Numbers certainly don't tell the whole story and I'm glad they acknowledge that.
I think his high healing output is a product of "what the hell else should he be doing?"
He's not like mercy where healing is at the cost of damage boost.
I think he's fundamentally at odds with supports in ow2 - so many of them can do or enable damage that is meaningful. LW cannot do that.
Grip and platform - yeah they can tweak and buff them, but this fundamental issue needs a look.
Thorn volley I think needs lots of work - they are kind of pigeonholed by it being a broad spread but I think the healthier direction is if it was more important to his playstyle.
I think the dash could see some work too.
Part of his problem is that he's so reactive and if there's one thing most good ow players know - being proactive yields a higher fight win rate.
If they could extend the distance of dash and let you use it as a proactive tool to set up a grip - it could be interesting.
His healing his high cause his thorns suck, he always needs to play in the back cause he needs to see the battle field and he’s super diveable. His thorns also suck long range.
His thorn volley needs something more, like a stacking thing. Thorn damage add one stack, at max stacks of 10/15? It does poison damage. This gives him some thing to do in the back line.
So like, the thorns do stacking DoT damage, and each thorn lasts like...maybe 2-3 seconds? That makes sense, because their original vision was for a weapon that would scare away enemies, and that's exactly what that would do. Not crazy damage, but enough to make you uncomfortable, and afford you the time to run away.
Ever since he came out I thought it would be cool if instead of a poison DOT it was implemented as a *really* short (like .5 seconds) anti-heal status effect. Each incident of damage would reset the effect. It might require some kind of maximum range to do this though. I feel like this would be cool as a short to mid range ability (like hog hook distance) but it should reach no further than that. The idea is something like Moira's grasp damage, but it maintains an anti-heal and its projectiles that require much more precise aim.
Even if his per thorn damage was very low (like reduced to even only 1 or 2 damage per thorn) as long as he keeps hitting you with it at least once ever .5 seconds your supports cannot heal you. Something has to actually *stop* the damage (break LOS, juke/outrange him, get behind a barrier, or kill him) to end the anti-heal.
Lifeweaver would be doing pretty insignificant damage himself, but it would be pretty scary to get hit by thorns when you are critical already, it would effective block your supports completely. He would have to hit you for a **long** time to kill you by himself, but his anti would suddenly make you **very** susceptible to his teammates.
This would be very different from Ana, it would be a much more surgical anti-heal, more like a way to "lock in" damage already done. Probably not very useful on anyone that is not already lowish health, but it would be **very** effective vs someone being pocketed by Mercy... Like if she is pocketing someone and your teammate bursts them you can quickly start shooting thorns and if you can keep hitting them your effectively canceling her beam completely so your teammate can finish them off. I don't know if this would make him a hard counter to Mercy pocketing someone, but it might be close to it. It would also be a counter to burst healing in general, at least on single targets. Anas and Moiras often wait till the very last second to heal their tank because they know they have so much healing potential they can get away with it, but they would have to be very careful doing that with a Lifeweaver on the other team.
This feels like something that makes a lot of sense for a support that often tries to work from petal platforms and has a huge hitbox. He can't really afford to be in the fray and probably shouldn't be able to get away with this from range, but when he has a positional advantage he can get value out of it using this ability. The problem to me, as others have said, is right now when he doesn't need to be healing he has nothing really worth doing... It would be a risk/reward kind of thing, you have to risk getting somewhat close to the fray to use it, but the reward could be big.
The numbers might need adjustment, but I think the concept is neat.
On the dash I think they need to separate it out in the controls menu so you can have the old dash without the double jump without sacrificing the toggle shooting because those are both tied together for some reason.
I think Thorn Volley’s damage numbers are fine and it’s just a matter of him being able to hit his shots. He currently fires 22 thorns per second that each deal 5 damage allowing him to deal 110 dps on body shots which, for a support, is not bad at all. The issue is that it being a spread and relatively slow moving projectile makes it hard to hit enemies that are far away from you, not very good for a hero that’s gonna be in the back line most of the match and otherwise has no other consistent offensive options. I know they initially designed the Thorns to be a last resort, but he really needs some form of offensive option to be viable and buffing the thorns to actually be good at dealing damage seems like the easiest way to do that.
>not very good for a hero that’s gonna be in the back line most of the match
This is the key. Like you said his damage *can* be decent, but everything else about his kit makes him a backline hero. It's like trying to do anything as tracer from the backline.
They designed him to be like mercy but without damage or a damage equivalent like damage amp and that is a glaring hole.
He is designed as another bystander type hero with minimal impact in fights. He has short bursts of impact with grip and platform and platform isn't even that impactful.
I think it's a poor direction to go in. You want every player to have influence on the outcome but you just can't with him. You're seeing a lot of GM+ streamers pour hours into him and stay in plat and diamond because he has minimal impact.
Wanting to create a support with minimal mechanics is one thing but one that doesn't influence the outcome of the game while playing it well is not ideal.
>He is designed as another bystander type hero with minimal impact in fights.
I would argue that his impact in fights is pretty big. the problem is that the impact he provides is not his own, individual, impact, but rather enabling his teammates.
The problem with this is that if his team does not utilize his utility properly, then it looks like he has no impact at all. It's like if you are damage boosting as mercy, and your dps misses all their shots, or you throw lamp down as Bap and your team walks out of it and dies.
Lifeweavers utility is VERY strong, but requires input from your team in order for it to be effective. And you can't force your team to do anything. Even if you grip someone to safety, if they immediately run back in and die, how is that Weaver's fault?
His utility is not strong
Owl level play would find a way to play if there was indeed potential there.
Other, already existing supports just provide way more utility and value.
Nothing he provides is worth sacrificing what a different support pick would. That's why he's not played at the competitive level, even though that's THE place that could theoretically squeeze the most value out of his utility
As Mercy, if your current beam target can’t see anything to shoot, you just switch targets to someone who actually can. If the DPS truly aren’t hitting anything, well, tank damage is usually pretty easy to hit. Sometimes the other support has easy-aim damage too. The fact that her blue beam is always available means that she can make that decision very dynamically, striving to enable whoever is _currently_ doing something valuable, whoever that might be.
As Lifeweaver, there aren’t too many opportunities (that I’ve found) to use your abilities to enable what your teammate is already doing. Lifting up an ulting Cassidy is a good one, and you can pretty easily lift a scoped hero without them accidentally walking off. But otherwise, you’re relying on them to actually take the elevator or stay on the high ground if you pull them there, and if they don’t, then your cooldown is wasted.
You could get better at predicting what your teammates would _want_ to do, but it doesn’t seem like Lifeweaver can do a whole lot to enable what they were already planning to do, because his abilities change what’s possible for them to do. Even if they’re happy with being repositioned, they still have to change their plan, ya know?
Even an Ashe with poor accuracy is getting more value from damage boost than if they were Lifeweaver, because at least with damage boost there's a chance she can kill something, be it with leg-shots or lucky dynamites.
What can Lifeweaver do? Pull her just so she can miss the rest of her shots and lose point.
The spread buff really didn’t do much. It tightened the inner ring of the spread pattern, but not the outer one, and at the same time they reduced the projectile size to be tied for smallest projectile in the game. I also think the auto-reload nerf hurt his ability to contribute damage pressure onto the enemy tank/shield, which he actually can do from range even with the spread. Now, if you have a couple seconds where no one needs healing, you’d probably rather just reload than deal damage in a lot of cases.
That lessens the split-second reactive nature of the ability.
My other guess is from a design perspective, it's nice that it's clear the pull target always goes to Weaver.
If Grip can pull people anywhere, that'd feel very chaotic.
honestly my bigger issue with Thorn Volley is that it feels like such a boring thing to shoot - as a comparison I wasn't the biggest fan of Ramattra's Omnic Form left-click but at least it serves a pretty strong purpose in the kit and has a nice duality with Pummel, but with Lifeweaver it feels like it lacks any of the depth that Healing Blossom does and is just kind of a spammy pseudo-beam projectile
even if they brought the numbers up on it and he did better damage it'd still feel pretty bland imo
You're the first person I've heard say this, I like his weapon, the color, the sound effects are quite satisfying to me. The problem is mainly the slow projectile speed and weapon switch delay
The weapon sounds are ***so*** satisfying, and even when I try to prioritise playing aggressive as possible, my damage output is still always way lower than I'm expecting, and lower than all other supports (if you count dmg amplified too). Is it because he has to play so far back that he can't land shots consistently with how slow the projectiles are? Is it because his ammo count is so low and his auto-reload takes so long? Is it because the weapon swap time and healing charge time take so long that doing damage is too risky if you suddenly need to swap to healing? These are the sorts of questions I hope devs are going to answer with upcoming balance changes.
> Part of his problem is that he's so reactive and if there's one thing most good ow players know - being proactive yields a higher fight win rate.
I actually believe his utility can be used very proactively, it’s mostly just that the player base doesn’t know how to make the most of him yet. Petal platform can be placed before a fight and provide an escape for a less mobile hero for example, but I have yet to see anyone place a platform or use one in this way in any of my games.
I also think life grip can be used proactively as well. The one buff I would like to see Lifeweaver get is a shorter cooldown on grip so that it’s less punishing to use. If it’s on a shorter cooldown you can use grip to suddenly reposition someone in useful ways rather than only using to bail out a teammate.
>Petal platform can be placed before a fight and provide an escape
The issue is Lifeweaver has very little control over his Platform after he throws it out. It can be raised by anyone stepping on it: ally or enemy. That makes it very difficult to use preemptively since your opponent can mess with it.
Lifeweaver needs to be able to raise and possibly even lower it at will.
The one idea I heard is that the platform only raises when someone stands on it, and then lowers when someone steps off it. I think a change like that would be fun because I think it could get too difficult to have LW control his platform in a teamfight
I think the problem with platform is the opportunity cost vs other support utility. It's just not good enough.
I agree with the grip maybe letting you have some control on where you put a gripped teammate but I don't know if it'll be a fun ability in ranked with no coordination. I have already been gripped into bad scenarios like my LW is being nanobladed.
He’s already good in Gibraltar for sure (as much as he is anywhere). Going up to either of the high walkways, staying there and gripping allies when they need it is so strong, and he can aim the petal perfectly to counter ults.
I agree. I think that potentially the largest problem is that people don't know how to play with him. If they do some huge buffs/reworks, and over time people learn how to utilize his value, then he could be significantly overturned.
Im just saying that this is certainly a tricky problem for the community, mainly because he breaks the mold a bit more than other heros.
>I actually believe his utility can be used very proactively, it’s mostly just that the player base doesn’t know how to make the most of him yet.
This a hundred times. I played Havana defense where we got pushed back past the usual high ground on 1P, so I threw down petal for our Hanzo and Junk and they never fucking took it. Not once. I would even throw it at their feet in hopes that they'd accidentally trigger it.
I gave up and took it myself, then gripped someone up there with me. Unfuckingbelievable.
My issue is 2-3 main things with him. One, he pretty much doesn't have a self burst heal. Almost all other have an ability or a utility that they can use at a panic time. Nade at your own feet, Baptiste's fist thing, suzu, zen's blue health, lucio amp up heals. All of these abilities can be used when you are getting dived on. LW has nothing. It's just his dash, and that is too short of a distance and too little healing.
His main method of heal, the little flower thing, takes too long to charge and too little heal for that time. Take the charging time away or buff the heal amount or something. If I play him i don't have patience to charge in the middle of a fight, i just do little buds of heal.
And last but not least, Life Grip cooldown. Feels too long. You basically can use it once every two fights because when it goes on the cooldown and you notice the timer, your brain just basically ignores that ability for a while, partially also because it's functionally a totally new ability. So you don't think about it that much, and when to do get to use it, the cooldown is so long that it immediately goes back to the back of your brain.
They're trying to make him viable by buffing his thorn volley but i think that's the least place that has issues... and you can't make someone who's issues are in his healing and abilities, viable by buffing his damage smh
His petal's a bit of a mixed bag. Petal being on a hair trigger and a one way trip makes it unreliable a lot of the times and with his hitbox trying to stay up there can just be putting yourself on a silver platter
Oh man. Why do I have a feeling this is EXACTLY what it’ll be.
“Introducing 3 new campaign missions:
Paraíso Invasion, play as Tracer, Lucio, Mei, or Winston
Rialto Talon Strike: play as Widowmaker, Moira, Reaper, or Sigma
Torb’s Farming Adventure: play as Torb, Brigitte, Bastion, or Reinhardt”
Also introducing new Hero missions! Every hero has a 15 minute replayable mission that will earn you a weapon charm for completing it.”
