I agree that Life Grip is painful to play into. I had a game on the same map as in your video (I basically stopped caring since OW2 came out, so I don't even know the name of it), where I was playing Rein, and every time I landed a charge on an enemy, it was Life Gripped away before I could hit the wall. I watched the replay later and saw that our Tracer flanked their Ana, stuck her with a bomb, and then the Lifeweaver standing next to the Ana pressed Life Grip and nullified the bomb's damage. The invulnerability happened instantly, before the animation began playing, before Ana began getting pulled. It wasn't necessary for the LW to anticipate the bomb and react ahead of time. So the Tracer's long flank, sneaking, and sticking the bomb was all nullified instantly with a single button press. Sure, you could say the same for Zarya bubbles, but at least they can be destroyed, e.g. bubbling a Rein's pin target can fail if the bubble gets destroyed before the collision. Life Grip has no counter at all, and it seems to have longer range than Zarya's bubbles, too. The bad gameplay elements, combined with getting threatened with suspension or banning because I said in match chat that our DPS seemed to be playing with a controller (which, after watching the replay, I confirmed--the match ended with our DPS having 2 elims and the opponents' DPS having over 60), makes it seem like Blizzard really wants me to uninstall the game again.
(Quite a late) Spattering of potential design alterations. Intent behind them to hopefully aid in LW's hero identity matching up closer to a more, tactics essential pocket healer like mercy: Main Healing Bulbs (Primary Fire) - The ui elements would be a lovely addition as you suggested. Personally, I think doubling down and having the LW be able to "lock onto" their healing target to begin healing would be a welcome change as well for pocketing. The Alt-Fire - Bewildering execution in my opinion. Path of least resistance I can see is to have it do something else besides raw damage on hit, simplest to me being a bleeding effect that is amplified when a teammate also fires onto the enemy in question. Otherwise, most likely needs to be sent back to the workshop :t. Life Grip - Could be given smaller changes, but I think ripping the bandaid off and applying a more secure concept would be more beneficial in the long run. Main idea I had was to take the effect, and reverse it. Have LW pull himself to the teammate and support them. Can lead to you getting killed with your teammate if timed improperly, but has more counterplay and agency than the ability has currently imo. (Also the invulnerability it has should most likely be culled as well). Petal Elevator - Good concept, bad execution from what I've seen. Having it be a cooldown that can raise teammates to highground, without wasting their own cooldowns is a neat idea, but falls apart due to it being used more often than not, to BE the highground, and all it takes is your teammate jumping back down for it to be wasted. If they instead just made it a stationary jump platform, with a cooldown between each jump, it would (in theory) be way more utilizable in poking between seperate elevations. (Dumb ideas that should most likely not be added to his kit, but just sounded fun, and why not get all the ideas off the table): - They could bring the death flower back, but it ONLY heals your teammates. Why they let it be applicable to anyone, regardless of team, just to remove it entirely is genuinely befuddling to me. - Have an ability that makes a healthpack heal a person more on use, only once, and needing reapplication upon said use. (Most likely has synergy issues with Sombra hack, and encourages healthpack bunkering, so yeah probably shouldn't happen lol). - The tree ultimate is more than likely fine as is, I just find it mundane from an ultimate standpoint. A humorous concept for one I had is that in some way LW turns the ground near him into lush golden grasses that heals any teammate that stands on them. Again the one he has is fine from what I've seen, just think it could be more interesting. Goodness that was a lot. Almost hope no one reads this purely from a wordvomit perspective (..almost lol). But yeah to anyone who read this, bless, and hope it gives some more ideas on how to improve the quality of poor LW overall. (Also apologies if this reuses ideas from others I have failed to see/credit).
The intent, I think, was to make a character who really engaged in positioning as a skill set. Grip, petal, and dash can all be used proactively to take a position or reactively to shut down your opponents. His healing style is meant to work with that, letting you heal the team effectively from odd angles
I agree entirely, but the extra value he gets from positioning himself well is pretty much only life grip being better and survivability. Aggressive positioning is never prioritised unless you want to dump kit with dash petal and lifegrip, because he can’t use or fight for these positions or use them himself.
@@realth8572 Hey, I've started my own youtube channel (I'm really bad at it and don't know how to edit videos yet) dedicated to Overwatch analysis. I'm super passionate about the game and 'd like to share my views on the game with you and maybe get some help in editing my videos so they are smoother, clearer and more concise. I believe I have figured out how the game is supposed to be played which even people at the highest levels are not understanding and if I refined my videos and gained a proper following I could seriously educate everyone in the player base on the most optimal way to play the game and more importantly why it is the most optimal way to play. In addition by learning these game theories I have studied meticulously we could manage to perfectly balance the game so that counter picking becomes a vital aspect of playing the game which was the original intentions of the game in the first place. Feel free to visit my channel to hear my thoughts and if you're interested I can join a discord server with you to discuss the game further. :)
Usurer joking right? Grip let’s your teammates get away with bad positioning, and petal is for when you’re about to die (from a bad position) and need to cheese your way out
@@Sushie55 grip isn't just for "bad positioning" dumbass, you can use it to save people from certain deaths they cannot escape as well as aid with their ultimates and get better, more unique positioning.
@@realth8572 Being able to heal around odd angles is super valuable, especially when you can provide that level of positioning to your other team members. I've been doing fantastically with LW myself, but I know a single example doesn't make a trend.
I still have NO IDEA why the devs haven't halved his weapon switch time. It feels so incredibly clunky to have a hero who has a delayed weapon switch, a slow charge time on his healing, AND a reload on that healing that is even slower than charging your healing. Every single ability he has has some sort of sluggish delay.
The developers INTENTIONALLY gave him all of those restictions because of how his heals work, fundamentally. They aimlock and provide instant bursts of heals greater than Baptiste and Ana. All they need to do is make his blossoms provide healing over a period of two seconds instead of instantly and then the devs can actually work on removing the intentionally terrible decisions they made to try and balance him.
So ive one tricked lifeweaver up to grandmaster and he does have a lot of issues. His abilities are purely defensive which i guess is supposed to be his specialty, the only issue is that other supports offer this better than weaver himself. Kiriko has an aoe cleanse, immortality, and burst heal. Ana has a 50% heal increase which is also aoe, not to mention she has higher healing numbers. Bap can make his entire team immortal for 5 seconds if placed behind cover, and has massive aoe healing on his shift and secondary fire. The only time weaver can outshine other supports is when your team is falling off the map constantly because thats the only time grip is better than every other support ability. The reason I play him isnt because of his healing, but because of the creative things you can do with him. You can cancel a lot more ults than people expect (rampage and flux are the best examples), and you can move your team around like chess pieces to give them more value. If I could change him, for defense I would add debuff immunity to the person being pulled with lifegrip (not a cleanse, but if they get hit with anti during the pull then it doesnt affect them), increased heal projectile speed, and for the edges of the platform to curve upwards to avoid damage easier. For offense I would give people the ability to cancel pull by pressing their interact key, and if needed, an antiheal debuff on his primary fire. Of course this wont be a 100% antiheal, but 20% would be good and would actually add something small to his offensive capability. If they were to add this, I would make the healthbars go pink instead of purple to specify what level of antiheal is on them (plus it would fit his color scheme. Rip zoe
totally agree on the petal platform idea, i always thought it was meant to be used as a way to give your allies high ground for free and then have them fight people from up there, but every time I've used it that way it just ends up killing them because they have zero cover up there and just get shot by the whole enemy team at once. I also think the way that you have to deploy the platform really sucks, you have a one-time projectile that bounces off of walls, barriers, and enemy players, and if you mess it up you have to wait a whole twelve seconds for another one. It's such a cool ability with so many uses but it's such a pain in the ass to actually get it in the right spot at the right time that most players end up just not using it. I wish they'd give an option to just spawn one under a player you choose (kinda the same way Zen targets people with orbs) or some way to see the trajectory before you throw one. I also think Life Grip is a really cool ability with a lot of wasted potential, like you said it's great for moving people around like chess pieces, but it also makes them invulnerable which contributes to a lot of complaints people have about abilities that feel like they steal a kill away from you. I think they should try reworking it to focus more on the repositioning aspect of it, so say instead of making someone invulnerable it forms a weak shield around them like a Zarya bubble that the enemy can break to interrupt it. Then give it a lower cooldown or maybe even another charge so it can be used more frequently. I also think Tree needs some kind of offensive capability if it's ever going to be good. Sure, there are ults like Transcendence and Sound Barrier, but both of them are way better at saving people and Barrier is basically an offensive ult since Lucio can speed his whole team during it. Hell, even Mercy's ultimate can be used offensively, either damage boosting or going after people with her pistol. The closest thing we have is just placing it behind the enemy tank as they walk through a choke, but that's only viable on specific maps and it feels kinda lame spending your ultimate on something that's basically just a stronger Mei wall. Tree also really sucks as a defensive ultimate because it can't even be moved once it's placed, so you're basically asking your team to stand still if they hope to get any benefit from it. You can't even stand on it either which I always found very odd for a hero so focused on high ground and giving his team a positional advantage, like it seemed like such an intuitive idea that I was surprised when I found out you couldn't.
I will say he is completely viable as a hero now, he just doesn’t excel over any other support. That being said he is definitely a horribly designed hero. He is basically made to prevent the enemy team from making plays and having fun. Having really high healing output prevents kills, lifegrip prevents kills, 225 hp with 50 shield hp prevents him from dying, a 50hp dash prevents him from dying, and of course if he isn’t dying he is able to output more healing which is preventing the enemy from doing anything.
Couldnt agree more, the worst part is that even at its best, his high healing cant keep a brawl tank up anywhere near the way bap ana or kiri can. There's just no niche!
This is mostly true if you play with a poorly coordinated team. I can guarantee you ,a team that actually communicates and works together will shut him down just as easily as any other hero
@@pwpqwq7648 That’s not the point I am making. It’s just that he is a hero designed to ruin the other teams enjoyment of the game. Sure you can shut him down easily but that doesn’t change the fact that his kit is fundamentally flawed.
5:02 I disagree with the implication that people who "don't want to aim" also don't want to play tactically. I feel it quite the opposite, often people don't want the aim specifically so they can focus on tactics and positioning and all of that jazz. Ever seen an "aim-carried" player, where they are incredible at clicking on heads but don't know a frontline from a backline? Imagine that, but the opposite, a player who knows every corner of the map and how to play around it, but also can't hit a hog. That is the type of player that Lifeweaver or Mercy or even Mei or Winston attracts.
I agree and never thought of it that way even tho I main mercy Lifeweaver Moira kiriko where aim isn’t always the focus. It’s pretty neat that some characters have very simple easy to use kits that when used professionally can be game saving like saving your team with tree of life from shatter or flux or other ults. Lifeweaver is one of the few supports that can successfully deal with mines while the others just run he can clear paths with life grip and destroy many with platform I find him fun ngl
I disagree too I suffer from arthritis at a young age and it’s just hard for me to age and characters like mercy and lifeweaver give me a chance to play a game I like
@@gitogal omg, i hope that gets better for you! I'm in remission from Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, had it from Pre-K to Highschool. This severely hampered my ability to play Baseball and function in gym class. What other characters/heroes do you play?
I agree, I’ve been playing for a while now, but for the life of me I can’t aim 😅😂. However, I’ve picked up a lot of game sense and knowledge so this kind of character is perfect for me. Game sense doesn’t equal mechanical skill, they r two independent skill sets that happen to often grow together.
3:44 regarding the mercy lifeweaver comparison Mercy was already tried and testing from tf2 she’s pretty much the mvm medic with some angel aspect (flying and floating n shit) Lifeweaver was a blizzard original they had no one else’s homework to be inspired from (at least to my knowledge the only part of the kit that reminds me of another game is the elevator flower albedo has in genshin)
By drawing the analogy to Mercy, it allows me to work through the ways a character can be balanced, and pin down what doesn't work about his kit. I sincerely hope that they were trying to make a Mercy style character, and failed. If they weren't, it shows a much deeper misunderstanding of their game design balance.
@@realth8572 I think maybe in the future his kit might be useful but they’d have to design new hero’s around being countered by him tho. I think the roster is reaching its limit imo or at least that pre existing characters just have such strong and essential parts in their kit that new characters just can’t compare to ana’s heal block, kirikos cure, mercy’s res or zens damage increasing potential I don’t think there’s any room for lifeweaver
@@realth8572 We know they were trying to make a Nercy style character, don't we? I remember before he came out reading some of the devs saying the next support was going "to be more like Mercy with a heal that doesn't require much aim and doesn't fight directly as much", or something along those lines.
Crazy spitball idea: make life grip an ability that has to be pre-cast before you can pull. Basically, the ability puts a life tether on a teammate. This will have a visual effect that the teammate (and everyone else) can see to know that the lifeweaver has his eye on them, and they can afford to go "all-in". After maybe a second of being active, it can be reactivated to pull them. While active, it would give some minor buff (idk) and/or allow the lifeweaver to heal them instantly just by charging his heal--as the charge meter goes up, they are being healed. This eliminates the abruptness of life grip, which is imo a big part of what makes it so frustrating for both teams. This way, everyone will know when and who can get pulled, and that they will be receiving extra healing. This gives both teams more information to play around, and gives him a better tool to empower someone to fight for an angle.
Great idea. I think platform also needs some changes, I suggest giving it one of two buffs to anyone who stands on it: Either a damage boost or small amount of healing over time, so it actually incentivises your teammates to stay on the platform a little longer and seek it out instead of just treating it like an obstacle to immediately step off and continue fighting on the ground.
the hitbox and former passive baffles me the most, he is at tank height, the petals makes him the opposite of cammoflage, my aim is dogwater and even I can hit him with ease. as for his former passive, supports should avoid death more than others, not promoting it.
@@tilick2144 In that case though, heavy only drops it when he's killed while using it. If heavy accidently heals the enemy team, it's a skill issue from trying to heal at a bad time. I've never even played TF2, but I could immediately guess that's how it worked cause that just makes more sense. The way lifeweaver worked where they drop the health pack no matter what is just beyond absurd
I feel like he’s really fun and also has a genuine purpose only when you’re playing with a good team with comms/friends. His platform and pull are supposed to be repositioning tools. That’s what he’s supposed to excel at. But the community tried to force him on every map on solo queue. Randoms wouldn’t understand and even months later, still don’t understand how to use the tools Lifeweavers gives effectively. He’s so fun on maps like Gibraltar and Dorado where his ability to reposition can carry fights. But most people just don’t use him like that and only use pull to pull their 1hp teammates, and only use their platform to protect themselves. So he ends up feeling like a very boring character.
I'd like to see Lifeweavers spikes turned into the needler Halo gun (without the homing). Each hit applies a stack and at a critical stack amount they explode for damage to help with duels, or if you wanna make it more support flavoured, he can stack needles and then any sources of damage from allies trigger them for bonus damage to bring more to team fights..
@@sagestrings869 it really depends. Sometimes it’s easier to just reposition your support than throw them an armor pack or try to boop the flanker away
@quiteslayer4067 If you are helping your other support in a duel as LW No one is healing the team. Brig when dueling a flanker is both healing her team and peeling for her squishies.
