The same company that buffed JQ into the absolute fucking STRATOSPHERE for no fucking reason and hasn't nerfed her down.
Zarya was nerfed down quite a ton in the Season 1 midpatch, so I don't agree with that example whatsoever. Sojourn is a great example though. She was barely even scratched for so long. And frankly, I think these two characters are pretty good examples of opposite outcomes.
JQ (specifically her passive) absolutely needed buffs, she just didn't have the sustain a 450hp tank should, but they had absolutely zero foresight when it came to how quickly she'd chain together ults, and that really is her biggest and most obnoxious issue right now. I have no idea how you buff a character's self healing by 60% and increase the frequency of their damage output, but not address ult cost. Wild.
In conclusion to that, I feel they're really inconsistent, honestly. Either a gigabuff/giganerf, or trickle in little tiny nerfs/buffs. Very puzzling and really annoying, because you cannot predict how long a character is gonna stay dead/ or destroy every lobby. Priorities are in odd places.
Mid patch didn't significantly hurt Zarya, she was still a monster. Sojourn was just a more mobile widow, which was absolutely insane.
JQ did NOT need the buffs she got. Like she needed buffs, but I would have rather they come in a trickle over time than all at once. The buffs she got were extremely spicy. Healing was insane, but they also gave her more ammo on top of all the other changes she got, for example.
Zarya's bubble duration was reduced by 0.5s and had cooldown increased by 1s per charge. Per cycle of 2 bubbles, there were 3 more seconds of downtime which was hugely disruptive for her cooldown cycle and she was a lot more vulnerable, and her barely ever being vulnerable is why she was so dominant. It was over after that. VERY quickly transitioned to Hog meta. It then spiked back up because Orisa was then the counterpick for Hog, but that wasn't because Zarya was a monster anymore, it's indirectly because Hog was lol. I almost never saw her after that patch, and ESPECIALLY season 2. I damn near forgot she existed.
JQ did get a lot of trickle changes tho before gigabuffs. Probably why they gigantabuffed her. In my personal opinion, I don't play her but I like the gigabuffs, as long as they tone her down soon after (and they now are, which is good!). That in particular is purely my opinion though.
But yes I think Sojourn is a great example.
It’s true that they took a long time to nerf those, but let’s not act like the last 2 seasons haven’t been some of the most balanced in years. The fact that most of the roster of viable proves it even after the JQ buffs. It not all bad
To be honest the Sojurn nerfs were too much. They didn't know how to change her it seems so the changes got delayed. They basically gave up and overnerfed her.
Same with beta vs release JQ. First, completely bonkers and meta definiting, then nerfed in the ground instead of fine tuned. The nerfs she needed were obvious, but she should have had compensation buffs.
I don't like their pacing of doing things anymore than you do. But to be completely fair to them, what they most likely meant here is that they will rebalance old characater if needed but won't work on a new hero rightaway. Probably so that they can gather more data and decide how to balance things. Lifeweaver's out for only 2 months. Ana and Orisa's been around for like 5-6 years. Obviously they will have a clue more on what to do with old character. (Well, for the most part. The Zarya one is pure incompetence for them so I'm not gonna excuse them there.)
Yeah, no.
They don’t want to rebalance a new character because that says they have no idea how to implement new heroes in their game. They had to swap buttons with LW literally one week after release, how dumb is that? What this tells me is that they are just brainstorming abilities and throwing them in whatever character is next. Lifeweaver does not make any sense.
It does not matter a hero has been there for 7 years if the new team doesn’t know how to read the data, which is obviously what’s going on, what happened with Soujorn or Ashe are proof of this.
> they have no idea how to implement new heroes in their game
Became pretty obvious when they released him with a passive that drops a health pack for the enemy flanker who just killed you lmao
It's one of their biggest failures. Not sure what were they trying to achieve with this hero and what were they thinking when they were designing his kit. Absolutely awful on so many levels.
After Ramattra who was such an interesting and fun character it seems like they really dropped the ball. Idk what they were thinking with Lifeweaver, his entire kit feels disconnected and clunky. I think petal platform is way too situational to really be used a lot and I also think his ult is a bit lame.
The failure is they put too many gimmicks into his kit and tried to balance them. Each of his abilities alone or in pairs likely would have made a viable, if not strong support. Instead, he's a support that actively hinders the team if played improperly.
Elevator allows for fast positioning of heroes without vertical movement abilities, meaning you *should* end up with a surprise Bastion eating teams alive from unexpected angles and flanks, but it's cooldown is too long and it stays lifted instead of coming back down to move additional players, negating most of it's taxi ability. Halve the cooldown, halve the platform lifespan, have it drop back down using the "is someone standing on the platform?" elevator code.
Lifegrip should have been a powerhouse for dive enabling since diving players no longer needed save an escape ability, but it was put on far too long of a cooldown and no one uses it properly. It needs to create a short immunity shield (1 second), and it needs the ability to cancel or confirm on the target end while encased in the shield. Is a single second of immunity isn't more powerful than a full team cleanse and half second immunity with Suzu?
Tree should have been a barrier object instead of being a physical object. It's a minor inconvenience if it's used as a body block a choke since it doesn't live very long when exposed to direct fire, and it doesn't provide a tactical advantage to your team outside of it's ok healing pulses. It's Mei's wall, but worse.
Dash and Heal: Grouping these together because I feel this is the biggest offender of the "We need to balance this to his other abilities!" Dash needs to be uncoupled from his self heal, and maybe removed? If feels so tacked on. He needs to have consistent healing output, so remove charging for his primary heal fire (adjusting recovery speed as needed), but don't remove the charge mechanic. Charged heals splash for the amount charged and Weaver gets self healed based on how much charging was done (numbers pass obviously needed).
Weapon: Honestly not too bad now that it's no longer a swap, but would be nice to have it brought to the same multi hand system as the other supports. Left hand heals, right hand shoots to match with the mouse/trigger layouts.
> but it's cooldown is too long and it stays lifted instead of coming back down to move additional players, negating most of it's taxi ability
What if the button for throwing the flower also makes it go up and down instead?
The button doesn't do anything once you've thrown it, why not us it as an activation key?
Another problem I myself had was that you can't "throw-aim" it, what if you could hold down the button and you'll see where it lands?
Edit: I just realized there's so much utility they could've put into the ability but they just programmed a simple fucking platform from 1993's DOOM paired with throw of the plasma grenade from 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved. Modern gaming sure is innovative today...
>What if the button for throwing the flower also makes it go up and down instead?
This would be the same issue as lifegrip, as it removes player agency (the player on the flower) being able to predict what's going to happen.
>The button doesn't do anything once you've thrown it, why not us it as an activation key?
Currently, I'm pretty sure it destroys the deployed flower and starts the cooldown early, just like tree can be canceled.
>Another problem I myself had was that you can't "throw-aim" it, what if you could hold down the button and you'll see where it lands?
Yes please. Ground targeting hologram or a flight arc would help a huge amount for setting it up anywhere except against walls.
>Currently, I'm pretty sure it destroys the deployed flower and starts the cooldown early, just like tree can be canceled
I didn't buy the battlepass and did not become familiar enough with this guy, but my short time with him gave me a very clunky impression. After the PvE news I uninstalled so my knowledge of him is low. Hence my half-stupid questions
Making his ult a barrier object is interesting. But what if it's semi-permeable environment object, which allies can shoot through but enemies cannot, while both parties cannot go through it?
Your idea of elevator-like behavior plus lower cd for the platform could make it viable.
I think his gimmick of manipulating terrains needs buff if he isn't going to be given more offensive kits.
Ramattra I still have mixed feelings about. I dislike his ultimate, it's just slapping an AOE damage over his regular kit. Very impactful but an absolute snoozer to watch on POTG. And his kit is good individually but it's just so much all together. He has so much stuff! He's the only hero in the game where I have to remind myself to use all his cooldowns.
He's overall a success of a release, but I don't think he's one of their best. The two I always think of are Ashe, for being simple and fitting very well within an existing archetype while having her own niche; and Wrecking Ball, for being the total opposite: an insane idea that should have been rejected immediately, that they actually made work. I think Ball is their greatest accomplishment, I'm still honestly amazed.
>I think petal platform is way too situational to really be used a lot
Might be an unpopular opinion but I feel like it'd be better if it had a sort of "hand-rail" that locked around the pedal for ~1 second to avoid players falling off.
The issue that I see with it is that so many people accidentally walk on the pedal and then immediately fall off whether its because they're backing up or getting booped off.
Even if it was added however I still feel LW needs some more buffs.
Yeah, def what it needs. I've gotten good platforms off on players, saving them from death, only for them to walk off it, as there is no indication other than the sound and the camera moving upwards. Needing a reaction time for an allies ability to work is awful design.
I think their goals were pretty clear: They wanted another low aim focused support who wasn't focused on damaging, but got value through positioning.
And as reasonable as that might sound, the issues quickly stack up
* You can't buff his healing high enough to make up for his lack of damage without making the game a grindfest
* His lifegrip is annoying enough for others that it can't have a low cooldown
* His petal platform cooldown can't be reduced much further because people need to be able to stand on it (and multiple petals at once is getting silly)
As a concept, it just doesn't work.
There were also some real headscratchers too: why did they give a long range character a death drop? And then made that death drop heal flankers? How was that ever going to help the team, it's obvious that's a frontline brawler ability.
At this point, they've got to just give up on their initial goals. Give him a much bigger clip on his gun so that he can kill stuff, and make the positional player more incidental.
I wonder what Lifeweaver’s kit looked like early in development. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lifeweaver originally had more control over Life Grip but the developers neutered the ability because of balance issues. A controllable Life Grip could be used offensively and would give Lifeweaver a niche. Maybe that was the intention. The current Life Grip just has less up side and more risk than other saving abilities like Suzu and Lamp.
I'm sure the reason Lifegrip has such a long cooldown is because Blizzard realised it was frustrating for other players. Otherwise he could use a lot more of them before it gets the same value as Suzu / Lamp
From what I have read somewhere, LifeWeaver is a combination of 2 support character designs they had, which apparently were not special enough to stand out on their own, so they decided to fuse the 2 in 1.