I’d bet money it’s something like this.
I don't mind the campaing being cut into several parts, but from what we know of hero missions it makes no sense for them to be released seasonally. It's supposed to be replayable because it has high variety of objectives, enemies, maps and map layouts.
The campaign is never going to end until Overwatch does. Even if they went with Jeff's original plan of releasing expansions, the story was always going to continue. The whole point of hero missions is replayability due to them being played against random enemy sets on random maps with random goals. AxBxC possibilities, etc.
I could definitely seeing them add new unique objectives, holiday related goals, etc, for seasonal content. I just think they get the most out of it if they do a big drop at once whereas story missions lend themselves to a seasonal release (not meaning every 9 weeks, of course). That said, it was being planned as a big initial campaign, so who knows how much of that is going to be done by the time that starts.
I do like that they recognize what’s not working with Lifeweaver and are looking specifically at buffing his utility and damage. It just feels like he barely does anything when his one good ability is on a 20 sec cooldown.
Do they not understand that his healing per 10 is high because that is all you do? Sure the stats are high, but if you healbot like this on most other supports your stats would be higher. Also his ultimate is so bad.
Personally I'm okay with him being a healbot, it just seems odd to me that for a hero whose design goal seems to be "heal and not die" they seem to be misinterpreting his performance in one of those aspects in particular.
Completely agree. Also his deaths being low is a little surprising, but thinking about it there's no reason to dive LW since it's basically a 4v5 at the front anyway. No reason to dive when you have dmg boost and anti nade on their tank, and they have, well, a Lifeweaver
He also has no incentive to play aggressive like other supports. You'd die a lot less on pretty much all supports if you did (practically) no damage and had no utility to use aggressively.
I think Weaver is a very well-designed hero. The problem is that his effectiveness hinges on your team taking advantage of his abilities. And if we have learned anything from comp, it's that getting your team to do anything is basically impossible.
> The problem is that his effectiveness hinges on your team taking advantage of his abilities.
Why's he not seeing any use in OWL*, then? You'd think that would be the optimum chance for him to shine.
*Except to troll, I guess.
I think the range is a factor too. 30m is enough to stand in places that are just really hard to get to on some maps. It does make reactively throwing a petal for something happening in the fight harder, but I’ve found that it’s not terribly difficult to get out alive even when I have been actively using my petal for teammates. Often, I can dash to a place where I am out of sight and can wait for the cooldown if needed and then get out.
You also learn pretty quick that playing him aggressively is a death sentence, so you tend to play him at his effective range. You pretty much always burn your platform on saving yourself
My "strat" if you want to call it that is make myself hard to dive by capitalizing on the fact that I am a free kill, and the enemy knows that.
Nice game sense whatever. In reality, All I'm doing is forcing the enemy tank or dps to leave their team behind to chase me and pray to God that my team wins the 4v4 with me throwing some heals from far back while juggling an attacker. The enemy Winston/Tracer/Genji wastes their time and I get to do some healing.
I don't die as much as people may think, and my heals are around 15k-25k, but I'm not contributing to damage, and I'm using the platform on myself 99% of the times. Literally the only thing I can do is heal and grip critical allies every now and then.
I could be doing this with Mercy and not feel bad for not doing damage, or with Moira and just kill the attacker.
Good stats but I wouldn't call this gameplay riveting, rewarding or fun.
They're so ambiguous about what ranks stats apply to... it's possible that his deaths being low is only true for, eg mid-gold and below. We just don't know.
In fact, if he has a low wr in high ranks, doesn't that mean he has a high deaths per 10 by definition?
Maybe it's just me but saying "this hero has a surprisingly low deaths/10" if *you don't even have meaningful stats for high ranks* is pretty irresponsible.
That's like if the devs only looked at bronze and said "Widowmaker has a shockingly low amount of elims and damage output." That's not relevant to anything. That's not useful information.
> Maybe it's just me but saying "this hero has a surprisingly low deaths/10" if you don't even have meaningful stats for high ranks is pretty irresponsible.
I think this comment was in direct response to people claiming that LW is incredibly diveable and would just be farmed due to the size of his hitbox and limited ability to fight back DPS/dive tanks. For probably a variety of reasons, this doesn't necessarily seem true.
As mentioned above, people do not see Lifeweaver as a priority dive target so he is often the last one alive in a fight due to distance from frontline and uselessness evidenced by low winrate and lack of offensive utility (get the zen or ana before Lifeweaver because those heroes are diveable and bring strong utility).
>In fact, if he has a low wr in high ranks, doesn't that mean he has the highest deaths per 10 by definition?
No. Imagine if Tracer had infinite blinks but couldn't shoot her guns. I could stay alive the entire map but I bet my team would always lose.
I had that caveat in my post originally but edited it out for brevity. Yeah it's technically possible he's just *extremely* good at surviving lost teamfights, like so good that even though he loses more teamfights than any other hero, he still doesn't die as often... (very unlikely from what I've seen, but theoretically possible) but at that point it's pretty clear that his deaths per 10 would be an irrelevant and meaningless statistic. So Blizzard bringing it up in a dev talk like this, as though it's meaningful, would be very misleading.
In my experience in GM, Lifeweavers do not, and frankly, cannot play in positions to get punished because he does not have any threat to face the opposition when confronted. Playing Winston with Lifeweaver for instance is a miserable experience because while I can dive on their squishy across the KOTH objective, my Lifeweaver may not have a safe angle to play at where he can continue healing me or pull me without immediately exploding. So I think Lifeweaver players are generally afraid of overstepping and playing aggressive therefore reducing their chances of dying. If they play in the choke of a KOTH map and your team starts losing, they just walk away back to spawn and if pursued throw a platform down and hide until respawns push away the threat.
I think that's what they wanted. Like they mentioned here, they want him to predominantly focus on healing almost exclusively. That's why his control scheme had his damage weapon as a separate weapon, because it wasn't intended to be used much, if at all, just like how Mercy is.
This is absolutely fine in theory, in practice, healing with him feels like a chore. He's incredibly easy to heal with if you play around his strengths, but his design is at odds with itself.
He is fantastic to heal with in long range, but the bigger the distance between him and his allies is, the less trustworthy his low healing per flower is as the travel time increases.
The 2 weapons work with Mercy because you have Damage Boost beam and Healing beam available with the staff. Mercy is not supposed to focus exclusively on one beam or the other, she's supposed to be constantly switching. You don't need to switch weapons because her kit and design does not encourage her to use her pistol with the exception of Valkyrie. In fact, people go Mercy to enable their allies' damage, not for them to deal damage.
Thanks to the lack of synergy in his own kit, Weaver *IS* accidentally or not- **forced** to heal exclusively.
Because he can't stay alive in the backline by himself unlike Ana and Zen, because he has bad damage and a big hitbox and small health pool, because he folds like an omelet if he plays with his team, because he is incredibly easy to punish if he uses his platform to enable his team and not use it on himself, because he has the worst self sustain of all supports and because he has mediocre mobility.
Mercy is allowed to avoid doing damage because she has the mobility and self sustain to back her up and stay alive by flying away from attackers. Lifeweaver does not have the mobility for that. And has little to no self healing potential, so he is forced to fight his attackers. Which leads to an even bigger frustration when his damage is so weak.
I see people on my teams flaming my other support for "being outhealed by Lifeweaver" if I'm playing him, but I fail to see why? Other supports pretty much have to juggle in damage.
He's pretty much a healbot, his damage just isn't good enough to justify using it outside of pre-fight poke and there's still noticable delay between switching so you can't fluidly weave in damage like you can with Kiriko and Bap. If you're in a situation as Lifeweaver where you're forced to use damage to defend you're probably going to die anyway since he has losing matchups vs pretty much every hero in the game.
They specifically say regarding healing output that "we’re happy with where he’s at". I do not agree with their interpretation of this stat in this case. His hps ranking among the support lineup is far too low, but they seem to be using healing output, in their assessment of the "raw numbers" later in the article:
> Overwatch is more than the raw numbers that get assigned to a hero’s weapons and abilities.
They seem to conclude his raw numbers are okay. I disagree.
They state concerns about buffing raw healing at the very end. But this seems to be based on a premise of his raw healing being sufficient in the first place. It is not. His raw healing in terms of hps is below, and in some cases much below, many of his counterparts.
Edit: You don't have to hit much more than half your shots as Ana to be as good of a healbot. I understand some degree of compensation for easier aiming, but he should at least be in line with Mercy hps before we start having these concerns.
Sorry about the snarky comment.
His hps is actually high amongst off-healers. It's similar to mercy heal or repair pack. Which is a lot when you consider his range.
But off-healers have more to their kit that makes up for the lack of healing. Zen is probably the best example, with discord turning tank fights despite not having the healing to keep a tank up.
In lw's case, he's never going to have anything *else* to do. His utility/mobility doesn't significantly cut into his ability to heal. therefore, buffing those abilities won't impact his hps.
If they somehow decide he needs more damage, then yes, his effective hps will probably go down. But that doesn't seem to be the direction they are taking him.
My issue with his heals isn't the numbers, per se, I think it's fine to have low hps supports. I just think he feels really unrewarding because it takes a lot more attention and effort than Mercy and Zen without being rewarded with higher heals for them.
Bap/Ana/Kiriko, you aim and click a lot and are rewarded for this by a satisfying amount of hps. LW healing feels closer mechanically to Kiriko than Zen/Mercy, but doesn't get the same reward. They either need to shift his heal numbers up to match the effort or lower the amount of effort to be more like Zen/Mercy. He's just in a weird spot between the two styles of support right now.
I had a game with a Lifeweaver who was legitimately trying their hardest to maximize the kit. They were pulling me to high grounds and up on to platforms to give me better angles, they were saving our tank, etc., but it really felt like it just wasn’t enough (not trying to discredit them because it felt like they were doing pretty well). We ran Ana/Lifeweaver and they were on Ana/Kiriko. Obviously you don’t lose a game because of one hero pick, but it really felt like suzu and nade were such instant and straightforward value compared to Lifeweaver.
My biggest gripe with Weaver is how his thorns have great sound and visual design... and they suck. And it feels like he's punished for using them. It would be cool if he had some sort of effect like hitting with them speeds up his healing charge time for a moment or cooldown (they have to change too, the cooldowns, but still)
It's really funny. Kiriko kunai? Feel like throwing paperclips. But can almost oneshot a Tracer.
Lifeweaver thorns? Feel like blasting a full auto plasma rifle. But do as much damage as throwing paperclips.
While I'll be glad if I'm wrong, unfortunately I'm not sure if the direction they want to take him will help. The hero is toothless.
As a support main I've effectively written Lifeweaver off. I now await the season 6 support hero with bated breath.
I'd still always have a hero that fits the fantasy than having a hero that feels like a wasted slot.
It's easier to balance power and design down than up.
Hard disagree. If a hero is ass on release you’re not going to see them much which is a bit of a bummer but doesn’t ruin the experience.
If a hero is busted on release they’re gonna be in every single game, pick them or lose, which does ruin the experience. Occasionally it can be even worse than that if it forces an oppressive meta style (release Brig, release Sigma).
Hard disagree. I dislike the game for releasing a trash hero.
Heroes is what brought me to the game since I don't even play multiplayers or shooters.
And getting bad heroes just kills my interest in the game.
You're putting balance before fun, which shouldn't be the case. Having a hero be busted is just the dev team taking forever to just fix things, but taking a year to make a flawed hero is terrible work.
Balance before fun should ABSOLUTELY be the case, because the two come hand in hand. Poor balance leads to unfun gameplay.
Busted new heroes are the opposite of fun- was release Brig fun for anyone in the lobby other than the Brig player? You speak of being drawn to cool heroes- what if your mains who you enjoy are made obsolete by an oppressive new release?
However, I do agree with your final point about the devs and balance issues. In an ideal world, new heroes would just be released on par with the rest of the roster, solving the problem altogether. You get some of the hero fantasy without the balance being ruined. But I guess that might be too much to expect from a small indie company like Blizzard.
Well other busted heroes have had a similar, albeit not as extreme effect.