It's difficult to compare LW to mercy when only looking at healing numbers. Mercy's greatest value is not her healing. Healing is arguably 3rd or 4th on the list. Her damage boost, res, and higher movement/survivability is far more valuable than her relatively low output healing beam. Only looking at Mercy's healing output is equivalent to looking at only Lucio's healing output when examining him. There is a reason Mercy and Lucio are off healers and not main like Baptiste or Moira can be. She can be a main support in many comps, but she shouldn't be played as the main healer. Main support and main healer are two different things.
I honestly love Lifeweaver’s kit. Grip is so useful and I love seeing enemy weavers able to pull off a perfect grip. Peddle is clunky I’ll give you that, but it would be cool if they changed it something like Mei’s wall where you could press the button again and it’ll shift from a platform to a small wall that sticks where it hits (wall, group, etc). Dash and his thorns is my only real complaint as switching to thorns takes a second and the dash doesn’t give him enough movement/can’t keep him alive as well as kiri, bap, or Ana’s self heal skills
I think Lifeweaver is incredibly cool and he's my favorite character in the game. I'm good with him being kinda weak forever. If they made stronger with some crazy rework that gave him offensive capabilities or something like that I'd be very sad.
my problem with lifeweaver is that they try to consider him a main Support when he’s very obviously not. there is no way he can keep anyone up by himself
Having an ability that forces your idiot friends / total strangers out of stupid positions they got themselves into is so unbelievably valuable good lord. Hating on life grip is flatly a bad opinion
I will say as a lifeweaver main that there is some major potential within his kit when it comes to repositioning your allies that I can think of no other supports can with the petal platform and of course life grip so if we were to ever rework him or give him a certain role I want him to help the team focus on positioning like Mabey having a shorter cooldown on abilities or just a bit more healing to compete with mercy or even baptiste
I agree entirely, recently I’ve been thinking that removing the immortality entirely from his grasp and giving him two on a cool-down whilst making his survivability lower would be a perfect spot, all the angular positioning, none of the kill denial
I remember when Lifeweaver was first announced Blizzard sent an email advertising that he was a “high damage support”… pretty crazy. It would be nice if his healing would have a “blooming effect” giving an ally like a small healing over time if its fully charged. That would give him the flexibility to be more aggressive and give the allies more opportunities to keep fighting. Would be interesting if they gave his damage a small burst if he lands a certain amount of shots. Both are in line with his hero fantasy, I believe. Very nice video. Keep up the good work.
YES, Ive been saying this over and over again to give life weaver a healing over time to help him heal. And make it where he can switch to dps and heal instantly
My problem with the character is that despite him having a decent damage option (not great, but it’s a good suppressive damage option), you simply have little to no time to leverage it, just because if you do, somebody on your team would likely die just because it would take you, like, two full seconds to heal them even a tiny bit. So it would be great to reduce the weapon switch time plus maybe have his first heal flower pre-charged to some % after switching from damage thorns
Let’s fix my support main. First idea is for the Life Grip to instead be a temporary invincibility. But if they hold back or press S, then they get the grip effect. Otherwise there is a cooldown reduction, and they get a small heal. This prevents accidental or troll grips from having too much impact on the game. Second, we need to bring back the destroy petal ability, but instead it just lowers it. So that way if you’re on a petal and your teammate wants up, you can press that button and it will go down for a second so they can get on. Third, why does his secondary fire consume 2 ammo per shot? It makes it misleading, half the ammo capacity and make it consume 1 like a normal fucking person. Also give it a slightly faster projectile speed, it feels like I’m shooting a homing turtle. And give it a new, more noticeable sound. It sounds like I’m shooting a Temu Star Wars blaster. With these changes, I feel like it could be more of a choke-spam tool. Now increase the healing time and give it a slow, but let my man charge up his primary fire while he’s shooting his secondary. Baptist’s can do his shoot-heal combo, and I think my man weaver should take inspiration. Remind me: why does his ultimate exist? A mostly stationary object that gives you some heals and other stuff. Never before seen concept! (Besides kind Zenyatta, Kiriko, Juno, and kind of Baptiste). I don’t have any suggestions for a new ult, but his ultimate is basic af. Maybe it should spawn a couple of petals that only your teammates can use, or it could have a one-time effect where it pulls a teammate towards it when they would’ve died otherwise. It’s just a glorified Illari pylon. Anyway that’s it
15:23-15:38 Exactly this this is one of the many reasons he’s so bad no pre heal ,travel time and charge time and no indication of healing that tells you you’re being healed .all of this makes it difficult to save people and by the time you do they are dead. Everything about his healing is too slow everyone else healing is literally instant.and the ammo limit doesn’t help either .
I think something fun that could be done with Lifeweaver would be to allow his primary heal to give some overhealth if he uses it on a full health target. Obviously not 1 to 1, and the overhealth should decay relatively quickly, but imagine being able to pump your tracer up to 225 temporarily with the stipulation that if she wants to make good on that buff, she has to make use of it *quickly*. Being able to still provide value even when your team isn't taking damage is one of the primary things that separates Lifeweaver from other supports, and I think being able to charge up a little temporary overhealth for your flanker when you get some downtime is something that could be added and make him feel unique and viable without being overbearing, just so long as it decays quickly enough. Do I trust Blizzard's current development team to get the balance of that right? Oh, absolutely not. If it were implemented we'd see overhealed tracers stomping all GM games for a week straight then a panic patch to nerf Lifeweaver again.
My take on lifeweaver is that he has a crazy potential to work with an enabler playstyle. He should be balanced towards that because 1- it's the fun quirky part of the kit that is actually enjoyable, at least for me and 2- enabler support playstyles are severely lacking in representation on the roster. Petal is an actual insane unprecedented ability that creates angles out of thin air where before _mei_ _wall_ was the only option. Something like an interactible "base" that allows allies to pull themselves up to the platform after it's activated would allow it to give more agency to weaver's allies in how they use it and cement the "moving allies around" identity. The option of interrupting life grip on reaction and/or giving it as a buff that can later be activated as would also allow it to give more agency to allies in how they use the movement weaver provides and also would be a path for blizzard to "canonize" life grip.
I think it would be better to not only add the UI element for healing blossom, but also to make him do a bit of healing per second while he's charging his healing blossom, while reducing the max healing charge amount. So, for example while you charging your healing blossom, you're not only showing your teammates that you're trying to heal them, but also providing the 20 hps while charging the blossom. And when you charge it up to the full, it will heal additional 60hp (20 hps while charging the healing blossom and 60 hp as a burst when the healing blossom is received by a teammate). I think it can improve the situations where you need to fastly heal someone, but can't do it because of the long heals charge time. This change doesn't really increase the hps on lifeweaver, but grandly fills the time while you're charging your healing blossom and leads to a more consistent healing
I think I like this fix most of all the ones I’ve heard, even out the spikes of support which makes the enemies feel terrible, give constant feedback to the ally that they’re being supported? Keep the hero design exactly as is in place. I read all comments but this one is gold.
Reducing that awkward healing downtime on lifeweaver with the channeling 20hps would feel SO much better, for both him and his allies. The ui element is a must. Absolutely love this idea!
personal thoughts on a rework for lifeweaver, some might be in the video but i think about this a lot lmao (note: numbers would definitely need to be balanced around these ideas) Healing Blossom - automatically charges up to max burst healing - charge can be sped up by dealing damage - decays over time to promote using more often - remove ammo and make it a resource optional: projectile with no homing but large hitbox like virus. but the homing isn't a pressing issue Thorn Volley - option 1: delete it and replace it with something more in line with kunai with higher impact shots. - option 2: give it a poison effect or a very minor debuff of sorts that deals damage over time to increase his damage uptime while healing. - option 3: make it bounce on walls and floors like a watered down scatter arrow, maybe have each thorn do very little damage on its own but makes him a real threat indoors and at close quarters like junkrat to force you to respect his space. this will tie into my thoughts on removing the heal from regenerative dash to make him less tanky i prefer option 2 personally. maybe low base damage but a longer damage over time effect to lessen the urgency of his damage/healing swap and allow him to confirm more kills for his team Regenerative Dash - remove the annoying free heal and add something more useful to it like super jump is to guardian angel. maybe make it so that if you double jump while crouching you roll instead to shrink your hitbox temporarily. just give it SOMETHING different and give him some more skill expression with it. it's just hanzo double jump right now which is insanely lazy. unfortunately, it's also the most consistent / least buggy part of his kit which is kinda sad. Petal Platform - FIRST AND FOREMOST, FIX THE MOST FRUSTRATING PART OF HIS KIT: MAKE ENEMIES UNABLE TO TAKE THE DAMN PLATFORM. ok, actual rework idea now! - no longer only lasts a few seconds, instead have it go back *down* after a few seconds of being in the air. make it a real elevator like the ones built into certain maps, but as an ability that he can control and place wherever. it'll be incredibly strong on maps like collosseo where vertical mobility majorly cuts down on travel time (i.e trying to get up to the mini near the bridge) and it still retains its existing utility (giving heroes with no mobility access to height they can't normally get to. like all 3 high ground options on kings row third point.) - lasts until killed like a turret or a pylon. - allow lifeweaver/teammates to activate it either by stepping on it or by pressing F, like a symmetra teleporter. (or, *just* by pressing F. i'd rather only have that than only have stepping on it.) - related to last note: could have a decently long reach for lifeweaver to be able to activate his petal platform, to allow him to remotely throw it into an orisa ult or a grav and activate it. of course, the teammates could still activate it from inside the grav/orisa ult however this would make it less consistent. but honestly, maybe more fun / more dynamic! Life Grip id argue that a complete rework is needed. one way it could function: - pressing E on someone now marks them for life grip. this would work like orb of harmony minus the healing - it would be visible to your team, the enemy team, and most importantly there would be a unique visual indicator on the screen of the marked teammate letting them know that you can life grip them back to your position at any time. this properly enables your teammates to go in and utilize life grip's potential without the use of comms or voice chat. mark them, they go in, you life grip them by pressing E again. - the cooldown only starts when you use life grip, there is no cooldown to change marker targets. there could also be a punishment cooldown if you let your marked target die without life gripping them. this could be abused by the enemy team, forcing you to either let a teammate die or to use your cooldown. - it's a very dynamic ability which is why i love this idea - imagine the following scenario: enemy flankers may be deterred from diving a zenyatta if they know he could be life gripped. or they could be incentivized to dive him anyway and force lifeweaver's hand. - building on the first point, remove the travel time on life grip. have the target be encased in the existing animated pink orb, and then *teleported* directly to you. what you lose in aesthetic you gain in consistency. as it stands, life grip is too damn buggy. targets get stuck under the map on samoa and die anyway, targets get stuck on map geometry and don't travel all the way to you, and so many more problems. simply having them teleport directly to you solves so many of them. - since we're now using the marker, we can remove the contingency of line of sight. you can now use life grip in a *radial* circle around you - regardless of line of sight. it doesn't have to be excessively big, but big enough to let your team flank around a building or so and get into the backline. big enough to let you grip a reinhardt back in after he's charged all the way in. probably around the size of kiriko's teleport. this also allows lifeweaver to more consistently pull teammates back up if they fall off the map. since there's no cooldown on changing the marker, if you have the cooldown you can quickly double tap the E key and apply it to someone to pull them to you. - this is a rez/lamp level cooldown at least. it would be so powerful and so versatile, but so incredibly fun. it has nearly infinite possibilities. keep in mind all of these are mostly realistic rework ideas. what we need to remember is that blizzard can't change things like lifeweaver's main model / things like his back petals very much. they can only adjust hitbox size. they also can't size him down. well, they could but this would require retexturing parts of his model to retain quality and changing his design like that would require them to adjust all of his skins. most of the rework ideas i've mentioned work within the existing art, sound effects and voice lines they've made for lifeweaver. one obvious thing people don't seem to realize is how much of a money hole it is to throw out voice lines, icons, models, etc. and give us new abilities. i can't imagine how much money they've lost on symmetra. it's much easier to build on existing abilities and ideas (changing brig's shield to modernize rally, giving sombra and hog new abilities while keeping the old ones, etc.) than it is to scrap them and move on.
This is really well thought out, i would personaly remove some healing from the dash and add a knock back effect as a way of controlling your enemy's positioning
I agree with you on the UI element, I personally think having the healing bud grow on the teammate would just help so much instead of making it a projectile. Like a Zen orb that charges up and when you release primary fire it just releases the charged up heal immediately. It would give teammates more assurance as they dive, and allow peeking out of LOS for a moment without worrying about being supported - much like when Mercy's stand behind corners
I’m genuinely here for this comment section. I’ve been reading what everyone has been saying and the immeasurable support for Life Weaver here and these amazing ideas for him in the community. Myself with hundreds of hours and ranked time on him & others here, too. He definitely needs some tweaks, I agree wholeheartedly. I think he’s amazing though. Not terrible, like, at all lmao. Quite literally his whole kit can do an insane amount of different things on all maps and almost all the characters. I’ve been playing since 2018 & with my map knowledge I can get through games & literally not die with how fast and unpredictable you can move. I get mad aggro with thorns and just get in squishys faces & just win the fight with my dash and shield. I have a feeling through Blizzard is gonna cook with him and are probably gonna re work his kit imo. You make a lot of good points on him as a character tho
Maybe he could give overhealth with a full charged healing left click on a full hp ally? That way he synergizes with topped up heroes and overhealth is a lot less busted than brig/torb armour pack was
as a lifeweaver main since release he's gotten a LOT better. I think now he's at the point where someone who's never played him can succeed unlike say doomfist or ball who require skill both mechanically and character specific. I regularly preform well with him in matches and I think his buffs have been great. only thing I wish he had is some sort of burst option for either damage or healing. currently the closest thing he has is tossing a heal orb and life gripping at the same time to overlap their heals but even then it's not practical because life grip inherently removes a character from the fight, making the "burst" more of a recovery. He puts out a surprising amount of damage and shouldn't be underestimated when flanking him especially if the LW plays the lucio type "can't catch me" game better than you can. overall I think he's in a good place but only really shines when teammates take advantage of his petal platform and play with life grip as a pseudo kamikaze play get out of jail free card that enables dives that would otherwise get you killed and snowball into wiping the team.
I think they could add some much needed enganging utility that can be used proactively instead of passively by waiting for you teammates to screw up: give him a single Zarya bubble on grip that grants invulnerability for 1 second (like a single target Suzu) so you can press it once (shield allies) and hold it (pull allies)
I think this is a pretty good analysis and I've been wondering why I lose games on LW but have like 25-30k healing and like 1-2 deaths. I think one of his biggest weaknesses is the fact that he can't do damage without completely ignoring healing. His damage just isn't strong enough to ignore healing, and it's only really good in small bursts, or emergency 1v1 duels. Mercy can at least increase the DPS' damage with blue beam. He's essentially only heals, and if you max out scrubs with full healing/HP and they can't get the job done...all the heals in the world won't change that, but it's possible that blue beam, discord, things like that can push them over the top. I think his heals have to give a slight advantage besides healing, but attack speed would ruin the cadence of the game and be annoying. It has to be something like 5-10% damage buff. Who knows, though. Also Life Grip should cleanse. I'm sure they'll add it eventually, but it's sort of nuts how it isn't in the game yet when it's such an obvious, and fair buff. He needs a way to enable the team without sacrificing heal uptime, and I don't think Thorns is the way to do that.