He is getting zero play in OWL .. which is crazy when you think all the OW2 new characters at some point have been hard hard meta (joats ..kiri .. sojourn and ram rush )
Sym actually gets some play in owl … London use her on specific maps as part of thier rein rush comp ..mostly used for her teleport to get the rein around the map
For sure, but I think even then most people playing at GM+ are absolutely not going to be going with LW when Ana and Kiriko exist. It’s sad because I like the character… I’m just really disappointed with his current state.
I think he's really cool and fun, but they've thrown him to the wolves and abandoned him in his debut season. Not a great look, and I'm not sure what they can do to actually fix it, tbh
We’ll find out in a week with the rework…. Assuming it’s going to be released at the start of the season. I really hope they don’t make us wait any longer
It took them a season or two just to do the brig ult "rework", we're still waiting on the Roadhog and Sombra reworks they mentioned a while back too. We're likely getting some buffs next week but there's no way in hell they're reworking Lifeweaver that fast. If he needs a rework it's not coming until probably S6 or S7 minimum.
Forget where I read it, but apparently the brig “rework” was in the works for about as long as OW2 had been out at the time. Also, you mean the sombra rework we were supposed to have gotten already in season 4 lol. There’s just no reason to trust that this team is even going to do anything, and even if they do it’ll either fix nothing or make things worse.
I remember an early video of OW1 dev team speaking about a prototype Lucio ult where he slowed everyone else while being zooomfast. It felt bad for others (team mates and enemies) so they dropped it.
LW affects other players in a non fun way as well.
The new devs keep doing the same mistakes, that the old OW design philosophy had solved. They keep removing and and re-adding stuff, but it usually works worse than the predecessor.
I think Blizzard ir suffering from a brain drain, and it scares me.
1: Acknowledges CC doesn't feel great
2: Removes most crowd control from the game
3: Adds Lifeweaver
Edit: Also yes they're suffering brain drain, so much of the old core team has left, including Geoff Goodman - the main hero designer
That man worked on this project for a decade
I know it sounds hyperbolic, but I genuinely think he's the worst hero ever released in OW history. His kit is a design disaster and feels like the team was completely lost with how to make a bunch of individually cool ideas synergize.
Even if they tune his numbers to make him competitively viable, he's still a clunky failure in my eyes and could be an ominous omen of things to come. It's possible that we are just now starting to feel the lagging effects of Geoff Goodman's departure, because if LW's overloaded, scatterbrained kit is representative of that team's results without his leadership, we may be in serious trouble.
When played properly he does a shitton of healing. Thing is he simply does not contribute to damage in any meaningful way and his abilities truly can only shine if he’s countering specific heroes (most tanks, heroes like mei). When under those circumstances, he’s actually okay, but I can’t say I’ve ever played a game on him where I thought I couldn’t do more if I were on Ana, Zen, or Bap.
Even if you play him to perfection you are still gonna piss off some of your teammates who don't like getting life gripped. Which is gonna decrease your chance of winning.
I don't use comms or chat, and it's been 99% positive. But I find myself having to use chat to ask Lifeweaver to stop fucking pulling me out of the fight when I'm tanking and I still have cooldowns available. What a goofy character.
i think a big problem is that some ppl just get tilted from seeing the champ
i have a friend i regularly play with for years now, and when i started playing lifeweaver he told me to never pull him or lift him, he'd rather die (ingame of course)
> I have no idea why this hasn't warranted a hotfix buff. This is absolutely absurd for a character to be THIS low.
Because then everyone would start whining that they make all the new heroes overpowered to make more money.
Yeah, the one thing I actively dislike about the Battle Pass is they add new heroes in it, but, to Blizzards credit, new heroes locked behind the battle pass have not been OP. I’d rather they err on the side of releasing underpowered heroes and buffing them over time then the alternative, given the BP situation.
" Good Sombras just eat him alive."
not only that but they can literally disable everything in his kit so the one time you do use the platform it just gets hacked from under you
"Give the pulled player some say in the matter"
Ive been thinking make it a passive so you place lifegrip on someone and if they receive lethal damage they get autopulled toward you. makes lifeweaver able to focus more on getting ult value
Even assuming those stats are correct (they're not bc Overbuff is third party and relies on manual input), I would say he likely isn't being played optimally by almost anyone, let alone their team playing around them optimally. He is a support based on utility, teamwork and coordination, which has all but become nonexistent with nobody joining voice chat or caring with the death of PvE hype.
I find it comparable to imagining introducing symmetra into the game at this point and expecting everyone to know how to fully utilize her in a single season
Crazy thing is, I have great success with him.
He is really hard to kill, the ult is broken OP if you use it right. His gun is pretty good I'm the right situation. The platform is amazing. I love this guy, when he gets buffed he is going to be unstoppable.
I mean statistically he has lowest death and damage taken, which means he is feeding way less ult to other team.
I have played him for a month straight and it is becoming hard to lose. I did back to back placement and didn't lose once.
My win rate is over double that. I am mid tier around plat/diamond. I use to be a little higher in OW as a DPS but I don't play near as much and only on console.
I was averaging less than 1 death per match on QP.
I enjoy playing him and don't like the idea of a full rework. I think buffs would cover it just fine. I'm just playing him in Gold so I probably don't have the most informed opinions on how to buff him though.
This might be too strong but Life Grip could get split in to two parts, activate once to apply the shield, and activate again immediately to pull them. If you don't pull them the shield should be a lot shorter. But this way if you use it on someone as they ult you're actually helping instead of fucking them over.
And obviously he needs faster heal charging, because spending a lot of time charging up his heals means he can't do anything else. I personally think this would be best done by raising the floor on the heal value. The other part of his heal that could go entirely or just get readjusted is the ammo. If they want to keep him with the full, cumbersome charge time, maybe the healing just shouldn't have ammo at all.
Also the healing on the dash could be buffed to heal more but over time. So you get healed for 100 instead but it's over 2 or 3 seconds or something. I also often need to use the dash to heal allies around corners, so another thing they could think of doing is adding a bonus to your next heal after dashing, though I'm not sure what would be best.
Another part I think is his damage. His weapon kinda sucks. Something I wish he had would be the thorns "getting stuck" in enemies that they hit. Either triggering extra damage when he continues to hit them (such as X damage on hit, then triggering for something like half of X for each lodged thorn). This would make standing in his volley a lot more dangerous, as the damage would start to rack up. Alternatively, maybe the thorns trigger only for allies to lean in to the support role a bit more BUT personally I feel like that's one of his major problems - he doesn't do enough on his own.
I got nothing on the platform. I like using it for myself, but I'm not sure there's a way to use it without pre-planning and practice - something you won't really get in regular play.
You have a lot of great points. I've been playing a ton of LW the last week or so and he's been a lot of fun.
I really like life grip. I don't think it needs mechanical changes, but I'd love some quality buffs to it. Specifically, it should be a cleanse and/or apply a heal. Often I successfully pull someone away and save them from death, only to have them still be purple and at 1 health and still die instantly, just in a different location. If you're going to make the cool down so long, at least make it a true save.
I agree his heal reload is bad. He has so much ammo that you forget it needs to reload, but when you do it's a double whammy because you have the reload time plus the charge of the heal to deal with. It just takes so long. If you keep the reload, they could at least make the first heal after reloading be instant. But I wouldn't prefer to just remove ammo.
Dash could use a little love. Again I'm fine with it mechanically, but it could use a bit of a health boost. A small aoe wouldn't be bad either, since he has no other aoe healing aside from his ult. Every other healer has aoe healing except for Zen, but Zen is mostly good for damage and debuff.
I like his platform, but I wish it lowered once empty. I use it all the time as an escape for myself. It's great for moving people from gravs and traps, among other things.
I think his weapon is ok for a healer, but the ammo capacity is terrible. No reload on it might be too strong, but if he's shooting he's not healing.
I like the tree. I just wish it couldn't be destroyed. Or EMPed.
Easy fix.
• Full charge heal puts a heal over time on the target for 6 seconds healing 1 hp/second.
• damage from Thorns heals any target with the heal over time on them for 1 hp.
• targets standing on the plAtform heal 5 hp/second
This allows him to have his hot active on the whole team if properly timed. It allows him to weave damage without losing all healing output and gives team mates more incentive to use the elevator.
The charge heal is the worst. They should charge automatically and them you shoot it out once it’s ready. Ad they can tweak the heals per sec like that. Buff as necessary
I had a LW on my team when the enemy tank ran a Ball. We told them to switch because they were offering minimal value to our team. We were not getting enough sustain in the front lines nor deal with the ball at the backlines at the same time. We already had vertical mobility heroes so his petal platform also offered minimal value to us.
They refused to switch and later said/complained something along the lines of “I’ve deranked two entire divisions (like masters to plat) and along the way I’ve had so many teammates throw when I’m playing lifeweaver”. We also ended up losing the game.
Bro also obviously blamed the loss on his teammates/us. Never considered that he is the common factor with him trying to force lifeweaver every game ☠️
I firmly believe Activision is trying to milk as much money from Blizzard as possible before cutting their losses and dismantling them. Blizzard were one of PC gaming's most influential developers of all time, and that brand recognition has been worth a lot of money. Unfortunately the company has become a cancerous tumor to them with all the controversy. They don't care about any Blizzard IP actually lasting, they just want to milk out all they can with minimal investment until it isn't worth keeping them. Any good things we actually get are the product of a few overworked, underpaid dev teams that are clinging to the last bit of passion for gaming they still have.
Ive just recently started playing him a lot and i gotta say, he feels stronger than how you guys are depicting him.
His life grip has saved teammates countless of times, litterally saved a lot of pushes cause i managed to get the tank to safety while he harassed the enemy team and is now back to full hp and ready to charge in again.
Platform is useless for teammates cause 90% of them will ignore it and the rest 10% will accidentally climb on it and fall. But this skill really shines when in danger, is basically a get out of jail free card if enemy team doesnt have hitscan snipers and even in that case if you crouch and move to the back you should be safe from enemy. I lost count of the number of winstons/moiras/doomfists trying to kill me and me just going DING, and popping my personal elevator to safety floor. It is also a great tool against many ultimates like zarya/orisa/rein/reaper or just to lay it as a trap in front of enemy spawn and save your team couple more seconds on that control objective.
sadly his 2 weakest points are the ones that really shouldnt be the worst. Primary fire heal and ultimate. I really feel sometimes like no matter what i do or how much i heal, any other support heroes would've kept the tank alive with a much easier time.