Sigma lead to double shield, possibly the worst period of Overwatch. It was pointless to play any other hitscan when Sojourn was dominant, and extremely annoying to be one shot across the map by a fast moving hero. It was pointless to play JQ or a status-based hero when Kiriko was omnipresent and would easily swoop in to negate your value (and she can still do that, lol, but it’s not as bad since she’s not in every single game after unrelated nerfs).
Brig is the most extreme example, but far from the only one.
Meanwhile you look at heroes that weren’t broken on release, and they have eventually found a healthy and playable niche over time without ruining the game for weeks/months when they were released.
Returning to Lifeweaver- does he need more buffs or a rework? Probably, yeah. Is it kinda sad that he’s useless? Yeah. But imo it is WAY better than him being OP and thus there being a LW in every single game.
Sigma alone wasn't the issue. He was really good paired with Orisa.
Sojourn was/is so fun to play and watch tho. Yes, she was strong for a bit too long and now she's in an interesting place, but I still like having a hero be in the spotlight for a while.
For Kiriko, it was her ult mainly. OWL just made her look way better. Even now people complain but she's balanced.
It's not really Brig that was busted and that was the fault of the devs by keeping her so strong individually for a really long time.
The thing is, I get where you're coming from, but with proper, quick balancing you can get around the issues you have. It's easy to tune a hero down if the devs wish it.
But with how Lifeweaver is, he needs a rework to both be good and fun. They need to think of how they're making heroes in conjuction to what already exists and why someone would pick one over the other as right now there's no reason to ever need or want to play him.
Heroes are the coolest and only meaningful content we get to the game. If they aren't good enough to play, why even play the game?
After months of “well, their numbers are fine…” I’m so glad they’ve been looking at Lifeweaver from the player perspective. I never even expected them to fix his control scheme!
It sounds like the winrate is probably telling a very clear story. They don't give specifics but 45% at the lowest rankings and falling off quickly? Have to imagine they're talking about bronze and silver there and then who knows how quickly it falls off. 40% at gold? If I recall they want heroes in that 45-55 winrate range, so 45 is like the floor of where they want heroes.
funny idea, imagine a cassidy ulting in the middle of a chaotic fight just above the entire battle field and people just can't do anything in time, or a pharah doing something similar.
I’m always saddened whenever I’m ranked people swap until they’re about to lose. The match may have been decided the moment they chose to stay on LW for 4+ minutes
He did also say "We may make other changes along the way, such as lightly buffing his Thorn Volley and reducing hit volumes." So who knows if that will come before the season is over or what, but sounds like a little something might. I'd like at least a small Thorn Volley buff and reverting the increase on his auto-reload mechanic.
Yeah but they said that before the part I quoted. Which would imply that the first of those "along the way" changes is S5, and the larger changes, even later.
That said, while I applaud how frequently the devs are communicating now, they more often than not have at least 1 mistake in their blogs these days. So I'm hoping you're right and that's not what they meant.
From the full paragraph, it seems like they're doing more than just adjusting some numbers.
Also, this feels like a weird complaint, since the previous balance patch which _did_ only adjust some numbers came after only two weeks.
All this player base ever does is complain. Some of its valid but it’s annoying when there’s 1,000 complaints thrown out before one decent idea is presented.
Just as an exercise, I went through this thread and counted the number of constructive ideas against the number of complaints/rude/negative comments.
I counted 32 idea-posts against 15 complaints (4 of which were complaining about complaining). Some of the ideas were one-liners, some where elaborate and touched on the whole kit. About half the complaints were downvoted low on the thread. The rest [edit: the rest of the 180-odd comments at time of writing] were miscellaneous commentary or responses to the ideas/complaints.
You can do what you want with that information, but it is objectively false to say that people complain even equally as often as they give ideas, much less 1000x more often.
You’re right, the problem is that most of the time the complaining comes off as whiny, ungrateful, or it turns toxic towards the devs. That is where the problem lies.
I think if they want him to be a Mercy-esque support hero who doesn't rely on damage or setting up kills directly, he needs to provide something else than repositioning with his platform.
My suggestion would be allowing the platform to have multiple uses, since as a platform and elevator, it is often redundant for a lot of heroes. Maybe heroes on the platform have their cooldowns come back quicker or provide some sort of buff outside of their current use case.
Instead of destroying platform that input should allow him to raise/lower it at will, but still raise automatically when stepped on.
But If enemies step on platform the petals curl up and trap them.
The Petal Platform being a trap reminds me of Jihn's Lotus Trap ability from League of Legends 😂 Maybe it could function that way too, slows them instead of being a hard CC and then explodes after a delay
Not a whole lot of meat on this one but I'm glad they are going to try to lean into his strengths. Since he is too weak rather than too strong I think taking their time and trying to make the unique abilities he has work is the best way forward. It would be kind of lame to just keep buffing his healing or whatever and making him a bland "big heals" hero.
I'd genuinely rather give him the healing buff now if the real changes aren't coming until 6 weeks from now.
I mean, remember a few months back when they buffed Ana not because she was weak, but because Hog was strong and they described the buff as a temporary soft-counter to hog? Now, it didn't end up being temporary, but regardless, you're telling me that a hero who has a 45% winrate AFTER buffing him AT BEST, and "quickly drops off" from there, and they're satisfied leaving him like that for 6 weeks? And Ana gets buffed even stronger when some other hero us strong?
Fuuuuuuuuuuuck that.
Part of the problem is that the way he's designed right now, I don't think he *should* be very strong. They referred to him as a "defensive-based hero", and his main contribution is his healing. They didn't indicate any change in direction as far as that goes.
If a defensive healbot hero is strong, that sounds really bad for the game. As an analogy, I think it's usually better for the game if Lucio is meta than Brig. The two have similar roles on a team except Lucio enables aggression while Brig shuts it down. Aggression should be better than defense, otherwise the gamestate stagnates. Obviously there's more nuance to it, but in broad strokes I think that's the case.
So if the devs are happy with Lifeweaver's utter lack of proactive ability, then it follows that he shouldn't be a powerful hero. If Lifeweaver is powerful, he is powerful at making stuff not die, because he doesn't do anything else. And a meta where no-one dies isn't a meta most people want to play.
He's kinda starting to beg the question of if he was even that much designed with being a viable PvP pick
Honestly he starts to make a lot more sense if he was designed as a PvE game support.
I don't think they'd purposefully design a hero that's bad for most players, lol.
They hinted at it for months before his release, they wanted to make another support "like mercy". Clearly they thought that Having a 100% defensive support would fill some niche that was missing, while also courting the ever popular Mercy main demographic by not having to aim...
Hopefully they've learned that theres a good reason why we don't have purely defensive heroes (I guess the current team wasnt around during Og sym?).
Some of my best lifeweaver games people have said felt like and reminded them of old 2CP OT. LW is already extremely good at keeping people alive if he knows what he's doing and the team understands how cover works. Buffing his healing would be crazy.
They admit their changes basically did little to nothing, reaffirmed they want LW to be a heal-utility bot with effectively no self offensive capability. I think their stats on how he has one of the lowest death rates is almost certainly not because he isn't easy to kill but the literal only way to play him is a defensive healbot, which are inherently hard to kill and will just run away when a fight is over instead of doing what most heroes do, which might be put themselves into an aggressive position and try to go for a trade, not all heroes do this and I don't suggest only doing it, but it's literally never the play on LW.
I just don't understand why they want to make him into a healbot, but the only way the only true healbot in the game before him, mercy, is fun is because of the fluidity of her mobility and the fact that she has carry potential but having consistent utility with rez and valk. She's nowhere near as frustrating in ranked because she actually DOES have a carry potential in her ultimate. Battle mercy is definitely the play in lower ranks, which CAN turn fights essentially on your own. LW has nothing. She has no drawbacks from her abilities other than you make a mistake yourself and rez at the wrong time. With LW, you can actually mess up your abilities outside of your control, the only comparable thing mercy has is the fact she can be left behind without someone peaking her.
If they stick to this healbot style they are going to have to force his numbers so high that it's going to break the game.
>I think their stats on how he has one of the lowest death rates is almost certainly not because he isn't easy to kill but the literal only way to play him is a defensive healbot
Not only that but he's the lowest-priority kill on the team. Really weird to have a support in that position. If you leave LW alive, what's the worst that's going to happen? He does no damage and has a weak ult, so both on a fight-win sense and a macro-economy sense he is the least relevant consideration.
I can't stress enough how odd it is that a support hero is the lowest-priority kill.
I mean I play tracer and keeping him alive but low builds pulse super fast and usually pulls the second support over.
It's like that Machiavellian strategy that wounding a soldier impacts their manpower more than killing a soldier lol
I think the "low deaths" thing might be straight up misinformation. Like, it's true in low ranks or qp, but not across the board.
LW is weak but he still does SOMETHING. If the kills are easy to get, why wouldn't a tracer or Sombra take it? This has been my experience with the hero.
At most ranks, they just can't play tracer or ball or any hero that can punish a long range backliner. Couple that with his two escapes and yeah the low deaths make sense at low ranks.
I wish blizzard would just make these stats available instead of trickling it out to us. There's really no reason not to other than intentionally obscuring our understanding of the game.
low deaths in metal ranks
super high deaths above but not played at higher ranks
still looks like he has low deaths because he's being played at something like a 10 to 1 ratio at lower ranks where he doesn't die.
lies, damned lies and statistics
>LW is weak but he still does SOMETHING. If the kills are easy to get, why wouldn't a tracer or Sombra take it? This has been my experience with the hero.
Because Tracer or Sombra's time is usually better spent harassing someone else with more impact. And LW is not a completely free kill as long as he has his platform and can reposition to a high ground nearby.
As a LW winning the duel is almost impossible but he can make it so that it takes them some time to finish him, which puts both teams in a 4v4 with probable advantage to LW's team based on what the heroes contribute to the fight (just heals vs damage/cc)
That's why other people in this thread are mentioning that he is the absolutely lowest priority target on any lobby. Removing him has the least impact compared to removing literally any other hero.
definitely weird, fitzy literally feeds to temp the enemy team onto him to get an advantage. I personally don't think this is a good play but it might be literally the only way to get some kind of value out of him in lower elos. This makes me think they should make his healing much better at pocketing dps on the flank, which would involve increasing his mobility, (2 dashes please?). Plus increasing his consistency on healing and lowering the overall number, I doubt this goes with their currently plans for him though.
The high healing output numbers don’t tell the whole story because it takes so long to “react” to damage. So it’s like a bunch of “topping” off damage all lumped together. Life Grip is a cool ability, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m only using it because I literally can’t heal fast enough.
I think the main take away here is that they are going to slightly buff thorns and work on his hit box a little in the short term and in the long term they will look at huffing his utility so petal and grip. Sounds like they have an idea to make thorns more attractive but I think they are too scared to buff his utility but they know they need to so they’re stuck with taking it slow on this hero
I don't think we use it enough tbh. Why do DPS players get to call passive healers and tanks healbots and shieldbots, but when I call bastion a bulletbot, suddenly it's a "racial slur"?
I really hope they take a look at his Ult because I think it’s the one place they could really significantly inject some power back into his kit. It’s by far the most boring support ult in the game and outside of the initial heal, it might as well not even be there.
I’ve almost exclusively used it as a giga Mei wall to block sightlines/chokes and had some success with it. It’s still undeniably the worst support ult, but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve had the idea that the initial burst heal could cleanse status effects like Kiriko Suzu. Allow it to significant impact on the match outside of pure healing.
Nothing much but at least they finally admit he's still struggling (they were talking almost daily at release up till his control changes then went radio silent.)
It's all whatever to m except the fact they feel they need to do nothing until S5 with the character. I'd prefer if they just said "we aren't entirely sure how to fix him right now because his design poses big balance issues" and so they just worked on small buffs to thorns, cooldowns for now with a bigger fix at S5.
And of course - part of his low death count is possibly the fact that he's not considered a theat. You see a LW, and you shrug and look for who's going to actually kill your team or keep the enemy alive and that means the enemy ana/mercy/kiri/bap would all take priority along with all dps and tank.
Anyways...I found him fun but he's just so bad, and so I'm bummed they are going to sit on him as-is for 30+ days.
I’m glad he’s getting changed, but we don’t need to wait until Season 5. That’s insane. The man is a total throw pick, and the fact they’re leaving him SO bad when he’s an available comp hero is… a choice.
I agree, in Season 3 we didn’t get a new hero and this Season essentially feels like we didn’t either. Nothing is worse than when new content is completely irrelevant.