Why not just make grip a single target cleanse on a shorter cooldown? Can’t save himself, can be low impact as it doesn’t need I frames it can just be “he cleanses everything with a burst 40 healing every 6-9 seconds” & he’s got clear utility, encourages more ppl being picked & lets him play without long ass down time on everything.
Another route is to change his playstyle by as you said, QoL change healing icon, reducing the travel time (think of Zen's healing orbs) I think the healing is fine, increase the heal over time. Think about it, theres so many characters that thrive at angles, the fact he has poor offense means hes more suited as a glass healing cannon, he should be able to provide steady heals the pre heal is huge and would absoluteley change the experience, playing him more as a "hidden mercy", which fits his character avoiding fights while enabling them is MORE like Mercy as she spends 80% of her time either healing or buffing, I think he would also benefit from a support buff passive, for example: that every fully charged orb provides a 35% damage reduction that lasts 3 seconds, which would allow his healing to feel more chunky and provide something other than just healing and would be somewhat unique in the sense that its not aggressive and fits his character, but also provides some sense of independence for the dps who are often in dangerous positions to get the kills they need; I'm just spit balling here, but having a character that can heal out of sight is pretty sick, its similar to Zen and Mercy because they need to stick fairly close in order to get the heals, but forces the enemy to find the proper angles/tactics to push you out. So being able to drop less heals that are more significant allows for the charge time to at the very least seem reasonable. Also your temmates need to know when theyre being supported, if your reticle is on them you should get an Icon that ligths up and sparcks or shines everytime you get healed and its intensity determines the size of the heal if it turns dark blue you have the Damage reduction. The platform just needs to act like a regular shield that you can stand on which means you can see/shoot through it, which would make it more viable... imagine the possibilities... I think these changes would be enough to make him significantly more viable, I'm a flex support main so Ive played LW and hes not bad, but it has so much room for improvement... I'd rather main Zenny... which I do.
Lifeweaver is the epitome of a "win more" character. His main role is centered around dealing out large quantities of healing... that's it. He offers no utility in aiding your allies to eliminate enemies, Ana has her nade & sleep, Lucio has speed boost, Moira and Zen have Orbs, Mercy has damage boost etc. All Lifeweaver can offer is his alternate fire which is ok at best, but when he's using it he's doing 0 healing, even his ult is just "more healing". This means if your teammates are eliminating the opposition you're all set, just keep your allies topped up and you're good to keep going and get the win. But if your teammates are not getting eliminations, all you can do is just try and extend the fight until either they get an elimination or get eliminated themselves, you can't quickly whip out a shield-bash, a sneaky headshot while your pylon takes over, or use your ult to give your teammates a higher dps. You just have to hope your teammates can survive longer than the opposition does, thus when you're winning; you win by a larger margin, but if you're losing; there's not much he can offer to change the course of the fight.
There is one thing that I'd say life grip does well it would be that protecting and moving around teamates with ultimates that don't make them invincible and are very slow like reaper, roadhog, and cassidy/mcree.
Personally, I think LW should be a bruiser. I would make two changes: first, give his ammo a UI near the center of the screen so that you can flow between modes more effectively. If you try to heal a 17th time (with his current 16 clip size), you have to react to his reload animation, swap to shooting (which comes with a delay), then swap back (another delay) to then heal again. If you don't start shooting immeditaly after using your last heal, you may as well just wait the reload animation out as swapping is very clunky. Second (basically part of the first), greatly increase the speed at which he swaps between heal and damage. Let him flow more effectively, and his lower throughout isn't an issue. I imagine him as a bruiser: his right click on a tank can SHRED them at close range. A Winston getting a little too familiar with you? Just rain down on him, forcing him back (much like Brig does). He has more health than the average support, with shields to boot, the petal as a self shield, and his dash to avoid damage. Getting in the fight is actually where he can be most effective. Diving next to a genji or tracer, helping them secure the kill. If they get a little too low, Grip them to give them the shield+invulnerability as you finish the kill. This would give him an interesting niche; a support with long range heal and utility, and short range damage and survivability. It is also just plain fun. Weaver is one of my favorite characters, but without a reliable team I feel like I struggle to make an impact (as you mentioned in the video). I have won countless fights with a single, well place Ana grenade. Sniped many targets with a Zen right click. Put up staggering numbers as a Moira. As Lifeweaver? I have gotten flamed to no end because I pulled a low health ally when they were allegedly close to a kill. Or flamed for not pulling them .01 seconds after they call for it.
Life weaver has a shit Neutral game. He has two niches: Enabling Hyper aggression, doom/genji and now Venture. These characters now have a free get of jail free card. Anti-ultimate: With petal + tree + grip there are endless ways for you to deny enemy plays through blocking LOS and more importantly neutralising the most powerful ults in the game grav, shatter, flux, cagefight. LW punished ability reliant enemies, but his weakness is just consistent damage.
Hmmm... If Lifeweaver's healing gave 25-50 overhealth for 1.5s on a max-health ally like his ult, I think that'd be a great way to give him more effective power without causing problems!
Okay here me out, make his heal work like zenyatta primary fire. It does a base heal value of let's say 35 hp for now with a somewhat slower fire rate than zen primary fire. Hitting an ally with healing multiple times in a row makes the healing your orb gives them increase with each shot. lets say it increases by 10, so healing the same target multiple times will heal them for 45 per orb instead of 35. This allows you to have burst healing on one target at the cost of not healing allies, while choosing to heal multiple people means you don't get high healing throughput. No aim assist on the orb either with a very fast projectile speed (again, zenyatta orb) so it has a bit better skill floor. The secondary fire can work the same as it does now, but no weapon switching. Right click to do damage, left click to heal, that's it. I'm not really sure what to do with the other abilities though. I have ideas for them, but they're all kind of spitballs that sound somewhat rough and weird. Also if this all sounds insanely stupid to you, you are correct I am in fact a gold player. I just like to think I'm somewhat intelligent when it comes to game design but have yet to have that theory tested so please let me know your honest thoughts about this idea.
Imo, beside the clunkiness that can entirely be fixed by patches, the big issue with Lifeweaver's kit comes from platform. Platform is just a gimmicky ability with very rare and unpractical tactical use cases that overlap with other part of his kit and I see no good reason to keep it in place of something Lifeweaver would actually need.
Love your channel keep making the great content. I wouldve rather weaver had a deployable jump pad than a 1 use elevator. I would like life grip to not pull ppl out of the fight but be a destroyable zarya bubble that if burst increases healing received by the target similar to ana nade.
I personally think replacing his dash with a utility ability might push him in the right direction. He can maybe gain 10% more movement speed and self heal on thorn hits. Like you said; he feels and plays like mercy with only ressurect and no damage boost.
random idea: give Lifeweaver the more construct options. When you use the ability you can choose between a petal platform, jump pad, petal wall that you can toggle like Mei's ice wall. That would give him a niche in terms of utility that plays towards his hero fantasy.
i was thinking a thorn wall that could function like ram's vortex, but smaller. It wouldn't pull ppl to the ground, but it would slow enemies and make them take damage if they tried to cross it.
I like this idea let me add some input for possible options. Petal Platform- As is, will remain the same. Possible add cover by extending the petals to curve upwards. However this might inflict on the heros visual design so maybe not. This would help give lifeweaver more of a niche of creating new angles. Rose bush- Thrown out like petal platform, this would create a wall of thorns the sizs of ramattras shield that would slow and damage enemies who walk through it. Applying a Damage over time and slow for a couple of seconds after they leave it. This would function very similar to roadhogs pig pen. Can be destroyed. This would deny enemy flanks and protect your angles or at least buying more time possible disrupting a dive. Can also be thrown into enemy backlines to zone them or at the enemy tank to be a nuisance/ trap them Lily Pad- would be very similar to petal platform placement wise, however this would work as a horizontal jump pad with slight vertical height aswell. This would allow for dives/ engages for your team without commiting abilities or allow for disengaging on your backline from a Flanker, can also be used like a sym teleproter to horizontally get between 2 highgrounds Vine tether- Cast the same way as petal platform, would create a node that tethers the first person that walkd through it applying a small damage over time and the tether should probably last a small ammount of time aswell, maybe like 1.25 seconds or even less. Possibly just a better rosebush but single target it would be used very similary to it Thorn sheild- Would create a placeable 200hp barrier the size of brigittes shield. Damages anyone who walks past it. This would help support your dps on angles or help you take a angle. Also make his hesling a little less downtimey and more consistent Also also allow him to have 2 different deplyables out at once, adding to his hero gantasy of feeling like a chess master positioning pieces to your will
What I'd do is making the heal have unlimited ammo, life grip have a double tap, first one shields the ally making it take less damage and the second actually pull the ally towards lifeweaver and like you said add a notification of being healed by lifeweaver, that's my idea
Yknow, If you play blizzard games, they kind of make the same stuff in a slightly new package all the time and they should still do that, but they should take a more proactive approach. If Lifeweaver has a problem with healing and aggression, perhaps an instant heal (They'd stick a travel time on it i'm sure) for around 100 on a single target, maybe it even has the tree of life mechanic where it give overheal that ticks down. put a 8-10 second cooldown and lifeweaver can now prebuff anyone before a fight, truly save someone and their position and also just maintain player better
how about adding some character healing like little plants like illari's where they burst heal for about 3 seconds kinda like brig charges, or if not adding a way to tp to his platform
I think your video nails the issues with LW very well. Although he's been buffed a bit since you've made your video, it still isn't enough. Fundamentally his kit is just kind of bad. Lifegrip being the biggest problem, even if you pull off some cool saves it usually means your team loses positioning especially if you have to pull the tank. A different support could have just kept the tank alive and in the fight (usually), so his value as a support plummets immensely. I've been thinking long and hard about what can be done to fix him if Blizzard insists he keeps his kit. This ultimately doesn't fix his core issue, but it might make him more viable. Give thorns a stacking debuff of 1-2% extra damage per thorn that caps at 10-20. Switching to thorns should be instant (in fact it should work more like BAP), and increase the damage by 10-25%. One of my biggest gripes with him is his insanely low damage, the meta of the game has shifted to support also being helpful in securing kills. Unless someone is "1", LW can't do too much to help out. Remove his healing ammo count so he never has to reload. It seems unnecessary, and it really drags down LW in prolonged fights. Which is strange because I've never felt this way with Ana or Bap, but this might be because they have other things they can do to help the team and also have good offensive capabilities. Also remove the unnecessarily slow debuff you get when you hold a charge, like why is that a thing? Petal, I actually like this ability and think is has some great uses, and makes as a great escape tool. Maybe make it last a little longer, but that might be OP. Airdash is the same as well, I like it. I wouldn't even know where to begin with Lifegrip and Tree of Life. Anyway I never broke T500 and was only ever a low GM, so I'm not sure how much my opinion is worth in this discussion lol.
As an Anna to LifeWeaver main Honestly I think that just giving him some kind of seed type effect might work? Either a seed placed when healing a full health target that pops for a small heal when the target takes damage Or a thorns type ability that does aoe damage around the buffed ally when they take damage Mostly to keep dives off of them or go for an easier escape Or maybe he could give a small life stealing leech seed style buff to an ally that would show up on the UI
Coming from a Mercy Main who ACTUALLY loves Lifeweaver is that you need to understand his kit. Yes, it is hard but when I was just getting Overwatch I started with Soldier: 76, DVa, and Mercy. I later stretched myself to play more DMG and support heroes. Lifeweaver is one of my favorite heroes to use other than Baptiste because he is fun. I have moments where I've had more healing than my support partner. (Coming from a Console player PS4)
I think a plausible solution could be to make him function like Corvus in paladins in the fact that he gives a mark This ability can replace petal if needed or he’ll even grip. What this mark does is mimic life weavers actions: whenever he heals someone, whether the mark or someone else, the marked hero gets a percentage of the healing. Whenever life weaver shoots his primary fire, the marked person has a thorns fire from their crosshair that does less damage than life weavers thorns. This can let the player know that life weaver is there to support and also lets life weaver pressure two angles at once. Plus maybe the mark can give one cc immunity, in exchange for losing the buff when enemy cc is applied to the marked hero. If liveweaver would still have life grip (aka it wasn’t replaced by this mark), maybe whenever he uses life grip on someone else, the marked ally would experience a buff of some kind? Unsure what this buff would be but I don’t think it should be a dr or even invincibility buff. Again, it allows life weaver to pressure multiple angles. For balancing purposes, only one mark can exist at a time and the mark isn’t unlimited and has a set duration, which can be refreshed by using the cooldown on the same ally BUT it doesn’t stack, only refreshes. This mark can help immensely with dive and rush characters, which seems to be what the dev team was trying to do but idk. Blizzard works in mysterious ways
An issue I can see is lifeweaver building ult charge really quickly because of this (since he’s dealing two instances of damage/healing at once) so maybe as a compromise, this mark doesn’t generate as much or any of at all ult charge? Idk, that or just make his ult cost more. I would try to change his ult but idk how to. Since in my mind, tree is just stationary rally/transcendence
Eh i dont agree. I feel like lifeweaver is a strong utility card. Just having a lifeweaver denies many plays, he isnt as vulnerable as people think, as a genji, sombra or tracer cant that comfortably 1v1 him. He does a suprising amount of damage and at any time he can just platform away or pull a teammate to help. He is like a +1 buff to every player on the team. Anyone can get a platform that can either save an ally or remove an enemy tank for a few moments (which is currently the one thing i abuse in this tank centric meta)
The worst support comp is lifeweaver/mercy. Everytime I get that comp it's a drag, it feels like 3v5. You better hope your DPS/tank are really good and can compensate for the missing support agro,
I agree overall, but the two heroes and their high survivability are pretty fun for QP purposes. Petal pad rezzes and dpsing on them is quite fun too. But whenever it comes to viability they do fall off more as they lack the carry potential other supports have.
petal and grip needs to be given some kind of way to allow for more agression eventhough i think for petal it's harder (for example giving a damage buff while on it would just encourage pretty boring play) but i think for lifegrip having it temporarily giving a speed boost may benefit both high and low level play tbh. it'd give more engagement options in higher level while on lower level allow a new lifeweaver to be less of a detriment if they fuck up a grip as the teammate can just go back into a fight
You really hit the nail on the head with his biggest problem for me, his incredibly reactive playstyle. Mercy is similarly reactive but she gives teammates the means to make plays with her damage boost while lifeweaver genuinely just has to wait for either the enemy to make a play or for a teammate to completely mess up a play, games with him just feel like you're waiting for things to happen and not making them happen yourself. You don't get kills, you don't give your team opportunities, you just give the team to make one screw up per fight.
I really enjoy lifeweaver because his kit helps manage team cohesion in qp and low ranks. Outplaying ults like sig's grav, jq's rampage, zar's grav etc with well placed trees and platforms are really satisfying. The new petal mechanics help with repositioning multiple teammates and the silly hero combos really make lifeweaver satisfying to me. Would like to see a short revisit to this vid now that people have learned what they can do with the character.
As I see, if you have a team comp with high mobility (i.e. Winston/Ball, Tracer Genji, and Lucio, he works pretty OK at healing. He's not as easy to kill if you save the petal platform for your own survival
Man it's sad because I really enjoy lifeweaver. I've been playing overwatch since WEEK 1 and have never had so much fun playing a hero before, so much so that I decided to main him. Now with the DPS passive rework, he feels terrible again and I was already at my breaking point with the game, so I uninstalled it. Hopefully he can get some changes so I can come back to enjoy the game I used to love.