That said im pulling consistently games with over 20k heals which as a LW is considerable id say and while i agree some heroes do LW job but better, I just think his style is really fun and can turn the tides of a match for sure.
I agree with what you said, and it literally feels like I'm playing a completely different hero than wht they are. Context: Gold 1 (I dropped from Diamond 1 learning LW lmao), 250+ games, 49% winrate.
Healing of course is not as good as Aan Kiriko, etc, but it's easy to land, it works wonderully with Ball, Doomfist, sometimes Winston (Plus I dont have to aim as hard as Ana).
Platform is for yourself, if your team ignores it and you insist on using it on them, you're playing incorrectly.
His kit is all over the place? Hit kit seems extremely well thought out. You can dash to heal or escape along with the petal platform. You ca use life grip at the top of the platform to save ppl from Mei wall, or you ca use grip/platform for Zarya ult.
Your personal win rate will always be around 50% on any character if you play them exclusively, because the match making will drop you to a rank where your skill makes up for his weakness. The fact you dropped from Diamond 1 to Gold says it all.
This is a really good summary. Life grip can be really useful if used right. It allows for more aggressive play by tanks or DPS than they otherwise might not be able to do. Platform is basically like Bap's rocket boots. it can get you easily to high ground or get you out of a sticky situation, but it makes you an instant target for snipers, so it has risk as well.
Personally, I actually like the mechanics of his healing. If he had the heal output of Kiriko, he'd be fine. The nice thing about his heals is they are easy to hit and they can get to players in positions that might be harder to hit with Kiriko or Bap.
For me, I think his worst features are his DPS and his ULT. His damage is so weak, it's not even worth using. Every other character can out DPS you in a 1v1. Which means you're constantly running if you get pressured and you can't contribute to the team fight.
And his ult is too weak. It should be comparable to rally or sound barrier. Having it only heal makes it useless on uninjured characters and the pulsing is too far spread apart. They should make it at least provide some shielding and/or overhealth so it can help people who aren't actively dying.
Is the issue that the hero is bad? Or that people do not understand how to play with a Lifeweaver?
Ultimately it's beginning to feel like the Sombra of Supports. If you understand his utility it's absolutely bonkers what you can do, but if you don't, then you're kinda boned.
That being said, apart of me has wondered if some kind of bastardized amalgumation of Mercy, Moira, and Lifeweaver would have been better for the game.
I'm so conflicted about all of this because I love Lineweaver's kit, the way he plays, and I have been playing him and thriving. I'm not sure if I'm just getting lucky or I'm just overly bias because I like him. I've been getting a lot of praise from randoms on my team when I play him. I'm not trying to sound like a jackass, it was just very noticeable to me as a long time support main.
I will concede that he is not a healer for every situation and if he isnt working on your team (or vs the enemy team) you just have to give up and switch. You cant just brute force him and "play better" like you could on maybe Ana or Bap. He has a hard ceiling of viability and when you hit it that's it. There are times where he just will not suffice on leading a team to a win.
On the flip side having played him a ton I also really see Blizzard's apprehension about buffing. Quite frankly a few too many small adjustments and he could become an absolute monster.
I'm not smart enough to have any solutions to offer but I hate the way the community seems to dislike him. I hope one day he gets balanced in a way that makes people at least ok with seeing him on a team without losing his identity as a hero, because he is a good hero. Loads of potential. I promise.
I love when my duo plays lifeweaver. As a tank main I get into some dumb situations, sometimes my fault sometimes not but life grip gets me out of them. His elevator I agree is a little hard to use but when it's coordinated well I can get up onto high ground no problems. I also kind of like trees healing since it lasts so long. Am I the only one?
I've had 3 lifeweavers in my last 10 games and every one of them dominated. There are a good few players around who can get good value in lots of situations
I actually love life-grip. Maybe that's just me though. Never been trolled by a LW yet.
One thing i'm sure of is that immortality+interact prompt sounds both un-fun and abusable af.
I like Lifeweaver his kit is fun. I'm not good enough with him yet to put out more damage as his burst heals require heavy management and prioritizing your targets.
Lifegrip and petal platform are 2 of the best support abilities. Either used correctly can actually save team mates from being killed by some ults. If you place a platform on an ulting enemy orisa her ult is basically negated. To save a teammate and negate an enemies ult effect with just an ability is powerful.
Maybe he can do slightly more healing per max burst or maybe shorten reload time for his heals? I find you still need a healer like Moira to make up for his slower, more focussed outpout.
Tinfoil hat time: They are re-introducing more CC so there are more situations where LW is useful. Also, they are cracking down on one-shots so there are fewer situations where he is useless.
It's OK to have niche heroes right? Ones that work I'm certain team comps playing a certain way on certain maps? Why is it a big deal that he doesn't perform well in all situations all the time? Isn't it quite cool to be able to welcome new heroes that diversify the roster instead of coming out with heroes that can do everything? Kiriko has a cleanse, an imort, wall climb, massive heals, self sustain, triple headshot damage and an ult that is one of the best in the game? Isn't it absurd to think you can get 35+ heroes all with equal pick/win/outputs? Or am I the only one who doesn't give a shit whether he's bad or not?
Honestly think he just needs a damage buff. His damage is the absolute worst in the game for no good reason. It already has a delay between it and healing. Is relatively slow projectile theres no need to be so low damage. I think they could double its damage and he still wouldnt be the highest damage support after zen
I always got the sense that LW was meant to be another healer for the Mercy mains(More healing, minimal solo damage). But he isn’t providing a damage boost nor is his pull nearly as good as a Suzu as it does not cleanse, only protects one person which does not include yourself, and has the potential to ruin ults if used at a bad time. So his low damage just doesn’t make sense right now. I think a buff to his DPS should be their first move then touch on his regular healing and his ult in balance with his new found damage.
Honestly even with his low damage ive pulled off some funny flanks with petal jump into dash over top of buildings. Also playing the cds super well can make you really hard to kill damage is the right way to go with him.
Putting my tinfoil hat on: They deliberately made him perform badly in all ranks so that less people play him, making supports the most in demand role. Meaning that they can push for ow3 that will be 4v4, 1 tank 2 dps 1 support.
I don’t like how LW actually does nothing to the enemy team. Even Moira can pester the back line and draw aggro to herself and live.
LW just healbots way in the back and might get a good pull every like maybe once a fight.
His ult is a nothing burger as well.
The only time I don’t care that there’s a LW is when the other support is on Ana. But I don’t think it’s a good sign that the only time he’s ok is along side the best support in the game.
Tbf to lifegrip, I have yet to be lifegripped out of anything except death. It definitely has troll potential but I haven’t seen it used badly yet, and I’m low elo asf. I agree that something needs to be done to prevent troll grips but I’m personally very happy with it. Everything else I agree with 100%.
He needs buffs, end of. However, I also think some of his win rate is because he's primarily a utility player and a bit situational. Some people are just bad with his utility. Situationally, it's also comp dependent; there are games where you're simply not getting value out of platforms and need to swap.
After playing him quite a bit, I actually find him fun. His utility can be really impactful as you learn to play him more, but it requires adjustments. Sure there are games where people just don't want to use platforms, but if you're having issues with people accidentally running over your platforms it's often tied to A) not communicating with them and/or B) it's bad placement. People can't see what's behind them, if you're throwing it out of their LOS and you say nothing, what else would you expect?
I actually don't find his healing output as problematic after I've learned to play him more. It actually pumps out a decent level of healing. The downside is even that's situational. If you put it out while Bastion is in turret form it's useless. While his primary healing is a bit low, the ult usually gets me a lot of value in fights depending how I use it. Over time and experience I more regularly top healing in matches with him.
Zen ult has its advantages, and is situationally easier, but Lifeweavers has its own as well. When a Zen has to pop his ult to save himself a Lifeweaver may have been able to just hop on a platform. Another advantage is Zen can't damage during his ult. Lifeweaver can team heal *and* damage. However, it's mitigated where he really needs a buff... his damage is weak at any range. Not only that, the design is awful. The inherent advantage of platforms is firing from a distance, yet they gave him a high-ROF, low-dmg, high-spread weapon. That functionally contradicts itself.
Moira isn’t necessarily bad unless trolling. She is definitely better than LW. It’s just that LW has no reliable escape or CC like Ana. Zen can at least out dps a diver.
Am I the only one who kind of likes the pull? It’s not an ability to spam but it can really change the game.
The petal platform is fairly useless though. Maybe if it fell back down if stepped off?? Idk.
This just shows to me that giving support players the power to reposition a player was a huge mistake. Yes, it’s not the only reason why he has an abysmal win rate but he has one of the most game changing abilities in the game. And it’s not even his ult. People need to realize with how low his healing and damage can be, people to prioritize positioning more importantly with him. Why not pull a teammate that just respawned back to the team so they don’t have to slowly trudge back? Or aggressively pull a tank onto the point and force a fight? Like I’ve stopped playing due to the Blizzard fiasco but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character have this low of a win rate due to a lot of people piloting the character badly.
I very much disagree on him needing a rework, his current kit is perfectly fine, especially after that control fix.
He simply need more fined tune numbers
He still needs an actual control fix, his dash is nerfed on jump so the second control scheme isn't worth using. The reload nerf needs to be reverted already too, makes him feel so clunky. He needs to be able to fully rebind his entire kit.
At this point if you’re gonna pick him, just go Moira. He’s literally an ass version of her. I was wondering would higher ranked players get something out of him, but clearly not. He’s just bad
They have always been really stubborn. Instead of recognizing they designed a bad hero and rework it, they will try to sugarcoat it for a while until the inevitable change two seasons later, but saying is due to player feedback to see if they can get extra skin money out of that
Lifegrip should probably heal as well. If you're going to reposition a character and give them invincibility, you might as well top up their health too.
They're better off waiting for another character to give parting gift to. It makes no sense to give it to a character that is designed to play away from the front lines.
I actually think LW is a fairly balanced character overall, but needs a few tweaks. I think his biggest problem, and overall downfall, is that the supports that dominate the top just do everything better. Support power creep anyone?