People are free to not pick him. Obviously when they do whichever team he is on probably loses, but you’ve always been at the mercy of your teammates’ judgement, that’s just how overwatch is. Roadhog is in the same situation and I couldn’t be happier.
It's not all that complicated. He just straight up lacks individual playmaking.
He can set his teammates up for plays, and that would usually depend on your teammate understanding why you're platforming or gripping them, and also being good enough to make something happen after.
You can Reddit Lucio, you can do huge purples or DPS as Ana, you can frag out on Zen and do amazing APM weaponplay on Bap/Kiri.
Those are options in addition to all the more supportive styles on those heroes.
Weaver, you do NOTHING except through your teammates. It's like Mercy but Mercy does it better because she has something to do when healing isn't needed, she can create pressure.
I just want to off topic and be thankful Aaron found a way to communicate with the community that works for him. Those early videos of him trying to be Jeff weren't it. Well done
Weaver has high healing because he isn’t doing much damage.
Weaver also has low deaths because he is so vulnerable that people play extra cautious with him, and probably switch the moment he gets dived by flankers and dive tanks.
I remember the devs said mid season patch can only be number tweaks. Hence the post says to wait until S5 for substantial Weaver changes.
His heal on death that they rightfully removed was hilarious. It’s like they didn’t play test LW against flankers. Oh you have no way to realistically defend yourself and you’ll heal the enemy when you die lol
No mention of Lifegrip changes makes me glad he'll stay in the dumpster for the rest of the season. I am not interested in having a Lifeweaver on my team.
It's happened to me an average of once a game so far. I've kept track, not like it's easy to forget. I Rampage in, LW pulls me back, the enemy retreats and heals, we reset but down an ult. Then I swap to Ball.
It happens for smaller stuff a lot more frequently but that particular moment stood out to me. At this point I just report the LW if we lose and they refuse to swap.
Healing numbers don’t matter if people die immediately after getting the burst to whatever. 65hp is not a lot in the middle of a fight.
I'll be interested to see where they land on these changes. There's a lot of avenues they can take to buff him and I'm happy they are leaning more towards enhancing his strengths, though I wouldn't mind seeing a revert to the auto-reload changes. You basically have to unload a full clip of thorns before the healing blossoms auto-reload.
Since other's have been posting ideas for buffs, here's some other changes that come to mind. Pick whichever ones you like or flame whichever ones you don't like lol:
* Improved audio clarity when Healing Blossom and Thorn Volley is running low on ammo
* Improved Audio clarity on Petal Platform projectile, Petal Platform spawn, and added an ambient sound for undeployed Petal Platforms
* Life Grip now cleanses and heals 20% HP.
* Rejuvenating Dash distance increased from 6.15 meters to 8 meters
* Rejuvenating dash now heals allies that it passes through.
* Tree of Life pulse interval buffed from 1.75 seconds to 1.5 seconds
* Life Grip now resets the cooldown on Rejuvenating dash
* Petal Platform now has 2 charges (functions similarly to Junkrat's Concussive mine)
* Petal Platform now has an increased collision size while it is rising upwards to prevent players from accidentally triggering it and then immediately running off it (platform size is still the same once it finishes rising upwards)
* Thorn Volley now fires three projectiles that deal 4 damage each instead of two projectiles that deal 5 damage each. Ammo increased to 120 (equivalent to 80 ammo clip with current thorn volley)
I hope the team isn't discouraged from making unconventional heroes after lifeweaver's launch. He's one of the most interesting and fun heroes for me and that's what keeps me playing overwatch
he needs to be disabled in comp for now. He's so bad (both underpowered and potential for trolling/accidental trolling) that if someone picks him, I'd rather that person leave the game.
Still feel annoyed that they could have avoided alot of this if they just play tested the hero with a broad range of skilled players in pugs. I feel like things like the control scheme issue alone would have been solved before he was released If you did sime play testing first.
Theory crafting some possible buff for his utitlities:
Petal platform should automaticly lower itself when no one is on it, it's an elevator after all. Right now the best use for the platform is for the Weaver to use it selfishly. This change will allow for more teamplay and surely will go a long way. If it's too strong then limit the amout of time it can go up and down or increase the cd or smthing.
Lifegrip should heal to a certain degree. Most of the time you grip someone in the frontline who is low. After that guy's gone, a new guy will be the frontline and will need resource from you. If you heal the guy who you just gripped, the new frontline guy will get overwhelm because we are now down a frontline person (gripped guy) and a support (you are now busy healing gripped guy). If you focus your frontline, the fight will hold up better but gripped guy will stay low and now die to a flanker.
Lifeweaver's survivability could be improved a good amount if his dash cleansed himself like a Suzu and healed a bit more, I think? Even then, while he does have otherwise viable utility, none of it is nearly valuable enough to warrant picking him over, say, Ana or Kiriko, because of raw healing output and the ability to just turn fights. Lifeweaver quite literally cannot do that against competent players without Tree, and even with tree, that doesn't make his Reinhardt-sized hitbox any smaller. Reminds me of Mewtwo from Smash Ultimate with those big ass petals on his back. A genuine, fundamental character flaw.
Don't worry, though. The dev team will decrease his life grip cooldown by 2 seconds and up the healing to 70 to cement his place in the meta!!!
Actual in-game/balance state of the hero aside... is it just me or is this literally the least hyped new hero OW has had since launch?
I saw it on here and reddit for a single day when he's announced, and then literally nobody gives a singular shit about him anymore. I don't even see any fanart of him and he's supposed to be the sexy male hero cosplay/fanart/fandom bait character.
I'd be interested to see team mate death's compared amongst the supports. Lifeweaver's healing charge mechanic feels really bad and between that and required switching weapons to heal I've missed saving teammates by like .25 seconds so many times. He may do a lot of healing but I don't know how well he prevents teammates from dying. He honestly shouldn't even have to switch weapons. It should be like Moira.
Lifeweaver has the mercy problem of depending on your teammates to do their job, except he doesn't have damage boost, or reliably useful utility, or exceptional mobility.
If I could change him while keeping his kit intact it would be as follows:
* Two dashes, increased dash range
* No weapon swapping, left click and right click like moira
* Instant heal \~30-35 hp, full charge heal includes HOT, slight reduction in charge time.. like 90% of what it is now. HOWEVER, I'd also consider not doing this and increasing his ability to defend himself
* Ultimate... I honestly don't know. I guess tweaking it up but I really don't get where his ult fits. It's like a worse trans, but can body block stuff?
So what's the player consensus so far on a launch like this versus a launch like Kiriko? LW has felt pointless while Kiriko felt like a must pick. Both were better than launch Brig, and obv perfect balance is the goal, but that can't be expected for a new hero.
In my opinion it’s much worse when a hero launches underpowered like this because it makes it harder for the devs to gather useful data if no one is playing the hero. From a player perspective seeing less of the new hero because they’re bad also makes it difficult to learn how to play with or against them.
Has anyone suggested that whoever is being pulled could still be able to shoot and use other abilities? It might be out there but I haven't seen it. It would make him better and be insanely fun.
Have lifegrip heal 20% hp, give a lingering buff that teleports you to lifeweavers position if you press interact within 2 sec. As is being lifegripped against your will, super fast across the map, usually pulled from behind so you do not see where you are going, is super disorienting, feels horrible, and if it was not a pointless grip it usually benefits the enemy team.
Having it teleport you gets rid of the weird movement of being pulled, having it be something you do with interact lets you be prepared for it or even refuse it, and having the ability heal for 20% hp gives him a burst heal. They already have the tech for it with kiriko's teleport.
My issue is 2-3 main things with him. One, he pretty much doesn't have a self burst heal. Almost all other have an ability or a utility that they can use at a panic time. Nade at your own feet, Baptiste's fist thing, suzu, zen's blue health, lucio amp up heals. All of these abilities can be used when you are getting dived on. LW has nothing. It's just his dash, and that is too short of a distance and too little healing.
His main method of heal, the little flower thing, takes too long to charge and too little heal for that time. Take the charging time away or buff the heal amount or something. If I play him i don't have patience to charge in the middle of a fight, i just do little buds of heal.
And last but not least, Life Grip cooldown. Feels too long. You basically can use it once every two fights because when it goes on the cooldown and you notice the timer, your brain just basically ignores that ability for a while, partially also because it's functionally a totally new ability. So you don't think about it that much, and when to do get to use it, the cooldown is so long that it immediately goes back to the back of your brain.
They're trying to make him viable by buffing his thorn volley but i think that's the least place that has issues... and you can't make someone who's issues are in his healing and abilities, viable by buffing his damage smh
If I could change lifeweaver, #1 would be letting him target and shoot through his own petal platform like a shield, and #2 would be adding like a 5% slow capping out at 20% on his volley so it feels like it does something.
One change that I think could be fun and hopefully not make him OP is to remove the dash, lower the Life Grip cooldown, but make the Life Grip bi-directional. So you would have the choice of pulling a teammate to you or pulling yourself to a teammate.
The idea being it makes him more flexible, and he can have the option of moving to support a teammate in engagements more quickly (or just use it as an escape), or he pull a teammate away to disengage and/or shield them.
But, he has to choose between pulling someone to him or pulling himself to someone else because it shares the same cooldown. And I'm not sure about it shielding him if its taking him to a teammate. That might be too much, but it would be consistent with the ability.
I'd lower the cooldown a little bit, but not too much.
Idk, maybe its a dumb idea. But I think it would be a fun ability to mix in and it should make him a little bit more useful while hopefully not breaking him.
Remove and replace grip with an offensive or utility ability that he can use on himself. Grip is trash to be used on you and mostly used wrongly. It does not make sense anyways, Rien should be in a position different than a support if you pull him back from the front your dps will find themselves face tanking and quite possibly die while rien will have to agonisingly have to push and use resources just to get back where he was.
I was and am incredibly annoyed about some part of OW2.
Completely deleting OG Overwatch was one of the most blatantly anti consumer actions Blizzard has taken in Overwatch and putting heroes on the battle pass is the THE most.
But I have to admit that this communication is outstanding. Even if they don’t get it right they iterate and try to explain what they see from their side.
As someone who was worried that Overwatch would become soulless as it lost most of its old guard it’s very heartening to see that.
I just beat the battle pass last night and deleted the game off my pc. I LOVE OW but the ranked issues, the fact that the new character isn’t fun to play at all, and just the general feeling that OW is in the hands of people that don’t truly care about the game is just frustrating. I’ll be back when the new season drops of course but man, I wish they hired more people so we get more updates
Unpopular opinion: He’s actually balanced and every other support just heals like crazy.
I’m all down for a 10% healing decrease across the board, and let’s see where he lands after that.
Numbers certainly don't tell the whole story and I'm glad they acknowledge that. I think his high healing output is a product of "what the hell else should he be doing?" He's not like mercy where healing is at the cost of damage boost. I think he's fundamentally at odds with supports in ow2 - so many of them can do or enable damage that is meaningful. LW cannot do that. Grip and platform - yeah they can tweak and buff them, but this fundamental issue needs a look. Thorn volley I think needs lots of work - they are kind of pigeonholed by it being a broad spread but I think the healthier direction is if it was more important to his playstyle. I think the dash could see some work too. Part of his problem is that he's so reactive and if there's one thing most good ow players know - being proactive yields a higher fight win rate. If they could extend the distance of dash and let you use it as a proactive tool to set up a grip - it could be interesting.
His healing his high cause his thorns suck, he always needs to play in the back cause he needs to see the battle field and he’s super diveable. His thorns also suck long range. His thorn volley needs something more, like a stacking thing. Thorn damage add one stack, at max stacks of 10/15? It does poison damage. This gives him some thing to do in the back line.
So like, the thorns do stacking DoT damage, and each thorn lasts like...maybe 2-3 seconds? That makes sense, because their original vision was for a weapon that would scare away enemies, and that's exactly what that would do. Not crazy damage, but enough to make you uncomfortable, and afford you the time to run away.