Ok, here are my lifeweaver buff ideas to give him more identity and utility. 1.) The way his healing is ive always flet like it should do something more. The possibility of it giving a speed boost is interesting but could be infuriating, but i think it should lean more into helping agile targets. Another idea is that it provideing a little overhealth or shield temporarily (like 25) 2.) Platform feels kinda unimpactfull. It can only really be used to go high, which is good but not enough. By making it perma and or allowing you to have multiple out, you give dps new angles that can feel impactful(it keeps a health bar). Another idea is to make the platform heal whoever is on it. This also makes lifegrip better since now lifeweaver can hold a strong position while supported by a dps with a presumably even stronger position and enabling him to pull them to him when their Platform us inevitability forced down I think these are great ideas, but surely im overlooking something. Hopefully, someone has an idea of how to improve these ideas or if they're utter garbage
I think the reason lifegrip is more annoying than rez is because of the time at which it can be applied. Rez can only be applied after an enemy play, lifegrip is applied right before, which is one the most dissatisfying things ever. Additionally, from a balance perspective, mercy can do nothing else while rezzing, while lifeweaver only has a downtime of a fraction of a second. This makes lifegrip one of those "no downside" abilities. If lifeweaver had to experience some sort of a negative result from using lifegrip, it would be less annoying to verse, because at least you could exploit its usage
It has a really lrngthy cooldown however. That is the punish. Consideting it can only save one target you can bait it out and then make the play just like with suzu or nade. I feel that suzu is atguably worse to play against because it doed the same thing essentially, stopping big ultimates/plays. While it does so over a shorter period of time it has a shorter CD, a cleanse, is AoE AND heals targets for like 100 hp if they were debuffed. If you also pressure LW when he would Lifegrip it's also very bad for hik to use it because he either drags in someone to their death or dies himself.
This makes so much sense now about why I've felt my Mercy main skills were transferable to Lifeweaver (at least... the way I play Mercy - either way, he's really enjoyable for me to play). I've always wanted the ability to grip pull reckless players as Mercy, so this has (sort of) been heaven :)
Regarding the 'down time' with Lifeweaver, I don't disagree, and this might not correlate at all, but I just find it funny that my fingers hurt more after playing Lifeweaver than when I play Mercy
I rather have the LW over a mercy any day of the week because I rather get value in keeping someone alive with pull then waiting for Rez for any value to come but this video really made something clear, players just won’t react at a t500 level pulling a tanks or dps from making plays instead of pulling to help for peeling for you but the fact you have to pull someone to help you instead of taking duel themselves creates even more down time for other characters
my idea is to lean more into the dive support+hard to kill idea, let him,be able to deploy his tree from farther away and the very first pulse of it when he plants it is a cleanse. only the first one tho every other pulse is normal healing. Suzu is and anti have been like dominating and giving cleanse to someone else plus he can get his ult quickly might be a cool change.
this is a little late but its not like things have changed in 3 months lol, I agree entirely, the biggest issue with LW is simply half the time his kit is negated by your own team mates making you feel like you're trolling 50% of the time, the amount of times im playing echo or soujourn, engage, get some damage, get low and use my abilities to escape onto to be immediately hit with a burst of healing or even gripped away which then just negates my movement ability but not really leading to this super strange movement when the full is finished and its super jarring. This makes him extremely frustrating to have on your team when 90% of the time a kiriko tp suzu at your feet would of not only secured the kill but then you and her can actively fight someone else etc, but not only can he be frustrating to play with, his entire kit is built around denial. Petal and grip negate so many ults in the game but unlike suzu which has an obvious impact on the game, neither of LW abilities are easy to bait out cause they don't do enough offensively anyway. Not to mention how frustraing the insane burst healing can be. Idk just a weird character
maybe they could give weaver something like the tf2 medic's overheal, where a fully charged heal will give overflow hp past max hp for a maximum of 80 overheal
I remember when he was leaked I automatically assumed it was fake because I thought blizzard wouldn’t be dumb enough to make a character with an ability like life grip.
i think the solution could be to make his flowers (leftclick) a passive "allies healed get an effect called *nutrition*, which increases the ult charge gained by a teammate from all sources (more effective on the pad and near walls?)" which has a icon and ui changes matching the effect. This fixes both, gives information about healing and provides more value. Hope someone sees this. :)
What do you think of: Making his primary fire hitscan but for every shot you hit you leave a "thorn", with each thorn reducing incoming healing by .25%, capping at 100 thorns, one of which would be removed after every 3 healing received - this would be to avoid making better at DPSing than most DPS but still provide good utility and offensive power with his attacks Making life grip and deployable object ( like a tree branch thing or something) that he would place down and then bind to a specific person, who would then use Interact to be gripped whenever in range and in LOS of the branch. - this would make it less of a troll ability and it would mean that it would actually be able to be used to enable teammates to make risky plays, with the understanding that they can get themself out if they take into account the branches position, and it makes life grip more interesting to use as now life lifeweaver has to take into account where his team want to go as well as maybe even enemy flankers destroying it into where he places it, instead of just using when you see someone far away and low And finally parting gift ( actually useful this time) he can charge a full heal and pre place it on someone,.who could then leave maybe into the enemy 's backline and then once they fall to half hp, it would activate and heal them for one charge -this further allow him to enable teammates while playing aggressively himself Overall i think this would make him better at enabling while allowing him to play aggressively and provide good offensive utility and create offensive pressure
Im late, but I've been maining LW since his release, having a good time! I love the pull, and the petal, personally I really like his kit. Tracking my teammate's Cooldowns and pulling them right on time feels so nice, but ofc not for the other team. My main complaint is his controls... Im on console so i don't have a convenient way to switch weapons, and if I have the newer control scheme I get hard nerfed by having a delay on my dash because I NEED to jump now. Its really sucks especially with abilities that lock jumping like Sig ult, Ram Vortex, ect... I really think that, sadly a rework is probably gonna be the best avenue... It'd be sad for me to see petal or pull go, but if they wanna make his kit more viable, and fun, one of them has to go... (Probably pull I think...)
When you are holding charge and looking at someone not only let them know give them a small hp gain per second and increase the total heal. Swap the weapon fire to hitscan which may need tuning balancing, consider making his health orb a barrage but decrease the total amount if healing more than one target: You charge and then hover over each person you want to heal and then release but give it less healing when spreading it out.
lifeweaver SHOULD be definitely be a high priority pick in casual ow along the lines of mercy (ok maybe not that high lol) but definitely moira, lucio, and kiriko level. hes skill floor is relatively low, he has mobility, and probably the best visual design of any hero period. theres glaring issues with his kit that i noticed immediately when his kit dropped that still have yet to be fixed. 1. swapping weapons. its been beaten to a bush, but its true. the simple fact that he has to swap is a major turn off. its clunky. everyone pointed it out. it still rings true to this day. 2. mobility. he might seem mobile from an outside perspective until you actually play the hero. his dash is short and the cd is too long. his platform cd is too long. 3. platform. you cant really use platform for anything other than self peel because the cd is too long. 4. life grip. giving a hero this much power over other players is intimidating. the fear that they might pull at the wrong time and get flamed is real. the more u play him, the less youll mess up/care about the flame. but this is a barrier for new players. 5. change his name. i really dont like the name lifeweaver and i dont feel like it fits him very much either. it just doesnt roll of the tongue nciely. it would fit a knitter more than a plant mage lol. the fw sound feels as clunky to say as his kit is to play lol. give him a name where hes from that relates to plants, flowers, life, etc. tbh lifeweaver just isnt very fun. you stand in the back and heal. if you can, take a good angle and reposition your dps. pull allies out of enemy ults. his griptypically saved for emergencies. his platform for when the naughty tracer flanks you. that means he will spend most of the match healing and using his lil baby dash every 5 seconds. whats lucio doing? perma wallriding and booping. mercy? dashing every 3 seconds across the point lol. moira? lock on succing with the best get ouf of jail free card. how would i change him? its simple! we must find what makes him unique, streamline his kit, and make him FUN! i would much rather lean into the builder archetype, creating cover and high ground for his team. life grip has GOT TO GO! 1. remove life grip. it has no place being in his kit. it really feels like they had a great idea for an ability and pushed it into the next released support and are now forced to balance him around it. GOODBYE! that means there is more power to be placed in his other abilities to make up for the lack of grip. 2. his damage and heal are no longer a toggle! the only reason its not a toggle is because they gave him too many abilities and the only way to fit them into a kit without making a new keybind was for his gun to toggle. but now that grip is gone, thats no longer necessary. 3. platform has shorter cd (like 1 second shorter). it now creates a pillar under it. he can have out 2 platforms. 4. reduce dash cd by 1 second. he will dash the same distance, but can now teleport a further distance to the top of a platform if he targets a pillar with this ability. think of it liek a kiriko step. 5. his ult now has a wide platform to stand on top of. 6. his damage needs to be much easier/reliable to hit! this is what will appeal to more casuals. perhaps take inspiration from junkrat grenades or bap heal, instead dealing damage over time in an aoe where they explode. maybe they could even be revealed through walls while poisoned to his team.
So having been playing lw for a few months, i think me (granted im a silver/gold scrub so take my ideas with salt) have the problem of him being very good if im with someone really good, similar to mercy being a win more? type support vs a over all "good" support (think anna only needing to land 2/3 of her skills to be of some value). I do have some change ideas i think would be intresting but im not sure how they would play out in practice so again take with some salt 1: the weapon : I kinda wish they would change his weapon to either a charged weapon to either charge up a heal or charge up a scailing damage "thorn" spike, yes youd lose the rate of fire but trade for bigger hits, imagine hanzo arrows but on a support? or b: change the healing to be shot out like the thorns but as petals? so he ends up being able to be more aggressive like kiri or moria in regards to heals and damage . 2: dash, perhaps to help him be a bit less clunky allow it to also go vertical like all the other mobile supports?, like either jump "dash jump" for horizontal or jump jump for vertical 3 : life grip.... honestly im not sure what can change about it... but i do wish theyd add some "protective" coding so you dont (cant) "accidently" pull someone off a ledge or soemthing, like end early or extend the pull to always land safely on a surface. 4: platform... so wild idea, and this is a 2 parter, firstly change its key binds, give it 3 activations 1: plant it 2: "move" it 3: end it, or just 1 and hold to force it to end early before having it move. Secondly... allow it to be placed on walls, make it more used for getting allies out of a area, or pushing enemies in a direction, like throw it on a wall and force them into the open vs a dva bomb. 5: ult is honestly fine? out side the obvious skill issues it has that he/it shares with mei ice wall, maybe it drops fruit for major burst healing?
I think he works well as a choke breaker, but he’s just super niche. I think they should take inspiration from Thresh from LoL with his life grip. He can throw a bubble on the ally, but the ally choose to interact with it to get pulled; similar to Symmetra’s teleport, except it’s on them. And if they don’t interact with it, it just gets refunded (maybe idk). Healing, I’d make it a mix of Kiriko, Mercy, and Lucio. He can hold down heal and the lotus blossoms and petals fly to whoever he’s attached to, but he will also have a small AoE heal around him for whenever is next to him. None of it will be huge healing, but it’d be consistent and give him a better pacing. Obviously this wouldn’t necessarily make him functional necessarily, but for me personally it’d make him more useful.
When it comes to life weaver, I think the biggest fix (besides the UI idea, which is genius) is to give him something new to do so that he doesn't have down time. My biggest idea for this is reducing enemy movement speed with vines. Make him a cool down that either holds a target in place, or a mini air affect that causes enemies to move slower (think reverse Lucio) and thus harder for them to escape from your DPS. Or if they want to perfect his gimmick of giving allies better angles (flower, life Grip) make it so that the range/defense provided by them is stronger. I.E let life Grip grab people from father away and heal a bit more so that the lost space is made up for better, while making it so that maybe life weaver has to be completely solitary in the same way mercy res is (or... something) and make it so the flower doesn't disappear and need to be remade. Just make it so it breaks when you reposition it like pylon. Another idea I had was giving him cleanse. Have life Grip have a cleanse affect, and let tree cleanse and be unbreakable in exchange for it not being able to heal through shields and being destroyed by EMP again. With those two things ALONE he would have a much bigger role to play and make him a rival to Kiriko, who has a insane pick rate just for Suzu. Or...you can make it so that flowers don't have a charge time at all. He can just, shoot them. Like Ana does. Removing their charge up and cool down after spamming them would immediately make him a more reliable healer without any other changes honestly. If they want a hero that JUST heals but does it better then any other support, make his healing more important. I think with this new meta too, buffing his healing numbers a bit more then other healers that have better gimmicks would allow him to stand on his own two feet while being more viable.
You could reduce the back hit box and give him a horizontal movement option incentivizing grip pulls aggressively into fights You would be able to pull off more moments like a petal high noon or a flying rein pin since you can play more in the front
Honestly, parting gift could work if its only for teammates it's a powerful passive so ig to balance it out it also includes enemy's so maybe they should re add it but this time only for teammates and let's say it only heals 90 hp
maybe during his cast time the targeting locks and has mini zen orb kind of healing to the target, maybe they can glow pink or something. imagine a dps can sort of hold an angle that way and when they are escaping you can release the mouse to use your burst. basically just mercy but with a springloaded healing burst baked in. this would be quicker to activate and more reliable than a burst ability with travel time and aim like suzu or armor pack but not quite as powerful as either, giving it perhaps a cool niche as well as just making it more engaging for the weaver i think. to offset this more effective left click, just remove life grip ez (hero fantasy will be the same because you can actually save people with your healing)
Seems like the best solution is to make his healing ability work a bit like Zenyatta. When spammed, his flower should quickly restore hp and have no auto tracking, and could damage enemies - making him give more pressure when healing and eliminating his weapon swap entirely. When bloomed and charged, his healing could instead apply a life flower on the target, that blooms when their hp is less than 100% - restoring a moderate amount of hp over time, and could be marked as a notification on their hud that they're flowered. His full charged flowers could also be applied to enemies instead and apply negative healing; when the target receives healing, the flower blooms and absorbs 50% of incoming healing over 3 seconds. Lasts 10 seconds before the flower fades. The flower would also poison the target, dealing low consistent damage over time but no direct damage. The poison effect could stack, but also be non-lethal on its own, making it a powerful pressure tool that can allow him to seriously pressure angles and reward him for charging his attacks. He would have slightly better throughput on heals when tossing 'weaver seeds', but his strength is more geared towards providing those HoTs and DoTs.
Since his petal platform find itself not very useful at times - and not something you need to hold onto like lifegrip - is it not possible to allow him two cast modes? One for a repositioning petal and the other perhaps a chip damage/crowd control option. Roots on the ground, or an exploding lotus fruit? Something.
No doubt there’s room for more design in his kit, but regardless it’s difficult to get around the core that his healing mode is just badly made for what it has to do. So all other changes take the characters design further away from the developers intention of making a character like mercy
@@realth8572 that's the thing - his identity is the issue. Only Mercy can be Mercy. A derivative still has to be Mercy (but X). So far he's Mercy with worse playmaking options, which is impressive because Mercy is often joked to be a skill-less character. But at the very least the skill expression of Mercy is overt. Lifeweaver's skill expression isn't in the use of his abilities, it's in not using it.