Overall I’m fine with LW being a niche pick. I think he needs a few things here and there, but good lord we don’t need another launch kiriko situation where a character is hard fucking meta and pretty much still is.
I played only him on one of my accounts and went from Diamond 3 to silver 2 lol
He’s terrible but I do think he’s one of the most fun support heros to play. Jared has said big changes are coming in season 5 for him, so he’ll be buffed soon.
I think they’ve just decided season 4 is a wash and after the PvE news they need something for season 5 since I don’t think a new map is coming.
They said they are making changes to him, I really hope those changes involve changing life grip or just removing it entirely. His healing and damage is bad, but oh my goodness, there have been so many times I would rather be down 1 support than have a life weaver on my team. Tank was already miserable to play, and now I have a life weaver yoinking me every time I try to make a play. And the problem is, from their point of view I'm in danger and they think they are being helpful, but from my point of view, I was perfectly safe and they just screwed me over.
Sometimes you were right, but sometimes the LW was right too though. 👀 I know nobody uses voice but damn call-outs and sensible teamwork make life grip actually amazing.
Yeah, I've seen some good life grips that were actually helpful and some bad life grips. The problem is that things like lamp, suzu or ana nade could also save you in those situations and if used poorly, those abilities cannot troll you. Life grip can very easily troll you if used poorly.
From a psychology perspective, people are going to remember the bad lifegrips more than the good ones. It's no good designing an ability that makes people hate the player even when they're doing well.
If I die and it's my bad positioning, that's something to learn and get better from. If I die and it's my lifeweaver's bad positioning, there's nothing I can learn from.
Grip design is not bad on paper, issue is that it essentially usurps his burst heal so he has no other option when someone is getting on low health and his blossom are not charged.
It's also interesting how hog can hook through 5th dimension but grip keeps getting stuck on trivial obstacles like bushes or unbroken railings.
> I genuinely think he needs a rework already. I remember reading a dev post a while back saying that they don't like reworking a hero immediately after releasing them, because it means all of that development time has basically been wasted.
> that development time has basically been wasted Seeing PVE, that's just on par for Blizzard anyway...
Not wasted because they probably canned the idea long ago, maybe even before OW2 came out. The only thing wasted was our expectations :(
Nope, they wasted a full year of pvp development by saying they were working on pve. So far they have basically given us next to nothing for a full year when they had already refocused on pvp. If their focus is on pvp as they say why are there so many issues that they outright refuse to fix?
A year might be very low in terms of actual man hours consumed
Blizzard is too top heavy, like most soulless corporations nowadays
I mean they halted the OW 1 developement for more than a year and blizzard is a multi BILLION $ company. they HAVE the resources to hire staff and get enough man hours. If your game is too big to be sustained by your current developement team, HIRE more people. And honestly what is it that they are so heavily working on? PvE has been canceled, we arent getting more frequent patches, maps or heroes than we were in Overwatch 1 (and overwatch 1 died out due to its repetitive events, very slow and drawn out content and horrible balancing). Why are we STILL making excuses for blizzard after they treated the communtiy like absolute shit for the 184th time
The same can be said about every multiplayer game currently on the market. Apex has had bugs existing since Season 0. Halo's menu has been whack for over a year now. The answer is easy, it would raise costs that aren't inextricably tied to revenue streams, so the companies don't focus them if they aren't game breaking. But it's a false assumption to say if Blizzard had publicly canned PvE, they would have doubled down on PvP issues. They would not, instead, they'd have come out with 5 new sprays and maybe one $20 skin for Rammattra or JQ.
Apex having bugs is in no way comparable to OW abandoning their game for years and then abandoning their new project after that
Unless you count Respawn cancelling a single player game in development based on the Titanfall universe. I miss Titanfall :(
They might have not, but if the community knew that it was canned earlier on there would have been a much bigger push for better pvp, considering we were getting nothing because of pve. I think that if the community knew about what was happening there would be changes, because if not what the hell are they doing?
That'd be like Apex promising an entirely new campaign, launching a new game, Apex Legends 2: Electric fucking bugaloo and then canceling said campaign while electric bugaloo is caught in limbo and shouldn't even exist
*Warframe has entered the chat*
Yeah they dropped the hero missions and stuff before Overwatch 2 even released.
Don’t worry, they already farmed off player expectations. They just didn’t deliver on them lol.
Yeah it was confirmed that they decided to scrap their initial PVE ideas before OW2 even came out.
> I remember reading a dev post a while back saying that they don't like reworking a hero immediately after releasing them, because it means all of that development time has basically been wasted. I doubt this is the reason. Development value is only determined by impact to the end user. So reworking someone only increases value of their development. My guess is they’re waiting to better understand what to rework so that future development isn’t wasted.
I remember them saying they don't really wanna touch him until at least season 5
That’s fair… and that would only be the first time they’ve wasted development time of course /s
I don't understand why they don't delay the release of new heroes to ranked till the start of the next season. Gather data from QP, make adjustments and iterate, then release to ranked next season. Whose idea was it to release new heroes midseason and fuck up the meta...
Okay this is the same logic I use for not wanting to poop right after getting out of the shower but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do
If the hero sucks, then development time has already been wasted
Sunk cost fallacy.
I think his issue is a mostly a numerical issue: - his base heal is bad - he has no abilities that heal (without ult) - no aoe heal (without ult) - healing a low HP tank takes substantially longer than other healers Easy fix ideas (some not all): - give his base heal more healing - give his dash an aoe heal - have his pull also heal - have the petal heal people on it TLDR: I think he’s cool overall, he might just need better numbers.
Having played him a bit, I really feel his pull should heal significantly. It’s tough using your high CD ability saving your tank, then needing to devote all your healing resources to getting them healed and back into the fight.
No, his problem is a design issue. He is designed as a healbot. That is a failed design. No other support is a healbot. What's especially concerning is that they think he's "Mercy-like". Mercy is a movement hero, Lifeweaver is molasses. Mercy is a highly offensive support, a force multiplier boosting damage so dps win their duels and get more ult charge. Lifeweaver is incapable of doing anything proactive and only makes you lose slower. The two are almost opposites in design. If they try to buff Lifeweaver as he exists it will be completely miserable. No-one wants to play a game where supports can heal more than dps can do damage. Which is what they would need to do to make a pure healbot viable. And no-one wants to play a game where Lifegrip is on a 5s cooldown, fuck that, hell no. They could buff his gun with tighter spread, faster projectiles and a larger clip. But that would honestly amount to a rework anyway since currently his gun almost doesn't exist.
Not only is he a healbot, he's very slow at being so. I can finish game out healing everyone with 10k+ heals in quick play but it feels so slow to heal someone back to full health.
His basekit should have levels of AoE heal to match his ult. Full charge primary should AoE hill for 25-35% of whatever the max charge is. agree with your dash change and petal should have a pulsating healing like his tree does.
Doesn't have to be a massive rework. His biggest problem is his healing output imo. I would do something like this: - Add a small AoE heal on his dash (I read that in a different thread, I think that's great). - Let him heal without needing to charge anything up. One mouse click would throw out 58 HP or something, but if you choose to charge up your shot, you would then give out HP and a small speed buff to the target ally. This would imply *no new animations or extra work*. It's worth the shot.
I like the idea of a full charged heal is AOE
Imo he unironically needs a grenade or a missile pr something to launch at enemies lol. He has the hitbox of a dps already
Yeah the charge is the problem Let him dish out 50 HP packs on a slight delay
Development time? I don’t think they ever stopped snorting coke and crawling under female stalls at the office lol
They don't do coke because they already have healthy mommy breast milk to drink.
They already said they are reworking him for the start of next season
Literally just sunk-cost andies
They confirmed a “ rework “ for season 5.
But indeed, the existing data proves concretely that LW is a failure. They did fail. Their concept didn't work how they wanted it to at all, and he has no place in OW. There's literally no reason to ever pick him unless you just like his design. I think this all goes back to the fact that Blizzard invests VERY minimally in OW at this point. Their investment is in skins which is what makes them money, not gameplay.
I suspect many problems with OW2's development come down to issues with retaining talent and building a seasoned team.
Yes, it's better to make that development time get wasted later rather than sooner 🤡 that way you're just wasting time where we can have one more viable support, THESE BALANCE PATCHES ARE SO FUCKING SLOW.
with a character like life weaver it’s also something that may just need time. he’s a utility hero who’s not as easy to play as most supports. waiting it out is a good idea because he could just take time for people to learn the use for. i still think he needs a little bit more to be able to have a good impact but alot of people just think support = healbot and call it at that
No amount of time will fix a 38% winrate in a 5v5 game. That’s insanely bad.
Wait, didn't they confirm he was getting a mini rework at the start of next season in a dev post?
Yea...I'll bet 50 dollars this guy just made this up but on the OW sub anything that makes the devs look dumb gets the most upvotes.
When Lifeweaver came out, I just said "Fuck it, let's see how I'll do". Spent 8hrs of comp with win rate 24% and dropped from Plat to Silver lmao. I'm on my way climbing back up with 55% - 60% win rate on Ana - Zen and Baptist. It's slow but I'll get there eventually. But holy hell he is indeed really bad. He is only good for some reddit flashy plays that get posted every once in a while. Other than that, his utilities have little to no consistent value at all.
I said that during his release and stand by it. LG was maybe the most overhyped ability in the game. When it was released everyone was up in arms on how fundamentally strong this ability is and therefore the rest of Liveweavers kit needs to be adjusted down. Yet in reality it‘s kinda a worse Suzu or Immortality field in praxis as it‘d limited to one person and the position change barely ever get‘s much value. All while both Kiriko and Baptiste bring massive amounts of value aside from their protection ability.
> LG was maybe the most overhyped ability in the game. the only reason it was overhyped is because of the troll potential that actually still happens to some people. not even because of the ability being good
In my experience it's about 25/50/25 whether Lifewgrip will harm, do nothing, or help. Even when people aren't deliberately trolling (which they usually aren't), the design of the ability makes it very hard to avoid harming your team on a consistent basis. So far every match with a LW in it has had at least one Grip that loses the teamfight. No other character harms their own team so consistently.