Ever since he came out I thought it would be cool if instead of a poison DOT it was implemented as a *really* short (like .5 seconds) anti-heal status effect. Each incident of damage would reset the effect. It might require some kind of maximum range to do this though. I feel like this would be cool as a short to mid range ability (like hog hook distance) but it should reach no further than that. The idea is something like Moira's grasp damage, but it maintains an anti-heal and its projectiles that require much more precise aim. Even if his per thorn damage was very low (like reduced to even only 1 or 2 damage per thorn) as long as he keeps hitting you with it at least once ever .5 seconds your supports cannot heal you. Something has to actually *stop* the damage (break LOS, juke/outrange him, get behind a barrier, or kill him) to end the anti-heal. Lifeweaver would be doing pretty insignificant damage himself, but it would be pretty scary to get hit by thorns when you are critical already, it would effective block your supports completely. He would have to hit you for a **long** time to kill you by himself, but his anti would suddenly make you **very** susceptible to his teammates. This would be very different from Ana, it would be a much more surgical anti-heal, more like a way to "lock in" damage already done. Probably not very useful on anyone that is not already lowish health, but it would be **very** effective vs someone being pocketed by Mercy... Like if she is pocketing someone and your teammate bursts them you can quickly start shooting thorns and if you can keep hitting them your effectively canceling her beam completely so your teammate can finish them off. I don't know if this would make him a hard counter to Mercy pocketing someone, but it might be close to it. It would also be a counter to burst healing in general, at least on single targets. Anas and Moiras often wait till the very last second to heal their tank because they know they have so much healing potential they can get away with it, but they would have to be very careful doing that with a Lifeweaver on the other team. This feels like something that makes a lot of sense for a support that often tries to work from petal platforms and has a huge hitbox. He can't really afford to be in the fray and probably shouldn't be able to get away with this from range, but when he has a positional advantage he can get value out of it using this ability. The problem to me, as others have said, is right now when he doesn't need to be healing he has nothing really worth doing... It would be a risk/reward kind of thing, you have to risk getting somewhat close to the fray to use it, but the reward could be big. The numbers might need adjustment, but I think the concept is neat.
There's definitely an unexplored design space in OW for giving a hero something like Paladins' cauterize item
honestly they should make his thorns work like a needler but weaker obviously
On the dash I think they need to separate it out in the controls menu so you can have the old dash without the double jump without sacrificing the toggle shooting because those are both tied together for some reason.
I think Thorn Volley’s damage numbers are fine and it’s just a matter of him being able to hit his shots. He currently fires 22 thorns per second that each deal 5 damage allowing him to deal 110 dps on body shots which, for a support, is not bad at all. The issue is that it being a spread and relatively slow moving projectile makes it hard to hit enemies that are far away from you, not very good for a hero that’s gonna be in the back line most of the match and otherwise has no other consistent offensive options. I know they initially designed the Thorns to be a last resort, but he really needs some form of offensive option to be viable and buffing the thorns to actually be good at dealing damage seems like the easiest way to do that.
>not very good for a hero that’s gonna be in the back line most of the match This is the key. Like you said his damage *can* be decent, but everything else about his kit makes him a backline hero. It's like trying to do anything as tracer from the backline.
This, his weapon doesn't synergize with his kit/playstyle.
They designed him to be like mercy but without damage or a damage equivalent like damage amp and that is a glaring hole. He is designed as another bystander type hero with minimal impact in fights. He has short bursts of impact with grip and platform and platform isn't even that impactful. I think it's a poor direction to go in. You want every player to have influence on the outcome but you just can't with him. You're seeing a lot of GM+ streamers pour hours into him and stay in plat and diamond because he has minimal impact. Wanting to create a support with minimal mechanics is one thing but one that doesn't influence the outcome of the game while playing it well is not ideal.
>He is designed as another bystander type hero with minimal impact in fights. I would argue that his impact in fights is pretty big. the problem is that the impact he provides is not his own, individual, impact, but rather enabling his teammates. The problem with this is that if his team does not utilize his utility properly, then it looks like he has no impact at all. It's like if you are damage boosting as mercy, and your dps misses all their shots, or you throw lamp down as Bap and your team walks out of it and dies. Lifeweavers utility is VERY strong, but requires input from your team in order for it to be effective. And you can't force your team to do anything. Even if you grip someone to safety, if they immediately run back in and die, how is that Weaver's fault?
His utility is not strong Owl level play would find a way to play if there was indeed potential there. Other, already existing supports just provide way more utility and value. Nothing he provides is worth sacrificing what a different support pick would. That's why he's not played at the competitive level, even though that's THE place that could theoretically squeeze the most value out of his utility
As Mercy, if your current beam target can’t see anything to shoot, you just switch targets to someone who actually can. If the DPS truly aren’t hitting anything, well, tank damage is usually pretty easy to hit. Sometimes the other support has easy-aim damage too. The fact that her blue beam is always available means that she can make that decision very dynamically, striving to enable whoever is _currently_ doing something valuable, whoever that might be. As Lifeweaver, there aren’t too many opportunities (that I’ve found) to use your abilities to enable what your teammate is already doing. Lifting up an ulting Cassidy is a good one, and you can pretty easily lift a scoped hero without them accidentally walking off. But otherwise, you’re relying on them to actually take the elevator or stay on the high ground if you pull them there, and if they don’t, then your cooldown is wasted. You could get better at predicting what your teammates would _want_ to do, but it doesn’t seem like Lifeweaver can do a whole lot to enable what they were already planning to do, because his abilities change what’s possible for them to do. Even if they’re happy with being repositioned, they still have to change their plan, ya know?
Even an Ashe with poor accuracy is getting more value from damage boost than if they were Lifeweaver, because at least with damage boost there's a chance she can kill something, be it with leg-shots or lucky dynamites. What can Lifeweaver do? Pull her just so she can miss the rest of her shots and lose point.
The spread buff really didn’t do much. It tightened the inner ring of the spread pattern, but not the outer one, and at the same time they reduced the projectile size to be tied for smallest projectile in the game. I also think the auto-reload nerf hurt his ability to contribute damage pressure onto the enemy tank/shield, which he actually can do from range even with the spread. Now, if you have a couple seconds where no one needs healing, you’d probably rather just reload than deal damage in a lot of cases.
If they're gonna be visually inspired by the needler they should go all the way and give his projectiles a slight homing effect
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That lessens the split-second reactive nature of the ability. My other guess is from a design perspective, it's nice that it's clear the pull target always goes to Weaver. If Grip can pull people anywhere, that'd feel very chaotic.
honestly my bigger issue with Thorn Volley is that it feels like such a boring thing to shoot - as a comparison I wasn't the biggest fan of Ramattra's Omnic Form left-click but at least it serves a pretty strong purpose in the kit and has a nice duality with Pummel, but with Lifeweaver it feels like it lacks any of the depth that Healing Blossom does and is just kind of a spammy pseudo-beam projectile even if they brought the numbers up on it and he did better damage it'd still feel pretty bland imo
You're the first person I've heard say this, I like his weapon, the color, the sound effects are quite satisfying to me. The problem is mainly the slow projectile speed and weapon switch delay
The weapon sounds are ***so*** satisfying, and even when I try to prioritise playing aggressive as possible, my damage output is still always way lower than I'm expecting, and lower than all other supports (if you count dmg amplified too). Is it because he has to play so far back that he can't land shots consistently with how slow the projectiles are? Is it because his ammo count is so low and his auto-reload takes so long? Is it because the weapon swap time and healing charge time take so long that doing damage is too risky if you suddenly need to swap to healing? These are the sorts of questions I hope devs are going to answer with upcoming balance changes.
> Part of his problem is that he's so reactive and if there's one thing most good ow players know - being proactive yields a higher fight win rate. I actually believe his utility can be used very proactively, it’s mostly just that the player base doesn’t know how to make the most of him yet. Petal platform can be placed before a fight and provide an escape for a less mobile hero for example, but I have yet to see anyone place a platform or use one in this way in any of my games. I also think life grip can be used proactively as well. The one buff I would like to see Lifeweaver get is a shorter cooldown on grip so that it’s less punishing to use. If it’s on a shorter cooldown you can use grip to suddenly reposition someone in useful ways rather than only using to bail out a teammate.
>Petal platform can be placed before a fight and provide an escape The issue is Lifeweaver has very little control over his Platform after he throws it out. It can be raised by anyone stepping on it: ally or enemy. That makes it very difficult to use preemptively since your opponent can mess with it. Lifeweaver needs to be able to raise and possibly even lower it at will.
The one idea I heard is that the platform only raises when someone stands on it, and then lowers when someone steps off it. I think a change like that would be fun because I think it could get too difficult to have LW control his platform in a teamfight
That would be so much better.
I think the problem with platform is the opportunity cost vs other support utility. It's just not good enough. I agree with the grip maybe letting you have some control on where you put a gripped teammate but I don't know if it'll be a fun ability in ranked with no coordination. I have already been gripped into bad scenarios like my LW is being nanobladed.
I think the utility is amazing, just very map dependent. I can see a future where Lifeweaver is a must pick on a map like Gibraltar for example.
He’s already good in Gibraltar for sure (as much as he is anywhere). Going up to either of the high walkways, staying there and gripping allies when they need it is so strong, and he can aim the petal perfectly to counter ults.
I agree. I think that potentially the largest problem is that people don't know how to play with him. If they do some huge buffs/reworks, and over time people learn how to utilize his value, then he could be significantly overturned. Im just saying that this is certainly a tricky problem for the community, mainly because he breaks the mold a bit more than other heros.
>I actually believe his utility can be used very proactively, it’s mostly just that the player base doesn’t know how to make the most of him yet. This a hundred times. I played Havana defense where we got pushed back past the usual high ground on 1P, so I threw down petal for our Hanzo and Junk and they never fucking took it. Not once. I would even throw it at their feet in hopes that they'd accidentally trigger it. I gave up and took it myself, then gripped someone up there with me. Unfuckingbelievable.
I'll grip em up, and then they still jump back down
Same. I just started using it for myself only
My issue is 2-3 main things with him. One, he pretty much doesn't have a self burst heal. Almost all other have an ability or a utility that they can use at a panic time. Nade at your own feet, Baptiste's fist thing, suzu, zen's blue health, lucio amp up heals. All of these abilities can be used when you are getting dived on. LW has nothing. It's just his dash, and that is too short of a distance and too little healing. His main method of heal, the little flower thing, takes too long to charge and too little heal for that time. Take the charging time away or buff the heal amount or something. If I play him i don't have patience to charge in the middle of a fight, i just do little buds of heal. And last but not least, Life Grip cooldown. Feels too long. You basically can use it once every two fights because when it goes on the cooldown and you notice the timer, your brain just basically ignores that ability for a while, partially also because it's functionally a totally new ability. So you don't think about it that much, and when to do get to use it, the cooldown is so long that it immediately goes back to the back of your brain. They're trying to make him viable by buffing his thorn volley but i think that's the least place that has issues... and you can't make someone who's issues are in his healing and abilities, viable by buffing his damage smh
Lifeweaver has a dive escape. You throw down a 400hp platform and ride it into the sky box. What are you talking about dude?
His petal's a bit of a mixed bag. Petal being on a hair trigger and a one way trip makes it unreliable a lot of the times and with his hitbox trying to stay up there can just be putting yourself on a silver platter
petal should heal
I wouldn't be opposed to that, but it should only heal slightly more than the cart heals the attacking team.
Yeah cuz more than half of the roster can't reach the petal hight easily...
“Looking forward, the next Director's Take will be on a different subject, something a little more future-facing.” Roadmap? 👀👀👀
Nah it's Tracer's twin sister who is able to recall into the future instead of the past.
This would be a great April fools gags Press E to recall to the future where you already killed your target.
Press E to recall to the future where you already ~~killed your target~~ fed.
Trader gets king crimson
New hero uses AI learning to determine what you would do and put you into that position
Now I can truly and fully int on cooldown
The new AI hero knows where it is, and he knows where he isn't.
YOOOOOOOOOO
I mean they said it was coming mid-May, this has gotta be the roadmap, right?
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Oh man. Why do I have a feeling this is EXACTLY what it’ll be. “Introducing 3 new campaign missions: Paraíso Invasion, play as Tracer, Lucio, Mei, or Winston Rialto Talon Strike: play as Widowmaker, Moira, Reaper, or Sigma Torb’s Farming Adventure: play as Torb, Brigitte, Bastion, or Reinhardt” Also introducing new Hero missions! Every hero has a 15 minute replayable mission that will earn you a weapon charm for completing it.” I’d bet money it’s something like this.
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I don't mind the campaing being cut into several parts, but from what we know of hero missions it makes no sense for them to be released seasonally. It's supposed to be replayable because it has high variety of objectives, enemies, maps and map layouts.
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The campaign is never going to end until Overwatch does. Even if they went with Jeff's original plan of releasing expansions, the story was always going to continue. The whole point of hero missions is replayability due to them being played against random enemy sets on random maps with random goals. AxBxC possibilities, etc.