One way to make Life Grip more reliable would be to turn it into a buff/status condition. Using the ability will initially apply the buff and not put Life Grip on cooldown. At any time, the Lifeweaver can use the ability again. They can use it on another target (removing the buff from the first target) or they can use it on the same target in order to pull them towards Lifeweaver. If the target gets below say, 50 HP, they are instantly pulled towards the Lifeweaver. Pulling a target (manually or automatically) puts the ability on cooldown. This sounds pretty OP, to be honest. But it WOULD give the target some indication that they are free to jump in, without requiring the Lifeweaver to communicate with them (much like a Mercy beam). For ever more reliability, you could make it so Lifeweaver constantly has the marked target's HP on their HUD, much like a Mercy or Zenyatta. You could also make it so the LW can heal the Life Grip target without having to aim at them, thus giving the target another indicator that they are receiving focused and reliable support. Of course, line of sight should still be required both for the healing and for the grip effect.
Honestly, though, I would rather they just completely redesign the hero. Both Life Grip and Petal Platform are extremely annoying abilities to play against.
Honestly i just want to have a option to deny life grip if you don't have a dash. I've lost count of the amount of times i got life gripped when i was 2 shots away from killing somebody while i'm at a 60%+ health just to watch my target walking away scot-free after i got dragged accross the map
Just spitballing here. What if there was a low healing beam that went to the targets (10hp/s) with the healing burst? Another one. Have consistent beam output but you can stop it to charge a big healing, potentially giving overhealth and healing more adaptively.
The way to fix lifeweaver would honestly be giving all supports a team hp and cooldown indicator in one of the corners. This way he knows when he show pull vs when he should let the other person use their movement ability. (also, make it so when hes been using thorns for long enough, when he switches back to healing its already fully charged)
Easy fix. Primary fire: stays the same Secondary fire: charges up when you aren’t healing or firing. When you start firing, release a high spread burst of needles that shreds enemies up close. After the burst, he fires at range as he always has when the button is held Petal Platform: stays the same Regenerative burst: no longer heals, but can be used on a 1 second cool down and can be used to gain some height. Life Grip: instead of pulling teammate right away, marks the teammate with a symbol that lets them know they can grip to lifeweaver with the interact key. If the teammate ignores the option for more than 5 seconds, lifeweaver can use the ability again on a much shorter cooldown. Tree of Life: stays the same Passive: heals a percentage to self of all heals given, including the ultimate.
What if they made it so lifegrip was instead an ability you preemptively place on an ally (think sort of like harmony orb, but on cd), this is displayed as some sort of floating thing on them (prob a flower) with a duration marker. At any time before it runs out the ally can press the interact key to activate a lifegrip, pulling the ally to lw's current position. Line of sight would prob be required, maybe similar to harmony orb where there's a grace period but you cant activate it unless direct los is there. This would put the urgency and decision making into the hands of the target (avoids accidental double ability usage) and lets the target know when to make riskier plays without having to just hope the lw is looking at them. A similar thing could be done with the healing, allowing to essentially preheal a target for like 75 hp or so, and that health will slowly drain to heal the target once they take damage. (Should also be displayed to the target)
1 Year update since release, seems that blizzard think buffing healing and survivability is all he needs 🤔
I agree that Life Grip is painful to play into. I had a game on the same map as in your video (I basically stopped caring since OW2 came out, so I don't even know the name of it), where I was playing Rein, and every time I landed a charge on an enemy, it was Life Gripped away before I could hit the wall. I watched the replay later and saw that our Tracer flanked their Ana, stuck her with a bomb, and then the Lifeweaver standing next to the Ana pressed Life Grip and nullified the bomb's damage. The invulnerability happened instantly, before the animation began playing, before Ana began getting pulled. It wasn't necessary for the LW to anticipate the bomb and react ahead of time. So the Tracer's long flank, sneaking, and sticking the bomb was all nullified instantly with a single button press. Sure, you could say the same for Zarya bubbles, but at least they can be destroyed, e.g. bubbling a Rein's pin target can fail if the bubble gets destroyed before the collision. Life Grip has no counter at all, and it seems to have longer range than Zarya's bubbles, too.
The bad gameplay elements, combined with getting threatened with suspension or banning because I said in match chat that our DPS seemed to be playing with a controller (which, after watching the replay, I confirmed--the match ended with our DPS having 2 elims and the opponents' DPS having over 60), makes it seem like Blizzard really wants me to uninstall the game again.
(Quite a late) Spattering of potential design alterations. Intent behind them to hopefully aid in LW's hero identity matching up closer to a more, tactics essential pocket healer like mercy:
Main Healing Bulbs (Primary Fire) - The ui elements would be a lovely addition as you suggested. Personally, I think doubling down and having the LW be able to "lock onto" their healing target to begin healing would be a welcome change as well for pocketing.
The Alt-Fire - Bewildering execution in my opinion. Path of least resistance I can see is to have it do something else besides raw damage on hit, simplest to me being a bleeding effect that is amplified when a teammate also fires onto the enemy in question. Otherwise, most likely needs to be sent back to the workshop :t.
Life Grip - Could be given smaller changes, but I think ripping the bandaid off and applying a more secure concept would be more beneficial in the long run. Main idea I had was to take the effect, and reverse it. Have LW pull himself to the teammate and support them. Can lead to you getting killed with your teammate if timed improperly, but has more counterplay and agency than the ability has currently imo. (Also the invulnerability it has should most likely be culled as well).
Petal Elevator - Good concept, bad execution from what I've seen. Having it be a cooldown that can raise teammates to highground, without wasting their own cooldowns is a neat idea, but falls apart due to it being used more often than not, to BE the highground, and all it takes is your teammate jumping back down for it to be wasted. If they instead just made it a stationary jump platform, with a cooldown between each jump, it would (in theory) be way more utilizable in poking between seperate elevations.
(Dumb ideas that should most likely not be added to his kit, but just sounded fun, and why not get all the ideas off the table):
- They could bring the death flower back, but it ONLY heals your teammates. Why they let it be applicable to anyone, regardless of team, just to remove it entirely is genuinely befuddling to me.
- Have an ability that makes a healthpack heal a person more on use, only once, and needing reapplication upon said use. (Most likely has synergy issues with Sombra hack, and encourages healthpack bunkering, so yeah probably shouldn't happen lol).
- The tree ultimate is more than likely fine as is, I just find it mundane from an ultimate standpoint. A humorous concept for one I had is that in some way LW turns the ground near him into lush golden grasses that heals any teammate that stands on them. Again the one he has is fine from what I've seen, just think it could be more interesting.
Goodness that was a lot. Almost hope no one reads this purely from a wordvomit perspective (..almost lol). But yeah to anyone who read this, bless, and hope it gives some more ideas on how to improve the quality of poor LW overall. (Also apologies if this reuses ideas from others I have failed to see/credit).
The intent, I think, was to make a character who really engaged in positioning as a skill set. Grip, petal, and dash can all be used proactively to take a position or reactively to shut down your opponents.
His healing style is meant to work with that, letting you heal the team effectively from odd angles
I agree entirely, but the extra value he gets from positioning himself well is pretty much only life grip being better and survivability. Aggressive positioning is never prioritised unless you want to dump kit with dash petal and lifegrip, because he can’t use or fight for these positions or use them himself.
@@realth8572 Hey, I've started my own youtube channel (I'm really bad at it and don't know how to edit videos yet) dedicated to Overwatch analysis. I'm super passionate about the game and 'd like to share my views on the game with you and maybe get some help in editing my videos so they are smoother, clearer and more concise. I believe I have figured out how the game is supposed to be played which even people at the highest levels are not understanding and if I refined my videos and gained a proper following I could seriously educate everyone in the player base on the most optimal way to play the game and more importantly why it is the most optimal way to play. In addition by learning these game theories I have studied meticulously we could manage to perfectly balance the game so that counter picking becomes a vital aspect of playing the game which was the original intentions of the game in the first place. Feel free to visit my channel to hear my thoughts and if you're interested I can join a discord server with you to discuss the game further. :)
Usurer joking right? Grip let’s your teammates get away with bad positioning, and petal is for when you’re about to die (from a bad position) and need to cheese your way out
@@Sushie55 grip isn't just for "bad positioning" dumbass, you can use it to save people from certain deaths they cannot escape as well as aid with their ultimates and get better, more unique positioning.
@@realth8572 Being able to heal around odd angles is super valuable, especially when you can provide that level of positioning to your other team members. I've been doing fantastically with LW myself, but I know a single example doesn't make a trend.
I still have NO IDEA why the devs haven't halved his weapon switch time. It feels so incredibly clunky to have a hero who has a delayed weapon switch, a slow charge time on his healing, AND a reload on that healing that is even slower than charging your healing. Every single ability he has has some sort of sluggish delay.
they need to take off all the delays on weaver and his current heal numbers will probably be sufficient enough for him to be more able to be balanced
The developers INTENTIONALLY gave him all of those restictions because of how his heals work, fundamentally.
They aimlock and provide instant bursts of heals greater than Baptiste and Ana. All they need to do is make his blossoms provide healing over a period of two seconds instead of instantly and then the devs can actually work on removing the intentionally terrible decisions they made to try and balance him.
Nah the healing genji meme is definitely a meme because the genji is being unreasonable. Thats what makes it funny
So ive one tricked lifeweaver up to grandmaster and he does have a lot of issues. His abilities are purely defensive which i guess is supposed to be his specialty, the only issue is that other supports offer this better than weaver himself. Kiriko has an aoe cleanse, immortality, and burst heal. Ana has a 50% heal increase which is also aoe, not to mention she has higher healing numbers. Bap can make his entire team immortal for 5 seconds if placed behind cover, and has massive aoe healing on his shift and secondary fire. The only time weaver can outshine other supports is when your team is falling off the map constantly because thats the only time grip is better than every other support ability. The reason I play him isnt because of his healing, but because of the creative things you can do with him. You can cancel a lot more ults than people expect (rampage and flux are the best examples), and you can move your team around like chess pieces to give them more value. If I could change him, for defense I would add debuff immunity to the person being pulled with lifegrip (not a cleanse, but if they get hit with anti during the pull then it doesnt affect them), increased heal projectile speed, and for the edges of the platform to curve upwards to avoid damage easier. For offense I would give people the ability to cancel pull by pressing their interact key, and if needed, an antiheal debuff on his primary fire. Of course this wont be a 100% antiheal, but 20% would be good and would actually add something small to his offensive capability. If they were to add this, I would make the healthbars go pink instead of purple to specify what level of antiheal is on them (plus it would fit his color scheme. Rip zoe
I one tricked Ramattra to uninstall
I literally came to comment about you RAVI lmao
totally agree on the petal platform idea, i always thought it was meant to be used as a way to give your allies high ground for free and then have them fight people from up there, but every time I've used it that way it just ends up killing them because they have zero cover up there and just get shot by the whole enemy team at once. I also think the way that you have to deploy the platform really sucks, you have a one-time projectile that bounces off of walls, barriers, and enemy players, and if you mess it up you have to wait a whole twelve seconds for another one. It's such a cool ability with so many uses but it's such a pain in the ass to actually get it in the right spot at the right time that most players end up just not using it. I wish they'd give an option to just spawn one under a player you choose (kinda the same way Zen targets people with orbs) or some way to see the trajectory before you throw one.
I also think Life Grip is a really cool ability with a lot of wasted potential, like you said it's great for moving people around like chess pieces, but it also makes them invulnerable which contributes to a lot of complaints people have about abilities that feel like they steal a kill away from you. I think they should try reworking it to focus more on the repositioning aspect of it, so say instead of making someone invulnerable it forms a weak shield around them like a Zarya bubble that the enemy can break to interrupt it. Then give it a lower cooldown or maybe even another charge so it can be used more frequently.
I also think Tree needs some kind of offensive capability if it's ever going to be good. Sure, there are ults like Transcendence and Sound Barrier, but both of them are way better at saving people and Barrier is basically an offensive ult since Lucio can speed his whole team during it. Hell, even Mercy's ultimate can be used offensively, either damage boosting or going after people with her pistol. The closest thing we have is just placing it behind the enemy tank as they walk through a choke, but that's only viable on specific maps and it feels kinda lame spending your ultimate on something that's basically just a stronger Mei wall. Tree also really sucks as a defensive ultimate because it can't even be moved once it's placed, so you're basically asking your team to stand still if they hope to get any benefit from it. You can't even stand on it either which I always found very odd for a hero so focused on high ground and giving his team a positional advantage, like it seemed like such an intuitive idea that I was surprised when I found out you couldn't.
how do you cancel rampage with lw?
@@cheesyburger2944watch where she looks while casting it and then block her path with tree
They literally said that LW is meant to be mecy 2.0 when they were leaking him
I will say he is completely viable as a hero now, he just doesn’t excel over any other support. That being said he is definitely a horribly designed hero. He is basically made to prevent the enemy team from making plays and having fun. Having really high healing output prevents kills, lifegrip prevents kills, 225 hp with 50 shield hp prevents him from dying, a 50hp dash prevents him from dying, and of course if he isn’t dying he is able to output more healing which is preventing the enemy from doing anything.
Couldnt agree more, the worst part is that even at its best, his high healing cant keep a brawl tank up anywhere near the way bap ana or kiri can. There's just no niche!
It's cancer to play as and against
I guess you could say he's a *thorn* in the enemy's side...
This is mostly true if you play with a poorly coordinated team. I can guarantee you ,a team that actually communicates and works together will shut him down just as easily as any other hero
@@pwpqwq7648 That’s not the point I am making. It’s just that he is a hero designed to ruin the other teams enjoyment of the game. Sure you can shut him down easily but that doesn’t change the fact that his kit is fundamentally flawed.
5:02 I disagree with the implication that people who "don't want to aim" also don't want to play tactically. I feel it quite the opposite, often people don't want the aim specifically so they can focus on tactics and positioning and all of that jazz.
Ever seen an "aim-carried" player, where they are incredible at clicking on heads but don't know a frontline from a backline? Imagine that, but the opposite, a player who knows every corner of the map and how to play around it, but also can't hit a hog. That is the type of player that Lifeweaver or Mercy or even Mei or Winston attracts.
I agree and never thought of it that way even tho I main mercy Lifeweaver Moira kiriko where aim isn’t always the focus. It’s pretty neat that some characters have very simple easy to use kits that when used professionally can be game saving like saving your team with tree of life from shatter or flux or other ults. Lifeweaver is one of the few supports that can successfully deal with mines while the others just run he can clear paths with life grip and destroy many with platform I find him fun ngl
I disagree too I suffer from arthritis at a young age and it’s just hard for me to age and characters like mercy and lifeweaver give me a chance to play a game I like
@@gitogal omg, i hope that gets better for you!
I'm in remission from Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, had it from Pre-K to Highschool. This severely hampered my ability to play Baseball and function in gym class. What other characters/heroes do you play?
@@maragazh9993 i mostly play low aim needed characters like moria mercy lucio on a good day.
I agree, I’ve been playing for a while now, but for the life of me I can’t aim 😅😂. However, I’ve picked up a lot of game sense and knowledge so this kind of character is perfect for me. Game sense doesn’t equal mechanical skill, they r two independent skill sets that happen to often grow together.