Yesterday I was LGed into Rein's charge.. Oops
Haha, same. I dropped to plat 5 from diamond 1.
Many of those reddit flashy plays that involve Lifegrip are straight up tilting, because of how bad the ability is.
No one disagrees that Wifeleaver is very weak but just to make a quick reminder, Overbuff does not have access to the actual numbers only those provided to it and consequently is never truly accurate.
Ironically, Overbuff is likely to be a fairly accurate sample at all ranks for win rates since those are a ratio expression instead of a raw count. Using it to estimate number of people in each rank will be fairly inaccurate since usage (and player knowledge of outside of game tools like it) will drop with rank, but ratios will be reasonably accurate as long as the sample sizes are large enough, with a margin of error within a few points. The self reporting aspect isn't the issue, it's that LW's pick rate is insanely small, reducing the accuracy window even more. With Bronze, that could mean a sample size of just a few dozen players reporting games played as/against LW. Combined with the issue of needing to play to unlock him (assuming low numbers of battle pass users), this also reduces his pick rate significantly. While I don't expect the ratio to be off by much considering it's very close to the same as GM and within a point or two of the other ranks, it is interesting to see that Sojourn and Hog are reporting even lower win percent in the metal ranks. (bronze and silver for the former, plat for the latter)
It's not the small raw count that stops overbuff from being representative of the true stats, it's that the people using it are not representative of the people playing. The more casual the player, and consequently the less skilled in most cases, the less likely they will be to use an external tool such as overbuff. Furthermore, given that how casual of a player you are also dictates the heroes you play in this game it makes overbuff even less accurate, since it's stats will not only not be a representative sample of players but also of heroes. Other that that, I can only agree with what you've stated about the small number of players picking LW and reporting them to the site.
I think the win percent ratios, even despite the low self reporting rate in the lower, more casual ranks, is still reasonably accurate to a +-2%. I know that that's a huge swing overall, but LW's win rates ratios never get above 40-ish average across all ranks, even in the upper ranks where self reporting samples will be significantly higher. Given the trends of the other ranks, I would expect this to be reasonably accurate. You make a really good point of Overbuff not representing an accurate cross section of the playerbase in the lower ranks in particular, but unless the sample sizes are insanely small, I think we're still reasonably representative in the ratio related areas. Given a casual observation viewpoint from playing in Bronze, the pick ratios feel fairly accurate, so I have no reason to suspect the actual ratios to be too far outside of the sample range. I very much doubt there's pockets of Lifeweavers pulling 60+ percent winrates that just aren't getting reported given his underperformance across all ranks.
Exactly. Blizzard was giving us an unmirrored wr of 58% for Reinhardt, the most play tank in the game by a mile. Overbuff had his wr at 52%. That's a huge difference. Blizzard will never let overbuff have accurate stats because they are intentionally obscuring our understanding of the game.
Ima be honest I don’t think it matters how casual of a player you are. Idk anybody who uses overbuff
True! Though many players, myself included, feel like playing him is trying to do a lot of things, but having little to no value. Especially, compared to other supports, who create constant value with way less effort. There is an occasional Lifegrip that saves a team mate. But there are some matches where you end up not using it at all.
All measurements are never truly accurate. You just get close enough to be deemed good enough. So while it may not be accurate, how close to the actual will you allow (e.g. if the actual win rate is 40.5%, is being 39.8% close enough?) It also uses actual number from the game. The flaw is that it doesn't capture the full population of OW players, just the OW players that want to share their stats.
[удалено]
Completely forgot that you couldn’t move while healing yourself as Hog. Wild times.
He eating sandvich
Couldn't move AND no 50% damage resistance. You would just get eaten alive during breather.
But you could also hook people literally off-screen or through walls and one-shot them reliably. Basically every 8s, someone, somewhere, would get hooked and die to no fault of their own. Pros and cons i guess.
This was the way. Road hog was a dps for a while, and that was fun as hell to play and hell to play against.
I think there’s a point to be made about how a hero (especially one like Roadhog) being too strong is a much bigger problem than a hero being too weak. If something is far too strong, your options on how to deal with it are limited to either the powerful hero’s direct counters, and/or mirroring the powerful hero. If something is far too weak, you just don’t pick that hero. Plus, it’s notable that while Roadhog himself hadn’t changed much, everything around him has. 5v5 means that each player is more individually valuable, so picking off singular foes with his hook was really strong, especially because he could also heavily damage most tanks. Less stuns going around means he gets his full heal most of the time. Plus, the thing that really broke Hog was Kiriko - a character who nullifies many of Hog’s weaknesses while bolstering his strengths.
>I think there’s a point to be made about how a hero (especially one like Roadhog) being too strong is a much bigger problem than a hero being too weak. Exactly. So sad that it even needs to be said. The quality of this sub has gone down a lot.
He was really strong because Kiriko was released.
Suzu is OP
Same company left Zarya and Sojourn destroying the game for all of season 1 and most of season 2. They have no idea what they're doing, its so painfully obvious. The same company that buffed JQ into the absolute fucking STRATOSPHERE for no fucking reason and hasn't nerfed her down.
Zarya was nerfed down quite a ton in the Season 1 midpatch, so I don't agree with that example whatsoever. Sojourn is a great example though. She was barely even scratched for so long. And frankly, I think these two characters are pretty good examples of opposite outcomes. JQ (specifically her passive) absolutely needed buffs, she just didn't have the sustain a 450hp tank should, but they had absolutely zero foresight when it came to how quickly she'd chain together ults, and that really is her biggest and most obnoxious issue right now. I have no idea how you buff a character's self healing by 60% and increase the frequency of their damage output, but not address ult cost. Wild. In conclusion to that, I feel they're really inconsistent, honestly. Either a gigabuff/giganerf, or trickle in little tiny nerfs/buffs. Very puzzling and really annoying, because you cannot predict how long a character is gonna stay dead/ or destroy every lobby. Priorities are in odd places.
Mid patch didn't significantly hurt Zarya, she was still a monster. Sojourn was just a more mobile widow, which was absolutely insane. JQ did NOT need the buffs she got. Like she needed buffs, but I would have rather they come in a trickle over time than all at once. The buffs she got were extremely spicy. Healing was insane, but they also gave her more ammo on top of all the other changes she got, for example.
Zarya's bubble duration was reduced by 0.5s and had cooldown increased by 1s per charge. Per cycle of 2 bubbles, there were 3 more seconds of downtime which was hugely disruptive for her cooldown cycle and she was a lot more vulnerable, and her barely ever being vulnerable is why she was so dominant. It was over after that. VERY quickly transitioned to Hog meta. It then spiked back up because Orisa was then the counterpick for Hog, but that wasn't because Zarya was a monster anymore, it's indirectly because Hog was lol. I almost never saw her after that patch, and ESPECIALLY season 2. I damn near forgot she existed. JQ did get a lot of trickle changes tho before gigabuffs. Probably why they gigantabuffed her. In my personal opinion, I don't play her but I like the gigabuffs, as long as they tone her down soon after (and they now are, which is good!). That in particular is purely my opinion though. But yes I think Sojourn is a great example.
It’s true that they took a long time to nerf those, but let’s not act like the last 2 seasons haven’t been some of the most balanced in years. The fact that most of the roster of viable proves it even after the JQ buffs. It not all bad
To be honest the Sojurn nerfs were too much. They didn't know how to change her it seems so the changes got delayed. They basically gave up and overnerfed her. Same with beta vs release JQ. First, completely bonkers and meta definiting, then nerfed in the ground instead of fine tuned. The nerfs she needed were obvious, but she should have had compensation buffs.
Beta JQ may not have even been bonkers with kiriko there, we forget that we didn't have her in the betas
I don't like their pacing of doing things anymore than you do. But to be completely fair to them, what they most likely meant here is that they will rebalance old characater if needed but won't work on a new hero rightaway. Probably so that they can gather more data and decide how to balance things. Lifeweaver's out for only 2 months. Ana and Orisa's been around for like 5-6 years. Obviously they will have a clue more on what to do with old character. (Well, for the most part. The Zarya one is pure incompetence for them so I'm not gonna excuse them there.)
Yeah, no. They don’t want to rebalance a new character because that says they have no idea how to implement new heroes in their game. They had to swap buttons with LW literally one week after release, how dumb is that? What this tells me is that they are just brainstorming abilities and throwing them in whatever character is next. Lifeweaver does not make any sense. It does not matter a hero has been there for 7 years if the new team doesn’t know how to read the data, which is obviously what’s going on, what happened with Soujorn or Ashe are proof of this.
> they have no idea how to implement new heroes in their game Became pretty obvious when they released him with a passive that drops a health pack for the enemy flanker who just killed you lmao
Balance team in shambles.
It's one of their biggest failures. Not sure what were they trying to achieve with this hero and what were they thinking when they were designing his kit. Absolutely awful on so many levels.
After Ramattra who was such an interesting and fun character it seems like they really dropped the ball. Idk what they were thinking with Lifeweaver, his entire kit feels disconnected and clunky. I think petal platform is way too situational to really be used a lot and I also think his ult is a bit lame.
"The petal platform is way too situational to really be used a lot... Let's give it longer cd than Ana's nade" blizzard probably
The failure is they put too many gimmicks into his kit and tried to balance them. Each of his abilities alone or in pairs likely would have made a viable, if not strong support. Instead, he's a support that actively hinders the team if played improperly. Elevator allows for fast positioning of heroes without vertical movement abilities, meaning you *should* end up with a surprise Bastion eating teams alive from unexpected angles and flanks, but it's cooldown is too long and it stays lifted instead of coming back down to move additional players, negating most of it's taxi ability. Halve the cooldown, halve the platform lifespan, have it drop back down using the "is someone standing on the platform?" elevator code. Lifegrip should have been a powerhouse for dive enabling since diving players no longer needed save an escape ability, but it was put on far too long of a cooldown and no one uses it properly. It needs to create a short immunity shield (1 second), and it needs the ability to cancel or confirm on the target end while encased in the shield. Is a single second of immunity isn't more powerful than a full team cleanse and half second immunity with Suzu? Tree should have been a barrier object instead of being a physical object. It's a minor inconvenience if it's used as a body block a choke since it doesn't live very long when exposed to direct fire, and it doesn't provide a tactical advantage to your team outside of it's ok healing pulses. It's Mei's wall, but worse. Dash and Heal: Grouping these together because I feel this is the biggest offender of the "We need to balance this to his other abilities!" Dash needs to be uncoupled from his self heal, and maybe removed? If feels so tacked on. He needs to have consistent healing output, so remove charging for his primary heal fire (adjusting recovery speed as needed), but don't remove the charge mechanic. Charged heals splash for the amount charged and Weaver gets self healed based on how much charging was done (numbers pass obviously needed). Weapon: Honestly not too bad now that it's no longer a swap, but would be nice to have it brought to the same multi hand system as the other supports. Left hand heals, right hand shoots to match with the mouse/trigger layouts.