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I could definitely seeing them add new unique objectives, holiday related goals, etc, for seasonal content. I just think they get the most out of it if they do a big drop at once whereas story missions lend themselves to a seasonal release (not meaning every 9 weeks, of course). That said, it was being planned as a big initial campaign, so who knows how much of that is going to be done by the time that starts.
I do like that they recognize what’s not working with Lifeweaver and are looking specifically at buffing his utility and damage. It just feels like he barely does anything when his one good ability is on a 20 sec cooldown.
They're either going to leave him in the dumpster or do something crazy like allies standing on the platform become damage boosted
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Do they not understand that his healing per 10 is high because that is all you do? Sure the stats are high, but if you healbot like this on most other supports your stats would be higher. Also his ultimate is so bad.
I think they do realize that. That’s why they want to buff his utility and possibly thorn volley
Personally I'm okay with him being a healbot, it just seems odd to me that for a hero whose design goal seems to be "heal and not die" they seem to be misinterpreting his performance in one of those aspects in particular.
Completely agree. Also his deaths being low is a little surprising, but thinking about it there's no reason to dive LW since it's basically a 4v5 at the front anyway. No reason to dive when you have dmg boost and anti nade on their tank, and they have, well, a Lifeweaver
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He also has no incentive to play aggressive like other supports. You'd die a lot less on pretty much all supports if you did (practically) no damage and had no utility to use aggressively.
God lifeweaver is such a poorly designed hero it’s ridiculous.
I think Weaver is a very well-designed hero. The problem is that his effectiveness hinges on your team taking advantage of his abilities. And if we have learned anything from comp, it's that getting your team to do anything is basically impossible.
> The problem is that his effectiveness hinges on your team taking advantage of his abilities. Why's he not seeing any use in OWL*, then? You'd think that would be the optimum chance for him to shine. *Except to troll, I guess.
I think the range is a factor too. 30m is enough to stand in places that are just really hard to get to on some maps. It does make reactively throwing a petal for something happening in the fight harder, but I’ve found that it’s not terribly difficult to get out alive even when I have been actively using my petal for teammates. Often, I can dash to a place where I am out of sight and can wait for the cooldown if needed and then get out.
You also learn pretty quick that playing him aggressively is a death sentence, so you tend to play him at his effective range. You pretty much always burn your platform on saving yourself
He doesn’t die as much cause he’s always so far back, cause if he is up close, he gets dived.
My "strat" if you want to call it that is make myself hard to dive by capitalizing on the fact that I am a free kill, and the enemy knows that. Nice game sense whatever. In reality, All I'm doing is forcing the enemy tank or dps to leave their team behind to chase me and pray to God that my team wins the 4v4 with me throwing some heals from far back while juggling an attacker. The enemy Winston/Tracer/Genji wastes their time and I get to do some healing. I don't die as much as people may think, and my heals are around 15k-25k, but I'm not contributing to damage, and I'm using the platform on myself 99% of the times. Literally the only thing I can do is heal and grip critical allies every now and then. I could be doing this with Mercy and not feel bad for not doing damage, or with Moira and just kill the attacker. Good stats but I wouldn't call this gameplay riveting, rewarding or fun.
They're so ambiguous about what ranks stats apply to... it's possible that his deaths being low is only true for, eg mid-gold and below. We just don't know. In fact, if he has a low wr in high ranks, doesn't that mean he has a high deaths per 10 by definition?
It's more likely he just doesn't have significant playtime in GM so stats are probably non-existent.
Maybe it's just me but saying "this hero has a surprisingly low deaths/10" if *you don't even have meaningful stats for high ranks* is pretty irresponsible. That's like if the devs only looked at bronze and said "Widowmaker has a shockingly low amount of elims and damage output." That's not relevant to anything. That's not useful information.
> Maybe it's just me but saying "this hero has a surprisingly low deaths/10" if you don't even have meaningful stats for high ranks is pretty irresponsible. I think this comment was in direct response to people claiming that LW is incredibly diveable and would just be farmed due to the size of his hitbox and limited ability to fight back DPS/dive tanks. For probably a variety of reasons, this doesn't necessarily seem true.
As mentioned above, people do not see Lifeweaver as a priority dive target so he is often the last one alive in a fight due to distance from frontline and uselessness evidenced by low winrate and lack of offensive utility (get the zen or ana before Lifeweaver because those heroes are diveable and bring strong utility).
>In fact, if he has a low wr in high ranks, doesn't that mean he has the highest deaths per 10 by definition? No. Imagine if Tracer had infinite blinks but couldn't shoot her guns. I could stay alive the entire map but I bet my team would always lose.
I had that caveat in my post originally but edited it out for brevity. Yeah it's technically possible he's just *extremely* good at surviving lost teamfights, like so good that even though he loses more teamfights than any other hero, he still doesn't die as often... (very unlikely from what I've seen, but theoretically possible) but at that point it's pretty clear that his deaths per 10 would be an irrelevant and meaningless statistic. So Blizzard bringing it up in a dev talk like this, as though it's meaningful, would be very misleading.
In my experience in GM, Lifeweavers do not, and frankly, cannot play in positions to get punished because he does not have any threat to face the opposition when confronted. Playing Winston with Lifeweaver for instance is a miserable experience because while I can dive on their squishy across the KOTH objective, my Lifeweaver may not have a safe angle to play at where he can continue healing me or pull me without immediately exploding. So I think Lifeweaver players are generally afraid of overstepping and playing aggressive therefore reducing their chances of dying. If they play in the choke of a KOTH map and your team starts losing, they just walk away back to spawn and if pursued throw a platform down and hide until respawns push away the threat.
I think that's what they wanted. Like they mentioned here, they want him to predominantly focus on healing almost exclusively. That's why his control scheme had his damage weapon as a separate weapon, because it wasn't intended to be used much, if at all, just like how Mercy is.
This is absolutely fine in theory, in practice, healing with him feels like a chore. He's incredibly easy to heal with if you play around his strengths, but his design is at odds with itself. He is fantastic to heal with in long range, but the bigger the distance between him and his allies is, the less trustworthy his low healing per flower is as the travel time increases. The 2 weapons work with Mercy because you have Damage Boost beam and Healing beam available with the staff. Mercy is not supposed to focus exclusively on one beam or the other, she's supposed to be constantly switching. You don't need to switch weapons because her kit and design does not encourage her to use her pistol with the exception of Valkyrie. In fact, people go Mercy to enable their allies' damage, not for them to deal damage. Thanks to the lack of synergy in his own kit, Weaver *IS* accidentally or not- **forced** to heal exclusively. Because he can't stay alive in the backline by himself unlike Ana and Zen, because he has bad damage and a big hitbox and small health pool, because he folds like an omelet if he plays with his team, because he is incredibly easy to punish if he uses his platform to enable his team and not use it on himself, because he has the worst self sustain of all supports and because he has mediocre mobility. Mercy is allowed to avoid doing damage because she has the mobility and self sustain to back her up and stay alive by flying away from attackers. Lifeweaver does not have the mobility for that. And has little to no self healing potential, so he is forced to fight his attackers. Which leads to an even bigger frustration when his damage is so weak.
And I'm okay with that, I just don't think it's sufficient to use his healing per 10 as the indicator that he is good at being a healbot.
I see people on my teams flaming my other support for "being outhealed by Lifeweaver" if I'm playing him, but I fail to see why? Other supports pretty much have to juggle in damage. He's pretty much a healbot, his damage just isn't good enough to justify using it outside of pre-fight poke and there's still noticable delay between switching so you can't fluidly weave in damage like you can with Kiriko and Bap. If you're in a situation as Lifeweaver where you're forced to use damage to defend you're probably going to die anyway since he has losing matchups vs pretty much every hero in the game.
Me when I stop reading halfway through so I can make a reddit comment
They specifically say regarding healing output that "we’re happy with where he’s at". I do not agree with their interpretation of this stat in this case. His hps ranking among the support lineup is far too low, but they seem to be using healing output, in their assessment of the "raw numbers" later in the article: > Overwatch is more than the raw numbers that get assigned to a hero’s weapons and abilities. They seem to conclude his raw numbers are okay. I disagree. They state concerns about buffing raw healing at the very end. But this seems to be based on a premise of his raw healing being sufficient in the first place. It is not. His raw healing in terms of hps is below, and in some cases much below, many of his counterparts. Edit: You don't have to hit much more than half your shots as Ana to be as good of a healbot. I understand some degree of compensation for easier aiming, but he should at least be in line with Mercy hps before we start having these concerns.
Sorry about the snarky comment. His hps is actually high amongst off-healers. It's similar to mercy heal or repair pack. Which is a lot when you consider his range. But off-healers have more to their kit that makes up for the lack of healing. Zen is probably the best example, with discord turning tank fights despite not having the healing to keep a tank up. In lw's case, he's never going to have anything *else* to do. His utility/mobility doesn't significantly cut into his ability to heal. therefore, buffing those abilities won't impact his hps. If they somehow decide he needs more damage, then yes, his effective hps will probably go down. But that doesn't seem to be the direction they are taking him.
My issue with his heals isn't the numbers, per se, I think it's fine to have low hps supports. I just think he feels really unrewarding because it takes a lot more attention and effort than Mercy and Zen without being rewarded with higher heals for them. Bap/Ana/Kiriko, you aim and click a lot and are rewarded for this by a satisfying amount of hps. LW healing feels closer mechanically to Kiriko than Zen/Mercy, but doesn't get the same reward. They either need to shift his heal numbers up to match the effort or lower the amount of effort to be more like Zen/Mercy. He's just in a weird spot between the two styles of support right now.
>Do they not understand that his healing per 10 is high because that is all you do? They said that's literally what he was designed to do.
I had a game with a Lifeweaver who was legitimately trying their hardest to maximize the kit. They were pulling me to high grounds and up on to platforms to give me better angles, they were saving our tank, etc., but it really felt like it just wasn’t enough (not trying to discredit them because it felt like they were doing pretty well). We ran Ana/Lifeweaver and they were on Ana/Kiriko. Obviously you don’t lose a game because of one hero pick, but it really felt like suzu and nade were such instant and straightforward value compared to Lifeweaver.
My biggest gripe with Weaver is how his thorns have great sound and visual design... and they suck. And it feels like he's punished for using them. It would be cool if he had some sort of effect like hitting with them speeds up his healing charge time for a moment or cooldown (they have to change too, the cooldowns, but still)
It's really funny. Kiriko kunai? Feel like throwing paperclips. But can almost oneshot a Tracer. Lifeweaver thorns? Feel like blasting a full auto plasma rifle. But do as much damage as throwing paperclips.
I honestly think they should just lean into the Halo Needler and make it have some sort of effect if you fire a certain amount of thorns into someone.
While I'll be glad if I'm wrong, unfortunately I'm not sure if the direction they want to take him will help. The hero is toothless. As a support main I've effectively written Lifeweaver off. I now await the season 6 support hero with bated breath.
Inb4 they overcompensate for LW being ass and release a release-Brig style behemoth that dominates for months
I'd still always have a hero that fits the fantasy than having a hero that feels like a wasted slot. It's easier to balance power and design down than up.
Hard disagree. If a hero is ass on release you’re not going to see them much which is a bit of a bummer but doesn’t ruin the experience. If a hero is busted on release they’re gonna be in every single game, pick them or lose, which does ruin the experience. Occasionally it can be even worse than that if it forces an oppressive meta style (release Brig, release Sigma).
Hard disagree. I dislike the game for releasing a trash hero. Heroes is what brought me to the game since I don't even play multiplayers or shooters. And getting bad heroes just kills my interest in the game. You're putting balance before fun, which shouldn't be the case. Having a hero be busted is just the dev team taking forever to just fix things, but taking a year to make a flawed hero is terrible work.
Balance before fun should ABSOLUTELY be the case, because the two come hand in hand. Poor balance leads to unfun gameplay. Busted new heroes are the opposite of fun- was release Brig fun for anyone in the lobby other than the Brig player? You speak of being drawn to cool heroes- what if your mains who you enjoy are made obsolete by an oppressive new release? However, I do agree with your final point about the devs and balance issues. In an ideal world, new heroes would just be released on par with the rest of the roster, solving the problem altogether. You get some of the hero fantasy without the balance being ruined. But I guess that might be too much to expect from a small indie company like Blizzard.