3:44 regarding the mercy lifeweaver comparison
Mercy was already tried and testing from tf2 she’s pretty much the mvm medic with some angel aspect (flying and floating n shit)
Lifeweaver was a blizzard original they had no one else’s homework to be inspired from (at least to my knowledge the only part of the kit that reminds me of another game is the elevator flower albedo has in genshin)
By drawing the analogy to Mercy, it allows me to work through the ways a character can be balanced, and pin down what doesn't work about his kit. I sincerely hope that they were trying to make a Mercy style character, and failed. If they weren't, it shows a much deeper misunderstanding of their game design balance.
@@realth8572 I think maybe in the future his kit might be useful but they’d have to design new hero’s around being countered by him tho. I think the roster is reaching its limit imo or at least that pre existing characters just have such strong and essential parts in their kit that new characters just can’t compare to ana’s heal block, kirikos cure, mercy’s res or zens damage increasing potential I don’t think there’s any room for lifeweaver
@@realth8572 We know they were trying to make a Nercy style character, don't we? I remember before he came out reading some of the devs saying the next support was going "to be more like Mercy with a heal that doesn't require much aim and doesn't fight directly as much", or something along those lines.
Lifeweaver is literally just a World of Warcraft Holy Priest. All his abilities come from that class and I cant believe nobody ever noticed.
he is based on anduin from heroes of the storm
they should make his heal auto charge so u can switch between healing and attacking
I'm saying the same thing!^^ there is an auto charge option toggle in his hero options though.. not exactly what we want but close ^^
He had a vision lol
Crazy spitball idea: make life grip an ability that has to be pre-cast before you can pull.
Basically, the ability puts a life tether on a teammate. This will have a visual effect that the teammate (and everyone else) can see to know that the lifeweaver has his eye on them, and they can afford to go "all-in". After maybe a second of being active, it can be reactivated to pull them. While active, it would give some minor buff (idk) and/or allow the lifeweaver to heal them instantly just by charging his heal--as the charge meter goes up, they are being healed.
This eliminates the abruptness of life grip, which is imo a big part of what makes it so frustrating for both teams. This way, everyone will know when and who can get pulled, and that they will be receiving extra healing. This gives both teams more information to play around, and gives him a better tool to empower someone to fight for an angle.
This sounds great
and to make him a little bit more useful, the instapress of that skill gives an small shield that clears cc on his target
Great idea. I think platform also needs some changes, I suggest giving it one of two buffs to anyone who stands on it: Either a damage boost or small amount of healing over time, so it actually incentivises your teammates to stay on the platform a little longer and seek it out instead of just treating it like an obstacle to immediately step off and continue fighting on the ground.
@@tau-5794 also give a debuff to the enemy so they have to watch there step.
Sooooo thresh?
the hitbox and former passive baffles me the most, he is at tank height, the petals makes him the opposite of cammoflage, my aim is dogwater and even I can hit him with ease.
as for his former passive, supports should avoid death more than others, not promoting it.
I like the concept of dropping a healthpack for your teammates, but in what world did they think it was okay to make it heal enemies also.
Heavy's sandvich works that way, so maybe they thought if it's a fine mechanic for tf2, then it's probably fine for overwatch
It made sense thematically, that’s why it was most likely added.
@@tilick2144 In that case though, heavy only drops it when he's killed while using it. If heavy accidently heals the enemy team, it's a skill issue from trying to heal at a bad time.
I've never even played TF2, but I could immediately guess that's how it worked cause that just makes more sense. The way lifeweaver worked where they drop the health pack no matter what is just beyond absurd
@@squiddler7731 It actually has to be thrown on the ground, where it can be picked up by anyone (and therefore stolen)
I feel like he’s really fun and also has a genuine purpose only when you’re playing with a good team with comms/friends. His platform and pull are supposed to be repositioning tools. That’s what he’s supposed to excel at. But the community tried to force him on every map on solo queue. Randoms wouldn’t understand and even months later, still don’t understand how to use the tools Lifeweavers gives effectively. He’s so fun on maps like Gibraltar and Dorado where his ability to reposition can carry fights. But most people just don’t use him like that and only use pull to pull their 1hp teammates, and only use their platform to protect themselves. So he ends up feeling like a very boring character.
Also not to mention how when you pull a teammate they just charge back in as if they aren’t already low/in a bad position to begin with.
I'd like to see Lifeweavers spikes turned into the needler Halo gun (without the homing). Each hit applies a stack and at a critical stack amount they explode for damage to help with duels, or if you wanna make it more support flavoured, he can stack needles and then any sources of damage from allies trigger them for bonus damage to bring more to team fights..
Lifeweaver's purpose is to Lifegrip the Doomfist. You get value through hyper aggresive feeding team mates.
Yeah, that or saving your Ana / Zen from flankers
@@lumi-lumi-lumi Just play brig at thay point
@@sagestrings869 it really depends. Sometimes it’s easier to just reposition your support than throw them an armor pack or try to boop the flanker away
Not to mention AOE gradual healing vs single target burst healing
@quiteslayer4067 If you are helping your other support in a duel as LW No one is healing the team. Brig when dueling a flanker is both healing her team and peeling for her squishies.
It's difficult to compare LW to mercy when only looking at healing numbers. Mercy's greatest value is not her healing. Healing is arguably 3rd or 4th on the list. Her damage boost, res, and higher movement/survivability is far more valuable than her relatively low output healing beam. Only looking at Mercy's healing output is equivalent to looking at only Lucio's healing output when examining him. There is a reason Mercy and Lucio are off healers and not main like Baptiste or Moira can be. She can be a main support in many comps, but she shouldn't be played as the main healer. Main support and main healer are two different things.
I honestly love Lifeweaver’s kit. Grip is so useful and I love seeing enemy weavers able to pull off a perfect grip. Peddle is clunky I’ll give you that, but it would be cool if they changed it something like Mei’s wall where you could press the button again and it’ll shift from a platform to a small wall that sticks where it hits (wall, group, etc). Dash and his thorns is my only real complaint as switching to thorns takes a second and the dash doesn’t give him enough movement/can’t keep him alive as well as kiri, bap, or Ana’s self heal skills
I think Lifeweaver is incredibly cool and he's my favorite character in the game. I'm good with him being kinda weak forever. If they made stronger with some crazy rework that gave him offensive capabilities or something like that I'd be very sad.
my problem with lifeweaver is that they try to consider him a main Support when he’s very obviously not. there is no way he can keep anyone up by himself
I mean, you can but you are going to sweat through it a lot. Works if enemies have a target focus of a 7yo
Having an ability that forces your idiot friends / total strangers out of stupid positions they got themselves into is so unbelievably valuable good lord. Hating on life grip is flatly a bad opinion
Plus pulling people out of rein charges is unquestionably the most satisfying feeling in the game
I will say as a lifeweaver main that there is some major potential within his kit when it comes to repositioning your allies that I can think of no other supports can with the petal platform and of course life grip so if we were to ever rework him or give him a certain role I want him to help the team focus on positioning like Mabey having a shorter cooldown on abilities or just a bit more healing to compete with mercy or even baptiste
I agree entirely, recently I’ve been thinking that removing the immortality entirely from his grasp and giving him two on a cool-down whilst making his survivability lower would be a perfect spot, all the angular positioning, none of the kill denial
I remember when Lifeweaver was first announced Blizzard sent an email advertising that he was a “high damage support”… pretty crazy. It would be nice if his healing would have a “blooming effect” giving an ally like a small healing over time if its fully charged. That would give him the flexibility to be more aggressive and give the allies more opportunities to keep fighting. Would be interesting if they gave his damage a small burst if he lands a certain amount of shots. Both are in line with his hero fantasy, I believe. Very nice video. Keep up the good work.
YES, Ive been saying this over and over again to give life weaver a healing over time to help him heal. And make it where he can switch to dps and heal instantly
My problem with the character is that despite him having a decent damage option (not great, but it’s a good suppressive damage option), you simply have little to no time to leverage it, just because if you do, somebody on your team would likely die just because it would take you, like, two full seconds to heal them even a tiny bit.
So it would be great to reduce the weapon switch time plus maybe have his first heal flower pre-charged to some % after switching from damage thorns
Let’s fix my support main. First idea is for the Life Grip to instead be a temporary invincibility. But if they hold back or press S, then they get the grip effect. Otherwise there is a cooldown reduction, and they get a small heal. This prevents accidental or troll grips from having too much impact on the game. Second, we need to bring back the destroy petal ability, but instead it just lowers it. So that way if you’re on a petal and your teammate wants up, you can press that button and it will go down for a second so they can get on. Third, why does his secondary fire consume 2 ammo per shot? It makes it misleading, half the ammo capacity and make it consume 1 like a normal fucking person. Also give it a slightly faster projectile speed, it feels like I’m shooting a homing turtle. And give it a new, more noticeable sound. It sounds like I’m shooting a Temu Star Wars blaster. With these changes, I feel like it could be more of a choke-spam tool. Now increase the healing time and give it a slow, but let my man charge up his primary fire while he’s shooting his secondary. Baptist’s can do his shoot-heal combo, and I think my man weaver should take inspiration. Remind me: why does his ultimate exist? A mostly stationary object that gives you some heals and other stuff. Never before seen concept! (Besides kind Zenyatta, Kiriko, Juno, and kind of Baptiste). I don’t have any suggestions for a new ult, but his ultimate is basic af. Maybe it should spawn a couple of petals that only your teammates can use, or it could have a one-time effect where it pulls a teammate towards it when they would’ve died otherwise. It’s just a glorified Illari pylon. Anyway that’s it
15:23-15:38 Exactly this this is one of the many reasons he’s so bad no pre heal ,travel time and charge time and no indication of healing that tells you you’re being healed .all of this makes it difficult to save people and by the time you do they are dead. Everything about his healing is too slow everyone else healing is literally instant.and the ammo limit doesn’t help either .
I think something fun that could be done with Lifeweaver would be to allow his primary heal to give some overhealth if he uses it on a full health target. Obviously not 1 to 1, and the overhealth should decay relatively quickly, but imagine being able to pump your tracer up to 225 temporarily with the stipulation that if she wants to make good on that buff, she has to make use of it *quickly*. Being able to still provide value even when your team isn't taking damage is one of the primary things that separates Lifeweaver from other supports, and I think being able to charge up a little temporary overhealth for your flanker when you get some downtime is something that could be added and make him feel unique and viable without being overbearing, just so long as it decays quickly enough.
Do I trust Blizzard's current development team to get the balance of that right? Oh, absolutely not. If it were implemented we'd see overhealed tracers stomping all GM games for a week straight then a panic patch to nerf Lifeweaver again.
My take on lifeweaver is that he has a crazy potential to work with an enabler playstyle. He should be balanced towards that because 1- it's the fun quirky part of the kit that is actually enjoyable, at least for me and 2- enabler support playstyles are severely lacking in representation on the roster.
Petal is an actual insane unprecedented ability that creates angles out of thin air where before _mei_ _wall_ was the only option.
Something like an interactible "base" that allows allies to pull themselves up to the platform after it's activated would allow it to give more agency to weaver's allies in how they use it and cement the "moving allies around" identity.
The option of interrupting life grip on reaction and/or giving it as a buff that can later be activated as would also allow it to give more agency to allies in how they use the movement weaver provides and also would be a path for blizzard to "canonize" life grip.
I think it would be better to not only add the UI element for healing blossom, but also to make him do a bit of healing per second while he's charging his healing blossom, while reducing the max healing charge amount.
So, for example while you charging your healing blossom, you're not only showing your teammates that you're trying to heal them, but also providing the 20 hps while charging the blossom. And when you charge it up to the full, it will heal additional 60hp (20 hps while charging the healing blossom and 60 hp as a burst when the healing blossom is received by a teammate). I think it can improve the situations where you need to fastly heal someone, but can't do it because of the long heals charge time. This change doesn't really increase the hps on lifeweaver, but grandly fills the time while you're charging your healing blossom and leads to a more consistent healing
I think I like this fix most of all the ones I’ve heard, even out the spikes of support which makes the enemies feel terrible, give constant feedback to the ally that they’re being supported? Keep the hero design exactly as is in place. I read all comments but this one is gold.
@@realth8572 thanks I guess
Reducing that awkward healing downtime on lifeweaver with the channeling 20hps would feel SO much better, for both him and his allies. The ui element is a must. Absolutely love this idea!
Wasn't expecting to hear 'Transistor' music. Good choice.
One of my favourites
personal thoughts on a rework for lifeweaver, some might be in the video but i think about this a lot lmao (note: numbers would definitely need to be balanced around these ideas)
Healing Blossom
- automatically charges up to max burst healing
- charge can be sped up by dealing damage
- decays over time to promote using more often
- remove ammo and make it a resource
optional: projectile with no homing but large hitbox like virus. but the homing isn't a pressing issue
Thorn Volley
- option 1: delete it and replace it with something more in line with kunai with higher impact shots.
- option 2: give it a poison effect or a very minor debuff of sorts that deals damage over time to increase his damage uptime while healing.
- option 3: make it bounce on walls and floors like a watered down scatter arrow, maybe have each thorn do very little damage on its own but makes him a real threat indoors and at close quarters like junkrat to force you to respect his space. this will tie into my thoughts on removing the heal from regenerative dash to make him less tanky
i prefer option 2 personally. maybe low base damage but a longer damage over time effect to lessen the urgency of his damage/healing swap and allow him to confirm more kills for his team
Regenerative Dash
- remove the annoying free heal and add something more useful to it like super jump is to guardian angel. maybe make it so that if you double jump while crouching you roll instead to shrink your hitbox temporarily. just give it SOMETHING different and give him some more skill expression with it. it's just hanzo double jump right now which is insanely lazy. unfortunately, it's also the most consistent / least buggy part of his kit which is kinda sad.
Petal Platform
- FIRST AND FOREMOST, FIX THE MOST FRUSTRATING PART OF HIS KIT: MAKE ENEMIES UNABLE TO TAKE THE DAMN PLATFORM.
ok, actual rework idea now!
- no longer only lasts a few seconds, instead have it go back *down* after a few seconds of being in the air. make it a real elevator like the ones built into certain maps, but as an ability that he can control and place wherever. it'll be incredibly strong on maps like collosseo where vertical mobility majorly cuts down on travel time (i.e trying to get up to the mini near the bridge) and it still retains its existing utility (giving heroes with no mobility access to height they can't normally get to. like all 3 high ground options on kings row third point.)
- lasts until killed like a turret or a pylon.
- allow lifeweaver/teammates to activate it either by stepping on it or by pressing F, like a symmetra teleporter. (or, *just* by pressing F. i'd rather only have that than only have stepping on it.)
- related to last note: could have a decently long reach for lifeweaver to be able to activate his petal platform, to allow him to remotely throw it into an orisa ult or a grav and activate it. of course, the teammates could still activate it from inside the grav/orisa ult however this would make it less consistent. but honestly, maybe more fun / more dynamic!
Life Grip
id argue that a complete rework is needed. one way it could function:
- pressing E on someone now marks them for life grip. this would work like orb of harmony minus the healing - it would be visible to your team, the enemy team, and most importantly there would be a unique visual indicator on the screen of the marked teammate letting them know that you can life grip them back to your position at any time. this properly enables your teammates to go in and utilize life grip's potential without the use of comms or voice chat. mark them, they go in, you life grip them by pressing E again.
- the cooldown only starts when you use life grip, there is no cooldown to change marker targets. there could also be a punishment cooldown if you let your marked target die without life gripping them. this could be abused by the enemy team, forcing you to either let a teammate die or to use your cooldown.