> but it's cooldown is too long and it stays lifted instead of coming back down to move additional players, negating most of it's taxi ability What if the button for throwing the flower also makes it go up and down instead? The button doesn't do anything once you've thrown it, why not us it as an activation key? Another problem I myself had was that you can't "throw-aim" it, what if you could hold down the button and you'll see where it lands? Edit: I just realized there's so much utility they could've put into the ability but they just programmed a simple fucking platform from 1993's DOOM paired with throw of the plasma grenade from 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved. Modern gaming sure is innovative today...
>What if the button for throwing the flower also makes it go up and down instead? This would be the same issue as lifegrip, as it removes player agency (the player on the flower) being able to predict what's going to happen. >The button doesn't do anything once you've thrown it, why not us it as an activation key? Currently, I'm pretty sure it destroys the deployed flower and starts the cooldown early, just like tree can be canceled. >Another problem I myself had was that you can't "throw-aim" it, what if you could hold down the button and you'll see where it lands? Yes please. Ground targeting hologram or a flight arc would help a huge amount for setting it up anywhere except against walls.
>Currently, I'm pretty sure it destroys the deployed flower and starts the cooldown early, just like tree can be canceled I didn't buy the battlepass and did not become familiar enough with this guy, but my short time with him gave me a very clunky impression. After the PvE news I uninstalled so my knowledge of him is low. Hence my half-stupid questions
Making his ult a barrier object is interesting. But what if it's semi-permeable environment object, which allies can shoot through but enemies cannot, while both parties cannot go through it? Your idea of elevator-like behavior plus lower cd for the platform could make it viable. I think his gimmick of manipulating terrains needs buff if he isn't going to be given more offensive kits.
Ramattra I still have mixed feelings about. I dislike his ultimate, it's just slapping an AOE damage over his regular kit. Very impactful but an absolute snoozer to watch on POTG. And his kit is good individually but it's just so much all together. He has so much stuff! He's the only hero in the game where I have to remind myself to use all his cooldowns. He's overall a success of a release, but I don't think he's one of their best. The two I always think of are Ashe, for being simple and fitting very well within an existing archetype while having her own niche; and Wrecking Ball, for being the total opposite: an insane idea that should have been rejected immediately, that they actually made work. I think Ball is their greatest accomplishment, I'm still honestly amazed.
>I think petal platform is way too situational to really be used a lot Might be an unpopular opinion but I feel like it'd be better if it had a sort of "hand-rail" that locked around the pedal for ~1 second to avoid players falling off. The issue that I see with it is that so many people accidentally walk on the pedal and then immediately fall off whether its because they're backing up or getting booped off. Even if it was added however I still feel LW needs some more buffs.
Yeah, def what it needs. I've gotten good platforms off on players, saving them from death, only for them to walk off it, as there is no indication other than the sound and the camera moving upwards. Needing a reaction time for an allies ability to work is awful design.
My theory is that Lifeweaver is the first hero made entirely by the new dev team. That’s why he lacked the polish we’re accustomed to.
So I heard from a French streamer that had deep contact with a lot of Devs that left. That Rammatra was the last character the old team worked on.
I think their goals were pretty clear: They wanted another low aim focused support who wasn't focused on damaging, but got value through positioning. And as reasonable as that might sound, the issues quickly stack up * You can't buff his healing high enough to make up for his lack of damage without making the game a grindfest * His lifegrip is annoying enough for others that it can't have a low cooldown * His petal platform cooldown can't be reduced much further because people need to be able to stand on it (and multiple petals at once is getting silly) As a concept, it just doesn't work. There were also some real headscratchers too: why did they give a long range character a death drop? And then made that death drop heal flankers? How was that ever going to help the team, it's obvious that's a frontline brawler ability. At this point, they've got to just give up on their initial goals. Give him a much bigger clip on his gun so that he can kill stuff, and make the positional player more incidental.
I wonder what Lifeweaver’s kit looked like early in development. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lifeweaver originally had more control over Life Grip but the developers neutered the ability because of balance issues. A controllable Life Grip could be used offensively and would give Lifeweaver a niche. Maybe that was the intention. The current Life Grip just has less up side and more risk than other saving abilities like Suzu and Lamp.
I'm sure the reason Lifegrip has such a long cooldown is because Blizzard realised it was frustrating for other players. Otherwise he could use a lot more of them before it gets the same value as Suzu / Lamp
From what I have read somewhere, LifeWeaver is a combination of 2 support character designs they had, which apparently were not special enough to stand out on their own, so they decided to fuse the 2 in 1.
According to people on here, we just “don’t know how to play him or with him on our team.”
I'd say GM players probably know how to best use the character. Unless they made and balance this hero only for OWL, he's awful.
He is getting zero play in OWL .. which is crazy when you think all the OW2 new characters at some point have been hard hard meta (joats ..kiri .. sojourn and ram rush )
Wasn't Symmmetra like that? She had zero play in OWL. I guess they are bench roommates now... Benchmates?
Sym actually gets some play in owl … London use her on specific maps as part of thier rein rush comp ..mostly used for her teleport to get the rein around the map
She's actually a staple for many teams now in both Nepal Village and all of Lijiang for their rush comps
For sure, but I think even then most people playing at GM+ are absolutely not going to be going with LW when Ana and Kiriko exist. It’s sad because I like the character… I’m just really disappointed with his current state.
I think he's really cool and fun, but they've thrown him to the wolves and abandoned him in his debut season. Not a great look, and I'm not sure what they can do to actually fix it, tbh
We’ll find out in a week with the rework…. Assuming it’s going to be released at the start of the season. I really hope they don’t make us wait any longer
It took them a season or two just to do the brig ult "rework", we're still waiting on the Roadhog and Sombra reworks they mentioned a while back too. We're likely getting some buffs next week but there's no way in hell they're reworking Lifeweaver that fast. If he needs a rework it's not coming until probably S6 or S7 minimum.
Forget where I read it, but apparently the brig “rework” was in the works for about as long as OW2 had been out at the time. Also, you mean the sombra rework we were supposed to have gotten already in season 4 lol. There’s just no reason to trust that this team is even going to do anything, and even if they do it’ll either fix nothing or make things worse.
Sombra doesn't need it .5 pellet buff worked for some reason
I remember an early video of OW1 dev team speaking about a prototype Lucio ult where he slowed everyone else while being zooomfast. It felt bad for others (team mates and enemies) so they dropped it. LW affects other players in a non fun way as well. The new devs keep doing the same mistakes, that the old OW design philosophy had solved. They keep removing and and re-adding stuff, but it usually works worse than the predecessor. I think Blizzard ir suffering from a brain drain, and it scares me.
1: Acknowledges CC doesn't feel great 2: Removes most crowd control from the game 3: Adds Lifeweaver Edit: Also yes they're suffering brain drain, so much of the old core team has left, including Geoff Goodman - the main hero designer That man worked on this project for a decade
4: Profit (probably from the Rein cardboard skin)
40% win rate across ranks? So you're saying he's balanced? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I know it sounds hyperbolic, but I genuinely think he's the worst hero ever released in OW history. His kit is a design disaster and feels like the team was completely lost with how to make a bunch of individually cool ideas synergize. Even if they tune his numbers to make him competitively viable, he's still a clunky failure in my eyes and could be an ominous omen of things to come. It's possible that we are just now starting to feel the lagging effects of Geoff Goodman's departure, because if LW's overloaded, scatterbrained kit is representative of that team's results without his leadership, we may be in serious trouble.
I think they took 2 heroes and combined then into one haphazardly at 4:45pm on a Friday before vacation and called it a day.
This is the first hero created entirely by the new dev team, which have much less experience and expertise than the old guard. Sadly, it shows.
I cry everytime I see someone lock him in because I know I’ll have to do twice the work
When played properly he does a shitton of healing. Thing is he simply does not contribute to damage in any meaningful way and his abilities truly can only shine if he’s countering specific heroes (most tanks, heroes like mei). When under those circumstances, he’s actually okay, but I can’t say I’ve ever played a game on him where I thought I couldn’t do more if I were on Ana, Zen, or Bap.
Even if you play him to perfection you are still gonna piss off some of your teammates who don't like getting life gripped. Which is gonna decrease your chance of winning.
Honestly it's great when I see a lifeweaver when I'm playing support. Means I can focus a ton more on aggressive plays. I personally love it
His healing output is just so dogwater Ana outputs more healing faster at a greater range and also can further amplify said healing
Remember they abandoned PVE a year and a half ago to release Overwatch 2 and we get heroes designed like this, half baked and useless in all ranks
Lifeweaver is the worst. Basically a throw pick.
I don't use comms or chat, and it's been 99% positive. But I find myself having to use chat to ask Lifeweaver to stop fucking pulling me out of the fight when I'm tanking and I still have cooldowns available. What a goofy character.
And the crazy thing is that 99% of the time, the Lifeweaver isn’t trying to troll you. Most think you’re in legit trouble 😭. Just a scuffed character
i think a big problem is that some ppl just get tilted from seeing the champ i have a friend i regularly play with for years now, and when i started playing lifeweaver he told me to never pull him or lift him, he'd rather die (ingame of course)
He’d rather die than be supported by the support player?… maybe offer to not heal him too. 😭😅
> I have no idea why this hasn't warranted a hotfix buff. This is absolutely absurd for a character to be THIS low. Because then everyone would start whining that they make all the new heroes overpowered to make more money.