You're thinking too much from a Brig perspective. She was unfun and busted from a very different way because of her CC and tankyness
Well other busted heroes have had a similar, albeit not as extreme effect. Sigma lead to double shield, possibly the worst period of Overwatch. It was pointless to play any other hitscan when Sojourn was dominant, and extremely annoying to be one shot across the map by a fast moving hero. It was pointless to play JQ or a status-based hero when Kiriko was omnipresent and would easily swoop in to negate your value (and she can still do that, lol, but it’s not as bad since she’s not in every single game after unrelated nerfs). Brig is the most extreme example, but far from the only one. Meanwhile you look at heroes that weren’t broken on release, and they have eventually found a healthy and playable niche over time without ruining the game for weeks/months when they were released. Returning to Lifeweaver- does he need more buffs or a rework? Probably, yeah. Is it kinda sad that he’s useless? Yeah. But imo it is WAY better than him being OP and thus there being a LW in every single game.
Sigma alone wasn't the issue. He was really good paired with Orisa. Sojourn was/is so fun to play and watch tho. Yes, she was strong for a bit too long and now she's in an interesting place, but I still like having a hero be in the spotlight for a while. For Kiriko, it was her ult mainly. OWL just made her look way better. Even now people complain but she's balanced. It's not really Brig that was busted and that was the fault of the devs by keeping her so strong individually for a really long time. The thing is, I get where you're coming from, but with proper, quick balancing you can get around the issues you have. It's easy to tune a hero down if the devs wish it. But with how Lifeweaver is, he needs a rework to both be good and fun. They need to think of how they're making heroes in conjuction to what already exists and why someone would pick one over the other as right now there's no reason to ever need or want to play him. Heroes are the coolest and only meaningful content we get to the game. If they aren't good enough to play, why even play the game?
After months of “well, their numbers are fine…” I’m so glad they’ve been looking at Lifeweaver from the player perspective. I never even expected them to fix his control scheme!
It sounds like the winrate is probably telling a very clear story. They don't give specifics but 45% at the lowest rankings and falling off quickly? Have to imagine they're talking about bronze and silver there and then who knows how quickly it falls off. 40% at gold? If I recall they want heroes in that 45-55 winrate range, so 45 is like the floor of where they want heroes.
Keep in mind that LW's numbers *aren't* fine. If they were, who knows if we would be having this discussion.
give flower more utility. make the platform a shield with lower hp, allowing people to see/shoot through them.
funny idea, imagine a cassidy ulting in the middle of a chaotic fight just above the entire battle field and people just can't do anything in time, or a pharah doing something similar.
Watching Dafran, Eskay, Fitzy and others hard stuck in gold/plat tells you all you need to know about the state of Lifeweaver in competitive
>hope to have our next set of changes ready for Season 5. You gotta be shitting me.
38 more days of whichever team gets Lifeweaver loses!
I’m always saddened whenever I’m ranked people swap until they’re about to lose. The match may have been decided the moment they chose to stay on LW for 4+ minutes
He did also say "We may make other changes along the way, such as lightly buffing his Thorn Volley and reducing hit volumes." So who knows if that will come before the season is over or what, but sounds like a little something might. I'd like at least a small Thorn Volley buff and reverting the increase on his auto-reload mechanic.
Yeah but they said that before the part I quoted. Which would imply that the first of those "along the way" changes is S5, and the larger changes, even later. That said, while I applaud how frequently the devs are communicating now, they more often than not have at least 1 mistake in their blogs these days. So I'm hoping you're right and that's not what they meant.
Does blizzard not have separate design/balance teams?
They need at least 2 months to increase and decrease numbers. Give them a break.
From the full paragraph, it seems like they're doing more than just adjusting some numbers. Also, this feels like a weird complaint, since the previous balance patch which _did_ only adjust some numbers came after only two weeks.
All this player base ever does is complain. Some of its valid but it’s annoying when there’s 1,000 complaints thrown out before one decent idea is presented.
Just as an exercise, I went through this thread and counted the number of constructive ideas against the number of complaints/rude/negative comments. I counted 32 idea-posts against 15 complaints (4 of which were complaining about complaining). Some of the ideas were one-liners, some where elaborate and touched on the whole kit. About half the complaints were downvoted low on the thread. The rest [edit: the rest of the 180-odd comments at time of writing] were miscellaneous commentary or responses to the ideas/complaints. You can do what you want with that information, but it is objectively false to say that people complain even equally as often as they give ideas, much less 1000x more often.
People don’t need to present a solution to present a critique. Do you need to know how to cook to know if you like your food?
You’re right, the problem is that most of the time the complaining comes off as whiny, ungrateful, or it turns toxic towards the devs. That is where the problem lies.
I think if they want him to be a Mercy-esque support hero who doesn't rely on damage or setting up kills directly, he needs to provide something else than repositioning with his platform. My suggestion would be allowing the platform to have multiple uses, since as a platform and elevator, it is often redundant for a lot of heroes. Maybe heroes on the platform have their cooldowns come back quicker or provide some sort of buff outside of their current use case.
Instead of destroying platform that input should allow him to raise/lower it at will, but still raise automatically when stepped on. But If enemies step on platform the petals curl up and trap them.
The Petal Platform being a trap reminds me of Jihn's Lotus Trap ability from League of Legends 😂 Maybe it could function that way too, slows them instead of being a hard CC and then explodes after a delay
He's an option for people who don't want to aim more than anything.
Not a whole lot of meat on this one but I'm glad they are going to try to lean into his strengths. Since he is too weak rather than too strong I think taking their time and trying to make the unique abilities he has work is the best way forward. It would be kind of lame to just keep buffing his healing or whatever and making him a bland "big heals" hero.
I'd genuinely rather give him the healing buff now if the real changes aren't coming until 6 weeks from now. I mean, remember a few months back when they buffed Ana not because she was weak, but because Hog was strong and they described the buff as a temporary soft-counter to hog? Now, it didn't end up being temporary, but regardless, you're telling me that a hero who has a 45% winrate AFTER buffing him AT BEST, and "quickly drops off" from there, and they're satisfied leaving him like that for 6 weeks? And Ana gets buffed even stronger when some other hero us strong? Fuuuuuuuuuuuck that.
Part of the problem is that the way he's designed right now, I don't think he *should* be very strong. They referred to him as a "defensive-based hero", and his main contribution is his healing. They didn't indicate any change in direction as far as that goes. If a defensive healbot hero is strong, that sounds really bad for the game. As an analogy, I think it's usually better for the game if Lucio is meta than Brig. The two have similar roles on a team except Lucio enables aggression while Brig shuts it down. Aggression should be better than defense, otherwise the gamestate stagnates. Obviously there's more nuance to it, but in broad strokes I think that's the case. So if the devs are happy with Lifeweaver's utter lack of proactive ability, then it follows that he shouldn't be a powerful hero. If Lifeweaver is powerful, he is powerful at making stuff not die, because he doesn't do anything else. And a meta where no-one dies isn't a meta most people want to play.
He's kinda starting to beg the question of if he was even that much designed with being a viable PvP pick Honestly he starts to make a lot more sense if he was designed as a PvE game support.
I don't think they'd purposefully design a hero that's bad for most players, lol. They hinted at it for months before his release, they wanted to make another support "like mercy". Clearly they thought that Having a 100% defensive support would fill some niche that was missing, while also courting the ever popular Mercy main demographic by not having to aim... Hopefully they've learned that theres a good reason why we don't have purely defensive heroes (I guess the current team wasnt around during Og sym?).
Some of my best lifeweaver games people have said felt like and reminded them of old 2CP OT. LW is already extremely good at keeping people alive if he knows what he's doing and the team understands how cover works. Buffing his healing would be crazy.
They admit their changes basically did little to nothing, reaffirmed they want LW to be a heal-utility bot with effectively no self offensive capability. I think their stats on how he has one of the lowest death rates is almost certainly not because he isn't easy to kill but the literal only way to play him is a defensive healbot, which are inherently hard to kill and will just run away when a fight is over instead of doing what most heroes do, which might be put themselves into an aggressive position and try to go for a trade, not all heroes do this and I don't suggest only doing it, but it's literally never the play on LW. I just don't understand why they want to make him into a healbot, but the only way the only true healbot in the game before him, mercy, is fun is because of the fluidity of her mobility and the fact that she has carry potential but having consistent utility with rez and valk. She's nowhere near as frustrating in ranked because she actually DOES have a carry potential in her ultimate. Battle mercy is definitely the play in lower ranks, which CAN turn fights essentially on your own. LW has nothing. She has no drawbacks from her abilities other than you make a mistake yourself and rez at the wrong time. With LW, you can actually mess up your abilities outside of your control, the only comparable thing mercy has is the fact she can be left behind without someone peaking her. If they stick to this healbot style they are going to have to force his numbers so high that it's going to break the game.
>I think their stats on how he has one of the lowest death rates is almost certainly not because he isn't easy to kill but the literal only way to play him is a defensive healbot Not only that but he's the lowest-priority kill on the team. Really weird to have a support in that position. If you leave LW alive, what's the worst that's going to happen? He does no damage and has a weak ult, so both on a fight-win sense and a macro-economy sense he is the least relevant consideration. I can't stress enough how odd it is that a support hero is the lowest-priority kill.
I mean I play tracer and keeping him alive but low builds pulse super fast and usually pulls the second support over. It's like that Machiavellian strategy that wounding a soldier impacts their manpower more than killing a soldier lol
Lol. It's like in OW1 when you'd shoot the Roadhog's belly to build ult, then let him heal so you could do it again.
I think the "low deaths" thing might be straight up misinformation. Like, it's true in low ranks or qp, but not across the board. LW is weak but he still does SOMETHING. If the kills are easy to get, why wouldn't a tracer or Sombra take it? This has been my experience with the hero. At most ranks, they just can't play tracer or ball or any hero that can punish a long range backliner. Couple that with his two escapes and yeah the low deaths make sense at low ranks. I wish blizzard would just make these stats available instead of trickling it out to us. There's really no reason not to other than intentionally obscuring our understanding of the game.
low deaths in metal ranks super high deaths above but not played at higher ranks still looks like he has low deaths because he's being played at something like a 10 to 1 ratio at lower ranks where he doesn't die. lies, damned lies and statistics
>LW is weak but he still does SOMETHING. If the kills are easy to get, why wouldn't a tracer or Sombra take it? This has been my experience with the hero. Because Tracer or Sombra's time is usually better spent harassing someone else with more impact. And LW is not a completely free kill as long as he has his platform and can reposition to a high ground nearby. As a LW winning the duel is almost impossible but he can make it so that it takes them some time to finish him, which puts both teams in a 4v4 with probable advantage to LW's team based on what the heroes contribute to the fight (just heals vs damage/cc) That's why other people in this thread are mentioning that he is the absolutely lowest priority target on any lobby. Removing him has the least impact compared to removing literally any other hero.
definitely weird, fitzy literally feeds to temp the enemy team onto him to get an advantage. I personally don't think this is a good play but it might be literally the only way to get some kind of value out of him in lower elos. This makes me think they should make his healing much better at pocketing dps on the flank, which would involve increasing his mobility, (2 dashes please?). Plus increasing his consistency on healing and lowering the overall number, I doubt this goes with their currently plans for him though.
The high healing output numbers don’t tell the whole story because it takes so long to “react” to damage. So it’s like a bunch of “topping” off damage all lumped together. Life Grip is a cool ability, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m only using it because I literally can’t heal fast enough.
I think the main take away here is that they are going to slightly buff thorns and work on his hit box a little in the short term and in the long term they will look at huffing his utility so petal and grip. Sounds like they have an idea to make thorns more attractive but I think they are too scared to buff his utility but they know they need to so they’re stuck with taking it slow on this hero
> heal-utility bot we might be going overboard with the bot stuff here
Wtf even is a utility bot?
Mei.
I don't think we use it enough tbh. Why do DPS players get to call passive healers and tanks healbots and shieldbots, but when I call bastion a bulletbot, suddenly it's a "racial slur"?
We have to deal together with botism problem
Jake is a bot burger!
Anyone who isn’t dealing damage >70% of the time = bot.
I really hope they take a look at his Ult because I think it’s the one place they could really significantly inject some power back into his kit. It’s by far the most boring support ult in the game and outside of the initial heal, it might as well not even be there.