- it's a very dynamic ability which is why i love this idea - imagine the following scenario: enemy flankers may be deterred from diving a zenyatta if they know he could be life gripped. or they could be incentivized to dive him anyway and force lifeweaver's hand.
- building on the first point, remove the travel time on life grip. have the target be encased in the existing animated pink orb, and then *teleported* directly to you. what you lose in aesthetic you gain in consistency. as it stands, life grip is too damn buggy. targets get stuck under the map on samoa and die anyway, targets get stuck on map geometry and don't travel all the way to you, and so many more problems. simply having them teleport directly to you solves so many of them.
- since we're now using the marker, we can remove the contingency of line of sight. you can now use life grip in a *radial* circle around you - regardless of line of sight. it doesn't have to be excessively big, but big enough to let your team flank around a building or so and get into the backline. big enough to let you grip a reinhardt back in after he's charged all the way in. probably around the size of kiriko's teleport. this also allows lifeweaver to more consistently pull teammates back up if they fall off the map. since there's no cooldown on changing the marker, if you have the cooldown you can quickly double tap the E key and apply it to someone to pull them to you.
- this is a rez/lamp level cooldown at least. it would be so powerful and so versatile, but so incredibly fun. it has nearly infinite possibilities.
keep in mind all of these are mostly realistic rework ideas. what we need to remember is that blizzard can't change things like lifeweaver's main model / things like his back petals very much. they can only adjust hitbox size. they also can't size him down. well, they could but this would require retexturing parts of his model to retain quality and changing his design like that would require them to adjust all of his skins. most of the rework ideas i've mentioned work within the existing art, sound effects and voice lines they've made for lifeweaver. one obvious thing people don't seem to realize is how much of a money hole it is to throw out voice lines, icons, models, etc. and give us new abilities. i can't imagine how much money they've lost on symmetra. it's much easier to build on existing abilities and ideas (changing brig's shield to modernize rally, giving sombra and hog new abilities while keeping the old ones, etc.) than it is to scrap them and move on.
Damn that’s a good rework
This is really well thought out,
i would personaly remove some healing from the dash and add a knock back effect as a way of controlling your enemy's positioning
Can you like email this to blizzard or make it loud and noticeable LMAO. This is actually so good please spread this
this is solid af
I agree with you on the UI element, I personally think having the healing bud grow on the teammate would just help so much instead of making it a projectile. Like a Zen orb that charges up and when you release primary fire it just releases the charged up heal immediately. It would give teammates more assurance as they dive, and allow peeking out of LOS for a moment without worrying about being supported - much like when Mercy's stand behind corners
I’m genuinely here for this comment section. I’ve been reading what everyone has been saying and the immeasurable support for Life Weaver here and these amazing ideas for him in the community. Myself with hundreds of hours and ranked time on him & others here, too.
He definitely needs some tweaks, I agree wholeheartedly. I think he’s amazing though. Not terrible, like, at all lmao. Quite literally his whole kit can do an insane amount of different things on all maps and almost all the characters. I’ve been playing since 2018 & with my map knowledge I can get through games & literally not die with how fast and unpredictable you can move. I get mad aggro with thorns and just get in squishys faces & just win the fight with my dash and shield.
I have a feeling through Blizzard is gonna cook with him and are probably gonna re work his kit imo.
You make a lot of good points on him as a character tho
Maybe he could give overhealth with a full charged healing left click on a full hp ally? That way he synergizes with topped up heroes and overhealth is a lot less busted than brig/torb armour pack was
Wow, this is one of the most informative, well edited, and insightful videos I've watched in the overwatch space. This needs more recognition.
They should make him able to hold a heal while not charging it basically charge one up, then store it and release it as a burst later
as a lifeweaver main since release he's gotten a LOT better. I think now he's at the point where someone who's never played him can succeed unlike say doomfist or ball who require skill both mechanically and character specific. I regularly preform well with him in matches and I think his buffs have been great. only thing I wish he had is some sort of burst option for either damage or healing. currently the closest thing he has is tossing a heal orb and life gripping at the same time to overlap their heals but even then it's not practical because life grip inherently removes a character from the fight, making the "burst" more of a recovery. He puts out a surprising amount of damage and shouldn't be underestimated when flanking him especially if the LW plays the lucio type "can't catch me" game better than you can. overall I think he's in a good place but only really shines when teammates take advantage of his petal platform and play with life grip as a pseudo kamikaze play get out of jail free card that enables dives that would otherwise get you killed and snowball into wiping the team.
Mercy's rez and Life Grip are completely different and not even comparable.
I think they could add some much needed enganging utility that can be used proactively instead of passively by waiting for you teammates to screw up: give him a single Zarya bubble on grip that grants invulnerability for 1 second (like a single target Suzu) so you can press it once (shield allies) and hold it (pull allies)
I think this is a pretty good analysis and I've been wondering why I lose games on LW but have like 25-30k healing and like 1-2 deaths. I think one of his biggest weaknesses is the fact that he can't do damage without completely ignoring healing. His damage just isn't strong enough to ignore healing, and it's only really good in small bursts, or emergency 1v1 duels. Mercy can at least increase the DPS' damage with blue beam. He's essentially only heals, and if you max out scrubs with full healing/HP and they can't get the job done...all the heals in the world won't change that, but it's possible that blue beam, discord, things like that can push them over the top. I think his heals have to give a slight advantage besides healing, but attack speed would ruin the cadence of the game and be annoying. It has to be something like 5-10% damage buff. Who knows, though. Also Life Grip should cleanse. I'm sure they'll add it eventually, but it's sort of nuts how it isn't in the game yet when it's such an obvious, and fair buff. He needs a way to enable the team without sacrificing heal uptime, and I don't think Thorns is the way to do that.
Why not just make grip a single target cleanse on a shorter cooldown?
Can’t save himself, can be low impact as it doesn’t need I frames it can just be “he cleanses everything with a burst 40 healing every 6-9 seconds” & he’s got clear utility, encourages more ppl being picked & lets him play without long ass down time on everything.
Another route is to change his playstyle by as you said, QoL change healing icon, reducing the travel time (think of Zen's healing orbs) I think the healing is fine, increase the heal over time. Think about it, theres so many characters that thrive at angles, the fact he has poor offense means hes more suited as a glass healing cannon, he should be able to provide steady heals the pre heal is huge and would absoluteley change the experience, playing him more as a "hidden mercy", which fits his character avoiding fights while enabling them is MORE like Mercy as she spends 80% of her time either healing or buffing, I think he would also benefit from a support buff passive, for example: that every fully charged orb provides a 35% damage reduction that lasts 3 seconds, which would allow his healing to feel more chunky and provide something other than just healing and would be somewhat unique in the sense that its not aggressive and fits his character, but also provides some sense of independence for the dps who are often in dangerous positions to get the kills they need; I'm just spit balling here, but having a character that can heal out of sight is pretty sick, its similar to Zen and Mercy because they need to stick fairly close in order to get the heals, but forces the enemy to find the proper angles/tactics to push you out. So being able to drop less heals that are more significant allows for the charge time to at the very least seem reasonable. Also your temmates need to know when theyre being supported, if your reticle is on them you should get an Icon that ligths up and sparcks or shines everytime you get healed and its intensity determines the size of the heal if it turns dark blue you have the Damage reduction. The platform just needs to act like a regular shield that you can stand on which means you can see/shoot through it, which would make it more viable... imagine the possibilities... I think these changes would be enough to make him significantly more viable, I'm a flex support main so Ive played LW and hes not bad, but it has so much room for improvement... I'd rather main Zenny... which I do.
Lifeweaver is the epitome of a "win more" character. His main role is centered around dealing out large quantities of healing... that's it. He offers no utility in aiding your allies to eliminate enemies, Ana has her nade & sleep, Lucio has speed boost, Moira and Zen have Orbs, Mercy has damage boost etc. All Lifeweaver can offer is his alternate fire which is ok at best, but when he's using it he's doing 0 healing, even his ult is just "more healing". This means if your teammates are eliminating the opposition you're all set, just keep your allies topped up and you're good to keep going and get the win. But if your teammates are not getting eliminations, all you can do is just try and extend the fight until either they get an elimination or get eliminated themselves, you can't quickly whip out a shield-bash, a sneaky headshot while your pylon takes over, or use your ult to give your teammates a higher dps. You just have to hope your teammates can survive longer than the opposition does, thus when you're winning; you win by a larger margin, but if you're losing; there's not much he can offer to change the course of the fight.
There is one thing that I'd say life grip does well it would be that protecting and moving around teamates with ultimates that don't make them invincible and are very slow like reaper, roadhog, and cassidy/mcree.
Personally, I think LW should be a bruiser. I would make two changes: first, give his ammo a UI near the center of the screen so that you can flow between modes more effectively. If you try to heal a 17th time (with his current 16 clip size), you have to react to his reload animation, swap to shooting (which comes with a delay), then swap back (another delay) to then heal again. If you don't start shooting immeditaly after using your last heal, you may as well just wait the reload animation out as swapping is very clunky. Second (basically part of the first), greatly increase the speed at which he swaps between heal and damage. Let him flow more effectively, and his lower throughout isn't an issue.
I imagine him as a bruiser: his right click on a tank can SHRED them at close range. A Winston getting a little too familiar with you? Just rain down on him, forcing him back (much like Brig does). He has more health than the average support, with shields to boot, the petal as a self shield, and his dash to avoid damage. Getting in the fight is actually where he can be most effective. Diving next to a genji or tracer, helping them secure the kill. If they get a little too low, Grip them to give them the shield+invulnerability as you finish the kill.
This would give him an interesting niche; a support with long range heal and utility, and short range damage and survivability. It is also just plain fun. Weaver is one of my favorite characters, but without a reliable team I feel like I struggle to make an impact (as you mentioned in the video). I have won countless fights with a single, well place Ana grenade. Sniped many targets with a Zen right click. Put up staggering numbers as a Moira. As Lifeweaver? I have gotten flamed to no end because I pulled a low health ally when they were allegedly close to a kill. Or flamed for not pulling them .01 seconds after they call for it.
Life weaver has a shit Neutral game. He has two niches:
Enabling Hyper aggression, doom/genji and now Venture. These characters now have a free get of jail free card.
Anti-ultimate:
With petal + tree + grip there are endless ways for you to deny enemy plays through blocking LOS and more importantly neutralising the most powerful ults in the game grav, shatter, flux, cagefight. LW punished ability reliant enemies, but his weakness is just consistent damage.
Hmmm... If Lifeweaver's healing gave 25-50 overhealth for 1.5s on a max-health ally like his ult, I think that'd be a great way to give him more effective power without causing problems!
Sure, let’s make tracer even more broken lul
I mean, that’s the reason why brig packs don’t have overheal anymore
Okay here me out, make his heal work like zenyatta primary fire. It does a base heal value of let's say 35 hp for now with a somewhat slower fire rate than zen primary fire. Hitting an ally with healing multiple times in a row makes the healing your orb gives them increase with each shot. lets say it increases by 10, so healing the same target multiple times will heal them for 45 per orb instead of 35. This allows you to have burst healing on one target at the cost of not healing allies, while choosing to heal multiple people means you don't get high healing throughput. No aim assist on the orb either with a very fast projectile speed (again, zenyatta orb) so it has a bit better skill floor. The secondary fire can work the same as it does now, but no weapon switching. Right click to do damage, left click to heal, that's it. I'm not really sure what to do with the other abilities though. I have ideas for them, but they're all kind of spitballs that sound somewhat rough and weird.
Also if this all sounds insanely stupid to you, you are correct I am in fact a gold player. I just like to think I'm somewhat intelligent when it comes to game design but have yet to have that theory tested so please let me know your honest thoughts about this idea.
Imo, beside the clunkiness that can entirely be fixed by patches, the big issue with Lifeweaver's kit comes from platform. Platform is just a gimmicky ability with very rare and unpractical tactical use cases that overlap with other part of his kit and I see no good reason to keep it in place of something Lifeweaver would actually need.
Love your channel keep making the great content. I wouldve rather weaver had a deployable jump pad than a 1 use elevator. I would like life grip to not pull ppl out of the fight but be a destroyable zarya bubble that if burst increases healing received by the target similar to ana nade.
I personally think replacing his dash with a utility ability might push him in the right direction.
He can maybe gain 10% more movement speed and self heal on thorn hits.
Like you said; he feels and plays like mercy with only ressurect and no damage boost.
random idea: give Lifeweaver the more construct options. When you use the ability you can choose between a petal platform, jump pad, petal wall that you can toggle like Mei's ice wall. That would give him a niche in terms of utility that plays towards his hero fantasy.
i was thinking a thorn wall that could function like ram's vortex, but smaller. It wouldn't pull ppl to the ground, but it would slow enemies and make them take damage if they tried to cross it.
I like this idea let me add some input for possible options.
Petal Platform- As is, will remain the same. Possible add cover by extending the petals to curve upwards. However this might inflict on the heros visual design so maybe not.
This would help give lifeweaver more of a niche of creating new angles.
Rose bush- Thrown out like petal platform, this would create a wall of thorns the sizs of ramattras shield that would slow and damage enemies who walk through it. Applying a Damage over time and slow for a couple of seconds after they leave it. This would function very similar to roadhogs pig pen. Can be destroyed.
This would deny enemy flanks and protect your angles or at least buying more time possible disrupting a dive. Can also be thrown into enemy backlines to zone them or at the enemy tank to be a nuisance/ trap them
Lily Pad- would be very similar to petal platform placement wise, however this would work as a horizontal jump pad with slight vertical height aswell.
This would allow for dives/ engages for your team without commiting abilities or allow for disengaging on your backline from a Flanker, can also be used like a sym teleproter to horizontally get between 2 highgrounds
Vine tether- Cast the same way as petal platform, would create a node that tethers the first person that walkd through it applying a small damage over time and the tether should probably last a small ammount of time aswell, maybe like 1.25 seconds or even less.
Possibly just a better rosebush but single target it would be used very similary to it
Thorn sheild- Would create a placeable 200hp barrier the size of brigittes shield. Damages anyone who walks past it.
This would help support your dps on angles or help you take a angle.
Also make his hesling a little less downtimey and more consistent
Also also allow him to have 2 different deplyables out at once, adding to his hero gantasy of feeling like a chess master positioning pieces to your will
What I'd do is making the heal have unlimited ammo, life grip have a double tap, first one shields the ally making it take less damage and the second actually pull the ally towards lifeweaver and like you said add a notification of being healed by lifeweaver, that's my idea
Yknow, If you play blizzard games, they kind of make the same stuff in a slightly new package all the time
and they should still do that, but they should take a more proactive approach.
If Lifeweaver has a problem with healing and aggression, perhaps an instant heal (They'd stick a travel time on it i'm sure) for around 100 on a single target, maybe it even has the tree of life mechanic where it give overheal that ticks down. put a 8-10 second cooldown and lifeweaver can now prebuff anyone before a fight, truly save someone and their position and also just maintain player better
how about adding some character healing like little plants like illari's where they burst heal for about 3 seconds kinda like brig charges, or if not adding a way to tp to his platform
I think your video nails the issues with LW very well. Although he's been buffed a bit since you've made your video, it still isn't enough. Fundamentally his kit is just kind of bad. Lifegrip being the biggest problem, even if you pull off some cool saves it usually means your team loses positioning especially if you have to pull the tank. A different support could have just kept the tank alive and in the fight (usually), so his value as a support plummets immensely.