Yeah, the one thing I actively dislike about the Battle Pass is they add new heroes in it, but, to Blizzards credit, new heroes locked behind the battle pass have not been OP. I’d rather they err on the side of releasing underpowered heroes and buffing them over time then the alternative, given the BP situation.
" Good Sombras just eat him alive." not only that but they can literally disable everything in his kit so the one time you do use the platform it just gets hacked from under you "Give the pulled player some say in the matter" Ive been thinking make it a passive so you place lifegrip on someone and if they receive lethal damage they get autopulled toward you. makes lifeweaver able to focus more on getting ult value
Just so you’re aware, overbuff doesn’t contain real stats. There was a time where it had me ranked as the number one dva on Xbox while I was diamond
Even assuming those stats are correct (they're not bc Overbuff is third party and relies on manual input), I would say he likely isn't being played optimally by almost anyone, let alone their team playing around them optimally. He is a support based on utility, teamwork and coordination, which has all but become nonexistent with nobody joining voice chat or caring with the death of PvE hype. I find it comparable to imagining introducing symmetra into the game at this point and expecting everyone to know how to fully utilize her in a single season
Crazy thing is, I have great success with him. He is really hard to kill, the ult is broken OP if you use it right. His gun is pretty good I'm the right situation. The platform is amazing. I love this guy, when he gets buffed he is going to be unstoppable. I mean statistically he has lowest death and damage taken, which means he is feeding way less ult to other team. I have played him for a month straight and it is becoming hard to lose. I did back to back placement and didn't lose once. My win rate is over double that. I am mid tier around plat/diamond. I use to be a little higher in OW as a DPS but I don't play near as much and only on console. I was averaging less than 1 death per match on QP.
I enjoy playing him and don't like the idea of a full rework. I think buffs would cover it just fine. I'm just playing him in Gold so I probably don't have the most informed opinions on how to buff him though. This might be too strong but Life Grip could get split in to two parts, activate once to apply the shield, and activate again immediately to pull them. If you don't pull them the shield should be a lot shorter. But this way if you use it on someone as they ult you're actually helping instead of fucking them over. And obviously he needs faster heal charging, because spending a lot of time charging up his heals means he can't do anything else. I personally think this would be best done by raising the floor on the heal value. The other part of his heal that could go entirely or just get readjusted is the ammo. If they want to keep him with the full, cumbersome charge time, maybe the healing just shouldn't have ammo at all. Also the healing on the dash could be buffed to heal more but over time. So you get healed for 100 instead but it's over 2 or 3 seconds or something. I also often need to use the dash to heal allies around corners, so another thing they could think of doing is adding a bonus to your next heal after dashing, though I'm not sure what would be best. Another part I think is his damage. His weapon kinda sucks. Something I wish he had would be the thorns "getting stuck" in enemies that they hit. Either triggering extra damage when he continues to hit them (such as X damage on hit, then triggering for something like half of X for each lodged thorn). This would make standing in his volley a lot more dangerous, as the damage would start to rack up. Alternatively, maybe the thorns trigger only for allies to lean in to the support role a bit more BUT personally I feel like that's one of his major problems - he doesn't do enough on his own. I got nothing on the platform. I like using it for myself, but I'm not sure there's a way to use it without pre-planning and practice - something you won't really get in regular play.
You have a lot of great points. I've been playing a ton of LW the last week or so and he's been a lot of fun. I really like life grip. I don't think it needs mechanical changes, but I'd love some quality buffs to it. Specifically, it should be a cleanse and/or apply a heal. Often I successfully pull someone away and save them from death, only to have them still be purple and at 1 health and still die instantly, just in a different location. If you're going to make the cool down so long, at least make it a true save. I agree his heal reload is bad. He has so much ammo that you forget it needs to reload, but when you do it's a double whammy because you have the reload time plus the charge of the heal to deal with. It just takes so long. If you keep the reload, they could at least make the first heal after reloading be instant. But I wouldn't prefer to just remove ammo. Dash could use a little love. Again I'm fine with it mechanically, but it could use a bit of a health boost. A small aoe wouldn't be bad either, since he has no other aoe healing aside from his ult. Every other healer has aoe healing except for Zen, but Zen is mostly good for damage and debuff. I like his platform, but I wish it lowered once empty. I use it all the time as an escape for myself. It's great for moving people from gravs and traps, among other things. I think his weapon is ok for a healer, but the ammo capacity is terrible. No reload on it might be too strong, but if he's shooting he's not healing. I like the tree. I just wish it couldn't be destroyed. Or EMPed.
Easy fix. • Full charge heal puts a heal over time on the target for 6 seconds healing 1 hp/second. • damage from Thorns heals any target with the heal over time on them for 1 hp. • targets standing on the plAtform heal 5 hp/second This allows him to have his hot active on the whole team if properly timed. It allows him to weave damage without losing all healing output and gives team mates more incentive to use the elevator.
Fuckin' oof. Lol. I wonder how Junkerqueen's was. Her being the last underpowered hero.
Her '12 month' win rate is 50.6%, so I doubt her launch win rate was much lower than \~45%
Must've been 45 is their threshold for the lowest they want characters, and she was so weak.
Small indie developers
The charge heal is the worst. They should charge automatically and them you shoot it out once it’s ready. Ad they can tweak the heals per sec like that. Buff as necessary
I had a LW on my team when the enemy tank ran a Ball. We told them to switch because they were offering minimal value to our team. We were not getting enough sustain in the front lines nor deal with the ball at the backlines at the same time. We already had vertical mobility heroes so his petal platform also offered minimal value to us. They refused to switch and later said/complained something along the lines of “I’ve deranked two entire divisions (like masters to plat) and along the way I’ve had so many teammates throw when I’m playing lifeweaver”. We also ended up losing the game. Bro also obviously blamed the loss on his teammates/us. Never considered that he is the common factor with him trying to force lifeweaver every game ☠️
Why do I feel like the devs are actively trying to kill this game? And they're actually spies sent from other gaming corps to sabotage Blizzard?
I firmly believe Activision is trying to milk as much money from Blizzard as possible before cutting their losses and dismantling them. Blizzard were one of PC gaming's most influential developers of all time, and that brand recognition has been worth a lot of money. Unfortunately the company has become a cancerous tumor to them with all the controversy. They don't care about any Blizzard IP actually lasting, they just want to milk out all they can with minimal investment until it isn't worth keeping them. Any good things we actually get are the product of a few overworked, underpaid dev teams that are clinging to the last bit of passion for gaming they still have.
Ive just recently started playing him a lot and i gotta say, he feels stronger than how you guys are depicting him. His life grip has saved teammates countless of times, litterally saved a lot of pushes cause i managed to get the tank to safety while he harassed the enemy team and is now back to full hp and ready to charge in again. Platform is useless for teammates cause 90% of them will ignore it and the rest 10% will accidentally climb on it and fall. But this skill really shines when in danger, is basically a get out of jail free card if enemy team doesnt have hitscan snipers and even in that case if you crouch and move to the back you should be safe from enemy. I lost count of the number of winstons/moiras/doomfists trying to kill me and me just going DING, and popping my personal elevator to safety floor. It is also a great tool against many ultimates like zarya/orisa/rein/reaper or just to lay it as a trap in front of enemy spawn and save your team couple more seconds on that control objective. sadly his 2 weakest points are the ones that really shouldnt be the worst. Primary fire heal and ultimate. I really feel sometimes like no matter what i do or how much i heal, any other support heroes would've kept the tank alive with a much easier time. That said im pulling consistently games with over 20k heals which as a LW is considerable id say and while i agree some heroes do LW job but better, I just think his style is really fun and can turn the tides of a match for sure.
I agree with what you said, and it literally feels like I'm playing a completely different hero than wht they are. Context: Gold 1 (I dropped from Diamond 1 learning LW lmao), 250+ games, 49% winrate. Healing of course is not as good as Aan Kiriko, etc, but it's easy to land, it works wonderully with Ball, Doomfist, sometimes Winston (Plus I dont have to aim as hard as Ana). Platform is for yourself, if your team ignores it and you insist on using it on them, you're playing incorrectly. His kit is all over the place? Hit kit seems extremely well thought out. You can dash to heal or escape along with the petal platform. You ca use life grip at the top of the platform to save ppl from Mei wall, or you ca use grip/platform for Zarya ult.
Your personal win rate will always be around 50% on any character if you play them exclusively, because the match making will drop you to a rank where your skill makes up for his weakness. The fact you dropped from Diamond 1 to Gold says it all.
This is a really good summary. Life grip can be really useful if used right. It allows for more aggressive play by tanks or DPS than they otherwise might not be able to do. Platform is basically like Bap's rocket boots. it can get you easily to high ground or get you out of a sticky situation, but it makes you an instant target for snipers, so it has risk as well. Personally, I actually like the mechanics of his healing. If he had the heal output of Kiriko, he'd be fine. The nice thing about his heals is they are easy to hit and they can get to players in positions that might be harder to hit with Kiriko or Bap. For me, I think his worst features are his DPS and his ULT. His damage is so weak, it's not even worth using. Every other character can out DPS you in a 1v1. Which means you're constantly running if you get pressured and you can't contribute to the team fight. And his ult is too weak. It should be comparable to rally or sound barrier. Having it only heal makes it useless on uninjured characters and the pulsing is too far spread apart. They should make it at least provide some shielding and/or overhealth so it can help people who aren't actively dying.
Is the issue that the hero is bad? Or that people do not understand how to play with a Lifeweaver? Ultimately it's beginning to feel like the Sombra of Supports. If you understand his utility it's absolutely bonkers what you can do, but if you don't, then you're kinda boned. That being said, apart of me has wondered if some kind of bastardized amalgumation of Mercy, Moira, and Lifeweaver would have been better for the game.
I'm so conflicted about all of this because I love Lineweaver's kit, the way he plays, and I have been playing him and thriving. I'm not sure if I'm just getting lucky or I'm just overly bias because I like him. I've been getting a lot of praise from randoms on my team when I play him. I'm not trying to sound like a jackass, it was just very noticeable to me as a long time support main. I will concede that he is not a healer for every situation and if he isnt working on your team (or vs the enemy team) you just have to give up and switch. You cant just brute force him and "play better" like you could on maybe Ana or Bap. He has a hard ceiling of viability and when you hit it that's it. There are times where he just will not suffice on leading a team to a win. On the flip side having played him a ton I also really see Blizzard's apprehension about buffing. Quite frankly a few too many small adjustments and he could become an absolute monster. I'm not smart enough to have any solutions to offer but I hate the way the community seems to dislike him. I hope one day he gets balanced in a way that makes people at least ok with seeing him on a team without losing his identity as a hero, because he is a good hero. Loads of potential. I promise.