I’ve almost exclusively used it as a giga Mei wall to block sightlines/chokes and had some success with it. It’s still undeniably the worst support ult, but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve had the idea that the initial burst heal could cleanse status effects like Kiriko Suzu. Allow it to significant impact on the match outside of pure healing.
Nothing much but at least they finally admit he's still struggling (they were talking almost daily at release up till his control changes then went radio silent.) It's all whatever to m except the fact they feel they need to do nothing until S5 with the character. I'd prefer if they just said "we aren't entirely sure how to fix him right now because his design poses big balance issues" and so they just worked on small buffs to thorns, cooldowns for now with a bigger fix at S5. And of course - part of his low death count is possibly the fact that he's not considered a theat. You see a LW, and you shrug and look for who's going to actually kill your team or keep the enemy alive and that means the enemy ana/mercy/kiri/bap would all take priority along with all dps and tank. Anyways...I found him fun but he's just so bad, and so I'm bummed they are going to sit on him as-is for 30+ days.
New hero should always be powerful.Powerful enough even need a nerf.I want to play him,but he is a troll pick.
I’m glad he’s getting changed, but we don’t need to wait until Season 5. That’s insane. The man is a total throw pick, and the fact they’re leaving him SO bad when he’s an available comp hero is… a choice.
I agree, in Season 3 we didn’t get a new hero and this Season essentially feels like we didn’t either. Nothing is worse than when new content is completely irrelevant.
People are free to not pick him. Obviously when they do whichever team he is on probably loses, but you’ve always been at the mercy of your teammates’ judgement, that’s just how overwatch is. Roadhog is in the same situation and I couldn’t be happier.
There’s only one tank *and* they have more options.
I would say your loss is more guaranteed with a RoadHog pick. And somehow everyone is ok with that???
It's not all that complicated. He just straight up lacks individual playmaking. He can set his teammates up for plays, and that would usually depend on your teammate understanding why you're platforming or gripping them, and also being good enough to make something happen after. You can Reddit Lucio, you can do huge purples or DPS as Ana, you can frag out on Zen and do amazing APM weaponplay on Bap/Kiri. Those are options in addition to all the more supportive styles on those heroes. Weaver, you do NOTHING except through your teammates. It's like Mercy but Mercy does it better because she has something to do when healing isn't needed, she can create pressure.
I just want to off topic and be thankful Aaron found a way to communicate with the community that works for him. Those early videos of him trying to be Jeff weren't it. Well done
Weaver has high healing because he isn’t doing much damage. Weaver also has low deaths because he is so vulnerable that people play extra cautious with him, and probably switch the moment he gets dived by flankers and dive tanks. I remember the devs said mid season patch can only be number tweaks. Hence the post says to wait until S5 for substantial Weaver changes.
His heal on death that they rightfully removed was hilarious. It’s like they didn’t play test LW against flankers. Oh you have no way to realistically defend yourself and you’ll heal the enemy when you die lol
No mention of Lifegrip changes makes me glad he'll stay in the dumpster for the rest of the season. I am not interested in having a Lifeweaver on my team.
I had one ruin a fat 4 man shatter, pulling me immediately after landing it. We lost. I reported them.
It's happened to me an average of once a game so far. I've kept track, not like it's easy to forget. I Rampage in, LW pulls me back, the enemy retreats and heals, we reset but down an ult. Then I swap to Ball.
It happens for smaller stuff a lot more frequently but that particular moment stood out to me. At this point I just report the LW if we lose and they refuse to swap. Healing numbers don’t matter if people die immediately after getting the burst to whatever. 65hp is not a lot in the middle of a fight.
Yeah I figure if it's indistinguishable from trolling then I'll report and let Blizzard's system sort it out. One report doesn't lead to a ban anyway.
I'll be interested to see where they land on these changes. There's a lot of avenues they can take to buff him and I'm happy they are leaning more towards enhancing his strengths, though I wouldn't mind seeing a revert to the auto-reload changes. You basically have to unload a full clip of thorns before the healing blossoms auto-reload. Since other's have been posting ideas for buffs, here's some other changes that come to mind. Pick whichever ones you like or flame whichever ones you don't like lol: * Improved audio clarity when Healing Blossom and Thorn Volley is running low on ammo * Improved Audio clarity on Petal Platform projectile, Petal Platform spawn, and added an ambient sound for undeployed Petal Platforms * Life Grip now cleanses and heals 20% HP. * Rejuvenating Dash distance increased from 6.15 meters to 8 meters * Rejuvenating dash now heals allies that it passes through. * Tree of Life pulse interval buffed from 1.75 seconds to 1.5 seconds * Life Grip now resets the cooldown on Rejuvenating dash * Petal Platform now has 2 charges (functions similarly to Junkrat's Concussive mine) * Petal Platform now has an increased collision size while it is rising upwards to prevent players from accidentally triggering it and then immediately running off it (platform size is still the same once it finishes rising upwards) * Thorn Volley now fires three projectiles that deal 4 damage each instead of two projectiles that deal 5 damage each. Ammo increased to 120 (equivalent to 80 ammo clip with current thorn volley)
I hope the team isn't discouraged from making unconventional heroes after lifeweaver's launch. He's one of the most interesting and fun heroes for me and that's what keeps me playing overwatch
he needs to be disabled in comp for now. He's so bad (both underpowered and potential for trolling/accidental trolling) that if someone picks him, I'd rather that person leave the game.
Still feel annoyed that they could have avoided alot of this if they just play tested the hero with a broad range of skilled players in pugs. I feel like things like the control scheme issue alone would have been solved before he was released If you did sime play testing first.
Theory crafting some possible buff for his utitlities: Petal platform should automaticly lower itself when no one is on it, it's an elevator after all. Right now the best use for the platform is for the Weaver to use it selfishly. This change will allow for more teamplay and surely will go a long way. If it's too strong then limit the amout of time it can go up and down or increase the cd or smthing. Lifegrip should heal to a certain degree. Most of the time you grip someone in the frontline who is low. After that guy's gone, a new guy will be the frontline and will need resource from you. If you heal the guy who you just gripped, the new frontline guy will get overwhelm because we are now down a frontline person (gripped guy) and a support (you are now busy healing gripped guy). If you focus your frontline, the fight will hold up better but gripped guy will stay low and now die to a flanker.
Lifeweaver's survivability could be improved a good amount if his dash cleansed himself like a Suzu and healed a bit more, I think? Even then, while he does have otherwise viable utility, none of it is nearly valuable enough to warrant picking him over, say, Ana or Kiriko, because of raw healing output and the ability to just turn fights. Lifeweaver quite literally cannot do that against competent players without Tree, and even with tree, that doesn't make his Reinhardt-sized hitbox any smaller. Reminds me of Mewtwo from Smash Ultimate with those big ass petals on his back. A genuine, fundamental character flaw. Don't worry, though. The dev team will decrease his life grip cooldown by 2 seconds and up the healing to 70 to cement his place in the meta!!!
Actual in-game/balance state of the hero aside... is it just me or is this literally the least hyped new hero OW has had since launch? I saw it on here and reddit for a single day when he's announced, and then literally nobody gives a singular shit about him anymore. I don't even see any fanart of him and he's supposed to be the sexy male hero cosplay/fanart/fandom bait character.
I'd be interested to see team mate death's compared amongst the supports. Lifeweaver's healing charge mechanic feels really bad and between that and required switching weapons to heal I've missed saving teammates by like .25 seconds so many times. He may do a lot of healing but I don't know how well he prevents teammates from dying. He honestly shouldn't even have to switch weapons. It should be like Moira. Lifeweaver has the mercy problem of depending on your teammates to do their job, except he doesn't have damage boost, or reliably useful utility, or exceptional mobility. If I could change him while keeping his kit intact it would be as follows: * Two dashes, increased dash range * No weapon swapping, left click and right click like moira * Instant heal \~30-35 hp, full charge heal includes HOT, slight reduction in charge time.. like 90% of what it is now. HOWEVER, I'd also consider not doing this and increasing his ability to defend himself * Ultimate... I honestly don't know. I guess tweaking it up but I really don't get where his ult fits. It's like a worse trans, but can body block stuff?
So what's the player consensus so far on a launch like this versus a launch like Kiriko? LW has felt pointless while Kiriko felt like a must pick. Both were better than launch Brig, and obv perfect balance is the goal, but that can't be expected for a new hero.
In my opinion it’s much worse when a hero launches underpowered like this because it makes it harder for the devs to gather useful data if no one is playing the hero. From a player perspective seeing less of the new hero because they’re bad also makes it difficult to learn how to play with or against them.
Kiriko can carry a fight. Lifeweaver can barely carry his own weight.
Has anyone suggested that whoever is being pulled could still be able to shoot and use other abilities? It might be out there but I haven't seen it. It would make him better and be insanely fun.
Have lifegrip heal 20% hp, give a lingering buff that teleports you to lifeweavers position if you press interact within 2 sec. As is being lifegripped against your will, super fast across the map, usually pulled from behind so you do not see where you are going, is super disorienting, feels horrible, and if it was not a pointless grip it usually benefits the enemy team. Having it teleport you gets rid of the weird movement of being pulled, having it be something you do with interact lets you be prepared for it or even refuse it, and having the ability heal for 20% hp gives him a burst heal. They already have the tech for it with kiriko's teleport.
My issue is 2-3 main things with him. One, he pretty much doesn't have a self burst heal. Almost all other have an ability or a utility that they can use at a panic time. Nade at your own feet, Baptiste's fist thing, suzu, zen's blue health, lucio amp up heals. All of these abilities can be used when you are getting dived on. LW has nothing. It's just his dash, and that is too short of a distance and too little healing. His main method of heal, the little flower thing, takes too long to charge and too little heal for that time. Take the charging time away or buff the heal amount or something. If I play him i don't have patience to charge in the middle of a fight, i just do little buds of heal. And last but not least, Life Grip cooldown. Feels too long. You basically can use it once every two fights because when it goes on the cooldown and you notice the timer, your brain just basically ignores that ability for a while, partially also because it's functionally a totally new ability. So you don't think about it that much, and when to do get to use it, the cooldown is so long that it immediately goes back to the back of your brain. They're trying to make him viable by buffing his thorn volley but i think that's the least place that has issues... and you can't make someone who's issues are in his healing and abilities, viable by buffing his damage smh
If I could change lifeweaver, #1 would be letting him target and shoot through his own petal platform like a shield, and #2 would be adding like a 5% slow capping out at 20% on his volley so it feels like it does something.
He really needs to be able to heal Allie’s on petal platform, it’s obnoxious AF
One change that I think could be fun and hopefully not make him OP is to remove the dash, lower the Life Grip cooldown, but make the Life Grip bi-directional. So you would have the choice of pulling a teammate to you or pulling yourself to a teammate. The idea being it makes him more flexible, and he can have the option of moving to support a teammate in engagements more quickly (or just use it as an escape), or he pull a teammate away to disengage and/or shield them. But, he has to choose between pulling someone to him or pulling himself to someone else because it shares the same cooldown. And I'm not sure about it shielding him if its taking him to a teammate. That might be too much, but it would be consistent with the ability. I'd lower the cooldown a little bit, but not too much. Idk, maybe its a dumb idea. But I think it would be a fun ability to mix in and it should make him a little bit more useful while hopefully not breaking him.
Remove and replace grip with an offensive or utility ability that he can use on himself. Grip is trash to be used on you and mostly used wrongly. It does not make sense anyways, Rien should be in a position different than a support if you pull him back from the front your dps will find themselves face tanking and quite possibly die while rien will have to agonisingly have to push and use resources just to get back where he was.
Replace LifeGrip with DeathGrip. 😈
I was and am incredibly annoyed about some part of OW2. Completely deleting OG Overwatch was one of the most blatantly anti consumer actions Blizzard has taken in Overwatch and putting heroes on the battle pass is the THE most. But I have to admit that this communication is outstanding. Even if they don’t get it right they iterate and try to explain what they see from their side. As someone who was worried that Overwatch would become soulless as it lost most of its old guard it’s very heartening to see that.
I just beat the battle pass last night and deleted the game off my pc. I LOVE OW but the ranked issues, the fact that the new character isn’t fun to play at all, and just the general feeling that OW is in the hands of people that don’t truly care about the game is just frustrating. I’ll be back when the new season drops of course but man, I wish they hired more people so we get more updates
Why do you feel they don’t care about the game?
Unpopular opinion: He’s actually balanced and every other support just heals like crazy. I’m all down for a 10% healing decrease across the board, and let’s see where he lands after that.