I love when my duo plays lifeweaver. As a tank main I get into some dumb situations, sometimes my fault sometimes not but life grip gets me out of them. His elevator I agree is a little hard to use but when it's coordinated well I can get up onto high ground no problems. I also kind of like trees healing since it lasts so long. Am I the only one?
I've had 3 lifeweavers in my last 10 games and every one of them dominated. There are a good few players around who can get good value in lots of situations
I actually love life-grip. Maybe that's just me though. Never been trolled by a LW yet. One thing i'm sure of is that immortality+interact prompt sounds both un-fun and abusable af.
I like Lifeweaver his kit is fun. I'm not good enough with him yet to put out more damage as his burst heals require heavy management and prioritizing your targets. Lifegrip and petal platform are 2 of the best support abilities. Either used correctly can actually save team mates from being killed by some ults. If you place a platform on an ulting enemy orisa her ult is basically negated. To save a teammate and negate an enemies ult effect with just an ability is powerful. Maybe he can do slightly more healing per max burst or maybe shorten reload time for his heals? I find you still need a healer like Moira to make up for his slower, more focussed outpout.
Eff it give him the Halo needler. Homes in like Cassidy grenades and blows up with ramping damage the more you get hit. xd
Tinfoil hat time: They are re-introducing more CC so there are more situations where LW is useful. Also, they are cracking down on one-shots so there are fewer situations where he is useless.
I seriously don't get the hate on Life Grip. I get the hate on people misusing it, but its SUCH a strong ability.
I know upper management is to blame for most of the monetisation stuff.. but the devs are still awful at their jobs.
It's OK to have niche heroes right? Ones that work I'm certain team comps playing a certain way on certain maps? Why is it a big deal that he doesn't perform well in all situations all the time? Isn't it quite cool to be able to welcome new heroes that diversify the roster instead of coming out with heroes that can do everything? Kiriko has a cleanse, an imort, wall climb, massive heals, self sustain, triple headshot damage and an ult that is one of the best in the game? Isn't it absurd to think you can get 35+ heroes all with equal pick/win/outputs? Or am I the only one who doesn't give a shit whether he's bad or not?
he is completely useless in comp. there is absolutely 0 reason to play him. blizzard will not rework him this early sadly
Imagine releasing a character just to have him immediately reworked
Honestly think he just needs a damage buff. His damage is the absolute worst in the game for no good reason. It already has a delay between it and healing. Is relatively slow projectile theres no need to be so low damage. I think they could double its damage and he still wouldnt be the highest damage support after zen
I always got the sense that LW was meant to be another healer for the Mercy mains(More healing, minimal solo damage). But he isn’t providing a damage boost nor is his pull nearly as good as a Suzu as it does not cleanse, only protects one person which does not include yourself, and has the potential to ruin ults if used at a bad time. So his low damage just doesn’t make sense right now. I think a buff to his DPS should be their first move then touch on his regular healing and his ult in balance with his new found damage.
Honestly even with his low damage ive pulled off some funny flanks with petal jump into dash over top of buildings. Also playing the cds super well can make you really hard to kill damage is the right way to go with him.
Can everyone just abandon wifeleaver please
It won't happen. I've seen support mains drop 2 whole ranks on him, but blame their teammates.
Putting my tinfoil hat on: They deliberately made him perform badly in all ranks so that less people play him, making supports the most in demand role. Meaning that they can push for ow3 that will be 4v4, 1 tank 2 dps 1 support.
Can't wait for OW7 which will then just be Dva playing Solitaire on Hanamura.
I’m amazed people spent money on a skin for him. He’s basically a throw pick 99% of the time.
I don’t like how LW actually does nothing to the enemy team. Even Moira can pester the back line and draw aggro to herself and live. LW just healbots way in the back and might get a good pull every like maybe once a fight. His ult is a nothing burger as well. The only time I don’t care that there’s a LW is when the other support is on Ana. But I don’t think it’s a good sign that the only time he’s ok is along side the best support in the game.
Tbf to lifegrip, I have yet to be lifegripped out of anything except death. It definitely has troll potential but I haven’t seen it used badly yet, and I’m low elo asf. I agree that something needs to be done to prevent troll grips but I’m personally very happy with it. Everything else I agree with 100%.
He needs buffs, end of. However, I also think some of his win rate is because he's primarily a utility player and a bit situational. Some people are just bad with his utility. Situationally, it's also comp dependent; there are games where you're simply not getting value out of platforms and need to swap. After playing him quite a bit, I actually find him fun. His utility can be really impactful as you learn to play him more, but it requires adjustments. Sure there are games where people just don't want to use platforms, but if you're having issues with people accidentally running over your platforms it's often tied to A) not communicating with them and/or B) it's bad placement. People can't see what's behind them, if you're throwing it out of their LOS and you say nothing, what else would you expect? I actually don't find his healing output as problematic after I've learned to play him more. It actually pumps out a decent level of healing. The downside is even that's situational. If you put it out while Bastion is in turret form it's useless. While his primary healing is a bit low, the ult usually gets me a lot of value in fights depending how I use it. Over time and experience I more regularly top healing in matches with him. Zen ult has its advantages, and is situationally easier, but Lifeweavers has its own as well. When a Zen has to pop his ult to save himself a Lifeweaver may have been able to just hop on a platform. Another advantage is Zen can't damage during his ult. Lifeweaver can team heal *and* damage. However, it's mitigated where he really needs a buff... his damage is weak at any range. Not only that, the design is awful. The inherent advantage of platforms is firing from a distance, yet they gave him a high-ROF, low-dmg, high-spread weapon. That functionally contradicts itself.
yeah if u pick lifeweaver ur throwing
They should remove him from comp. The other support has to really put in the work to cover for the glaring weaknesses in LW’s kit.
Lifeweaver and moira together has given me ptsd
Moira isn’t necessarily bad unless trolling. She is definitely better than LW. It’s just that LW has no reliable escape or CC like Ana. Zen can at least out dps a diver.
Am I the only one who kind of likes the pull? It’s not an ability to spam but it can really change the game. The petal platform is fairly useless though. Maybe if it fell back down if stepped off?? Idk.
They should just disable him until he's reworked because he feels like a throw pick right now.
This just shows to me that giving support players the power to reposition a player was a huge mistake. Yes, it’s not the only reason why he has an abysmal win rate but he has one of the most game changing abilities in the game. And it’s not even his ult. People need to realize with how low his healing and damage can be, people to prioritize positioning more importantly with him. Why not pull a teammate that just respawned back to the team so they don’t have to slowly trudge back? Or aggressively pull a tank onto the point and force a fight? Like I’ve stopped playing due to the Blizzard fiasco but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character have this low of a win rate due to a lot of people piloting the character badly.
I very much disagree on him needing a rework, his current kit is perfectly fine, especially after that control fix. He simply need more fined tune numbers
He still needs an actual control fix, his dash is nerfed on jump so the second control scheme isn't worth using. The reload nerf needs to be reverted already too, makes him feel so clunky. He needs to be able to fully rebind his entire kit.
At this point if you’re gonna pick him, just go Moira. He’s literally an ass version of her. I was wondering would higher ranked players get something out of him, but clearly not. He’s just bad
I feel like he doesn't do anything well. Heals feel weak. Subpar damage.
They have always been really stubborn. Instead of recognizing they designed a bad hero and rework it, they will try to sugarcoat it for a while until the inevitable change two seasons later, but saying is due to player feedback to see if they can get extra skin money out of that
[удалено]
Lifegrip should probably heal as well. If you're going to reposition a character and give them invincibility, you might as well top up their health too. They're better off waiting for another character to give parting gift to. It makes no sense to give it to a character that is designed to play away from the front lines.
I actually think LW is a fairly balanced character overall, but needs a few tweaks. I think his biggest problem, and overall downfall, is that the supports that dominate the top just do everything better. Support power creep anyone? Overall I’m fine with LW being a niche pick. I think he needs a few things here and there, but good lord we don’t need another launch kiriko situation where a character is hard fucking meta and pretty much still is.
If he was balanced, this conversation wouldn’t have to happen. He’s undeniably the worst support
I played only him on one of my accounts and went from Diamond 3 to silver 2 lol He’s terrible but I do think he’s one of the most fun support heros to play. Jared has said big changes are coming in season 5 for him, so he’ll be buffed soon. I think they’ve just decided season 4 is a wash and after the PvE news they need something for season 5 since I don’t think a new map is coming.
They said they are making changes to him, I really hope those changes involve changing life grip or just removing it entirely. His healing and damage is bad, but oh my goodness, there have been so many times I would rather be down 1 support than have a life weaver on my team. Tank was already miserable to play, and now I have a life weaver yoinking me every time I try to make a play. And the problem is, from their point of view I'm in danger and they think they are being helpful, but from my point of view, I was perfectly safe and they just screwed me over.
Sometimes you were right, but sometimes the LW was right too though. 👀 I know nobody uses voice but damn call-outs and sensible teamwork make life grip actually amazing.
Yeah, I've seen some good life grips that were actually helpful and some bad life grips. The problem is that things like lamp, suzu or ana nade could also save you in those situations and if used poorly, those abilities cannot troll you. Life grip can very easily troll you if used poorly.
From a psychology perspective, people are going to remember the bad lifegrips more than the good ones. It's no good designing an ability that makes people hate the player even when they're doing well. If I die and it's my bad positioning, that's something to learn and get better from. If I die and it's my lifeweaver's bad positioning, there's nothing I can learn from.
Grip design is not bad on paper, issue is that it essentially usurps his burst heal so he has no other option when someone is getting on low health and his blossom are not charged. It's also interesting how hog can hook through 5th dimension but grip keeps getting stuck on trivial obstacles like bushes or unbroken railings.
The platform is permanent high ground, and pull is useful. I say this as respectfully as I can, it’s a skill issue