I've been thinking long and hard about what can be done to fix him if Blizzard insists he keeps his kit. This ultimately doesn't fix his core issue, but it might make him more viable. Give thorns a stacking debuff of 1-2% extra damage per thorn that caps at 10-20. Switching to thorns should be instant (in fact it should work more like BAP), and increase the damage by 10-25%. One of my biggest gripes with him is his insanely low damage, the meta of the game has shifted to support also being helpful in securing kills. Unless someone is "1", LW can't do too much to help out.
Remove his healing ammo count so he never has to reload. It seems unnecessary, and it really drags down LW in prolonged fights. Which is strange because I've never felt this way with Ana or Bap, but this might be because they have other things they can do to help the team and also have good offensive capabilities. Also remove the unnecessarily slow debuff you get when you hold a charge, like why is that a thing?
Petal, I actually like this ability and think is has some great uses, and makes as a great escape tool. Maybe make it last a little longer, but that might be OP. Airdash is the same as well, I like it.
I wouldn't even know where to begin with Lifegrip and Tree of Life.
Anyway I never broke T500 and was only ever a low GM, so I'm not sure how much my opinion is worth in this discussion lol.
As an Anna to LifeWeaver main
Honestly I think that just giving him some kind of seed type effect might work?
Either a seed placed when healing a full health target that pops for a small heal when the target takes damage
Or a thorns type ability that does aoe damage around the buffed ally when they take damage
Mostly to keep dives off of them or go for an easier escape
Or maybe he could give a small life stealing leech seed style buff to an ally that would show up on the UI
The point made at 18:24 completely opened my eyes
Coming from a Mercy Main who ACTUALLY loves Lifeweaver is that you need to understand his kit. Yes, it is hard but when I was just getting Overwatch I started with Soldier: 76, DVa, and Mercy. I later stretched myself to play more DMG and support heroes. Lifeweaver is one of my favorite heroes to use other than Baptiste because he is fun. I have moments where I've had more healing than my support partner.
(Coming from a Console player PS4)
I think a plausible solution could be to make him function like Corvus in paladins in the fact that he gives a mark
This ability can replace petal if needed or he’ll even grip. What this mark does is mimic life weavers actions: whenever he heals someone, whether the mark or someone else, the marked hero gets a percentage of the healing. Whenever life weaver shoots his primary fire, the marked person has a thorns fire from their crosshair that does less damage than life weavers thorns. This can let the player know that life weaver is there to support and also lets life weaver pressure two angles at once. Plus maybe the mark can give one cc immunity, in exchange for losing the buff when enemy cc is applied to the marked hero. If liveweaver would still have life grip (aka it wasn’t replaced by this mark), maybe whenever he uses life grip on someone else, the marked ally would experience a buff of some kind? Unsure what this buff would be but I don’t think it should be a dr or even invincibility buff. Again, it allows life weaver to pressure multiple angles. For balancing purposes, only one mark can exist at a time and the mark isn’t unlimited and has a set duration, which can be refreshed by using the cooldown on the same ally BUT it doesn’t stack, only refreshes.
This mark can help immensely with dive and rush characters, which seems to be what the dev team was trying to do but idk. Blizzard works in mysterious ways
An issue I can see is lifeweaver building ult charge really quickly because of this (since he’s dealing two instances of damage/healing at once) so maybe as a compromise, this mark doesn’t generate as much or any of at all ult charge? Idk, that or just make his ult cost more. I would try to change his ult but idk how to. Since in my mind, tree is just stationary rally/transcendence
I immediately recognized oskar schuster in the music, honestly shocked me LOL
Eh i dont agree. I feel like lifeweaver is a strong utility card. Just having a lifeweaver denies many plays, he isnt as vulnerable as people think, as a genji, sombra or tracer cant that comfortably 1v1 him. He does a suprising amount of damage and at any time he can just platform away or pull a teammate to help. He is like a +1 buff to every player on the team. Anyone can get a platform that can either save an ally or remove an enemy tank for a few moments (which is currently the one thing i abuse in this tank centric meta)
The worst support comp is lifeweaver/mercy. Everytime I get that comp it's a drag, it feels like 3v5. You better hope your DPS/tank are really good and can compensate for the missing support agro,
I agree overall, but the two heroes and their high survivability are pretty fun for QP purposes. Petal pad rezzes and dpsing on them is quite fun too. But whenever it comes to viability they do fall off more as they lack the carry potential other supports have.
That’s one of the combos you hate to have on your team but also hate to play against.
petal and grip needs to be given some kind of way to allow for more agression
eventhough i think for petal it's harder (for example giving a damage buff while on it would just encourage pretty boring play) but i think for lifegrip having it temporarily giving a speed boost may benefit both high and low level play tbh. it'd give more engagement options in higher level while on lower level allow a new lifeweaver to be less of a detriment if they fuck up a grip as the teammate can just go back into a fight
You really hit the nail on the head with his biggest problem for me, his incredibly reactive playstyle. Mercy is similarly reactive but she gives teammates the means to make plays with her damage boost while lifeweaver genuinely just has to wait for either the enemy to make a play or for a teammate to completely mess up a play, games with him just feel like you're waiting for things to happen and not making them happen yourself. You don't get kills, you don't give your team opportunities, you just give the team to make one screw up per fight.
I really enjoy lifeweaver because his kit helps manage team cohesion in qp and low ranks. Outplaying ults like sig's grav, jq's rampage, zar's grav etc with well placed trees and platforms are really satisfying. The new petal mechanics help with repositioning multiple teammates and the silly hero combos really make lifeweaver satisfying to me. Would like to see a short revisit to this vid now that people have learned what they can do with the character.
As I see, if you have a team comp with high mobility (i.e. Winston/Ball, Tracer Genji, and Lucio, he works pretty OK at healing. He's not as easy to kill if you save the petal platform for your own survival
Man it's sad because I really enjoy lifeweaver. I've been playing overwatch since WEEK 1 and have never had so much fun playing a hero before, so much so that I decided to main him. Now with the DPS passive rework, he feels terrible again and I was already at my breaking point with the game, so I uninstalled it. Hopefully he can get some changes so I can come back to enjoy the game I used to love.
Ok, here are my lifeweaver buff ideas to give him more identity and utility.
1.) The way his healing is ive always flet like it should do something more. The possibility of it giving a speed boost is interesting but could be infuriating, but i think it should lean more into helping agile targets. Another idea is that it provideing a little overhealth or shield temporarily (like 25)
2.) Platform feels kinda unimpactfull. It can only really be used to go high, which is good but not enough. By making it perma and or allowing you to have multiple out, you give dps new angles that can feel impactful(it keeps a health bar). Another idea is to make the platform heal whoever is on it. This also makes lifegrip better since now lifeweaver can hold a strong position while supported by a dps with a presumably even stronger position and enabling him to pull them to him when their Platform us inevitability forced down
I think these are great ideas, but surely im overlooking something. Hopefully, someone has an idea of how to improve these ideas or if they're utter garbage
I think the reason lifegrip is more annoying than rez is because of the time at which it can be applied. Rez can only be applied after an enemy play, lifegrip is applied right before, which is one the most dissatisfying things ever. Additionally, from a balance perspective, mercy can do nothing else while rezzing, while lifeweaver only has a downtime of a fraction of a second. This makes lifegrip one of those "no downside" abilities. If lifeweaver had to experience some sort of a negative result from using lifegrip, it would be less annoying to verse, because at least you could exploit its usage
It has a really lrngthy cooldown however. That is the punish. Consideting it can only save one target you can bait it out and then make the play just like with suzu or nade. I feel that suzu is atguably worse to play against because it doed the same thing essentially, stopping big ultimates/plays. While it does so over a shorter period of time it has a shorter CD, a cleanse, is AoE AND heals targets for like 100 hp if they were debuffed.
If you also pressure LW when he would Lifegrip it's also very bad for hik to use it because he either drags in someone to their death or dies himself.
This makes so much sense now about why I've felt my Mercy main skills were transferable to Lifeweaver (at least... the way I play Mercy - either way, he's really enjoyable for me to play). I've always wanted the ability to grip pull reckless players as Mercy, so this has (sort of) been heaven :)
Regarding the 'down time' with Lifeweaver, I don't disagree, and this might not correlate at all, but I just find it funny that my fingers hurt more after playing Lifeweaver than when I play Mercy
I rather have the LW over a mercy any day of the week because I rather get value in keeping someone alive with pull then waiting for Rez for any value to come but this video really made something clear, players just won’t react at a t500 level pulling a tanks or dps from making plays instead of pulling to help for peeling for you but the fact you have to pull someone to help you instead of taking duel themselves creates even more down time for other characters
The only thing left to do is make his thorn volley explode like the needler from halo
my idea is to lean more into the dive support+hard to kill idea, let him,be able to deploy his tree from farther away and the very first pulse of it when he plants it is a cleanse. only the first one tho every other pulse is normal healing. Suzu is and anti have been like dominating and giving cleanse to someone else plus he can get his ult quickly might be a cool change.
this is a little late but its not like things have changed in 3 months lol, I agree entirely, the biggest issue with LW is simply half the time his kit is negated by your own team mates making you feel like you're trolling 50% of the time, the amount of times im playing echo or soujourn, engage, get some damage, get low and use my abilities to escape onto to be immediately hit with a burst of healing or even gripped away which then just negates my movement ability but not really leading to this super strange movement when the full is finished and its super jarring.
This makes him extremely frustrating to have on your team when 90% of the time a kiriko tp suzu at your feet would of not only secured the kill but then you and her can actively fight someone else etc, but not only can he be frustrating to play with, his entire kit is built around denial. Petal and grip negate so many ults in the game but unlike suzu which has an obvious impact on the game, neither of LW abilities are easy to bait out cause they don't do enough offensively anyway. Not to mention how frustraing the insane burst healing can be. Idk just a weird character
Wow only 800 subs. You got potential man, and what you do have now i like. Good breakdown of theory and it’s easy to follow your thoughts. Easy sub :)
maybe they could give weaver something like the tf2 medic's overheal, where a fully charged heal will give overflow hp past max hp for a maximum of 80 overheal
I remember when he was leaked I automatically assumed it was fake because I thought blizzard wouldn’t be dumb enough to make a character with an ability like life grip.
i think the solution could be to make his flowers (leftclick) a passive "allies healed get an effect called *nutrition*, which increases the ult charge gained by a teammate from all sources (more effective on the pad and near walls?)" which has a icon and ui changes matching the effect. This fixes both, gives information about healing and provides more value. Hope someone sees this. :)
What do you think of:
Making his primary fire hitscan but for every shot you hit you leave a "thorn", with each thorn reducing incoming healing by .25%, capping at 100 thorns, one of which would be removed after every 3 healing received
- this would be to avoid making better at DPSing than most DPS but still provide good utility and offensive power with his attacks
Making life grip and deployable object ( like a tree branch thing or something) that he would place down and then bind to a specific person, who would then use Interact to be gripped whenever in range and in LOS of the branch.
- this would make it less of a troll ability and it would mean that it would actually be able to be used to enable teammates to make risky plays, with the understanding that they can get themself out if they take into account the branches position, and it makes life grip more interesting to use as now life lifeweaver has to take into account where his team want to go as well as maybe even enemy flankers destroying it into where he places it, instead of just using when you see someone far away and low
And finally parting gift ( actually useful this time) he can charge a full heal and pre place it on someone,.who could then leave maybe into the enemy 's backline and then once they fall to half hp, it would activate and heal them for one charge
-this further allow him to enable teammates while playing aggressively himself
Overall i think this would make him better at enabling while allowing him to play aggressively and provide good offensive utility and create offensive pressure
I don't want him fixed because then there will be lifeweavers in my games who pull me
They tried to make mercy without the utility that damage boost brings. Mercy without damage boost wouldnt be viable at higher ranks
Im late, but I've been maining LW since his release, having a good time! I love the pull, and the petal, personally I really like his kit. Tracking my teammate's Cooldowns and pulling them right on time feels so nice, but ofc not for the other team. My main complaint is his controls... Im on console so i don't have a convenient way to switch weapons, and if I have the newer control scheme I get hard nerfed by having a delay on my dash because I NEED to jump now. Its really sucks especially with abilities that lock jumping like Sig ult, Ram Vortex, ect... I really think that, sadly a rework is probably gonna be the best avenue... It'd be sad for me to see petal or pull go, but if they wanna make his kit more viable, and fun, one of them has to go... (Probably pull I think...)
As our Bulgarian lord and saviour Bogur says. If you don't want to die, don't fcking pick. Hide behind the wall and let supports heal you
Can't be shot whilst respawning!
When you are holding charge and looking at someone not only let them know give them a small hp gain per second and increase the total heal. Swap the weapon fire to hitscan which may need tuning balancing, consider making his health orb a barrage but decrease the total amount if healing more than one target: You charge and then hover over each person you want to heal and then release but give it less healing when spreading it out.
lifeweaver SHOULD be definitely be a high priority pick in casual ow along the lines of mercy (ok maybe not that high lol) but definitely moira, lucio, and kiriko level. hes skill floor is relatively low, he has mobility, and probably the best visual design of any hero period. theres glaring issues with his kit that i noticed immediately when his kit dropped that still have yet to be fixed.
1. swapping weapons. its been beaten to a bush, but its true. the simple fact that he has to swap is a major turn off. its clunky. everyone pointed it out. it still rings true to this day.
2. mobility. he might seem mobile from an outside perspective until you actually play the hero. his dash is short and the cd is too long. his platform cd is too long.
3. platform. you cant really use platform for anything other than self peel because the cd is too long.
4. life grip. giving a hero this much power over other players is intimidating. the fear that they might pull at the wrong time and get flamed is real. the more u play him, the less youll mess up/care about the flame. but this is a barrier for new players.
5. change his name. i really dont like the name lifeweaver and i dont feel like it fits him very much either. it just doesnt roll of the tongue nciely. it would fit a knitter more than a plant mage lol. the fw sound feels as clunky to say as his kit is to play lol. give him a name where hes from that relates to plants, flowers, life, etc.
tbh lifeweaver just isnt very fun. you stand in the back and heal. if you can, take a good angle and reposition your dps. pull allies out of enemy ults. his griptypically saved for emergencies. his platform for when the naughty tracer flanks you. that means he will spend most of the match healing and using his lil baby dash every 5 seconds. whats lucio doing? perma wallriding and booping. mercy? dashing every 3 seconds across the point lol. moira? lock on succing with the best get ouf of jail free card.
how would i change him? its simple! we must find what makes him unique, streamline his kit, and make him FUN!
i would much rather lean into the builder archetype, creating cover and high ground for his team. life grip has GOT TO GO!
1. remove life grip. it has no place being in his kit. it really feels like they had a great idea for an ability and pushed it into the next released support and are now forced to balance him around it. GOODBYE! that means there is more power to be placed in his other abilities to make up for the lack of grip.
2. his damage and heal are no longer a toggle! the only reason its not a toggle is because they gave him too many abilities and the only way to fit them into a kit without making a new keybind was for his gun to toggle. but now that grip is gone, thats no longer necessary.
3. platform has shorter cd (like 1 second shorter). it now creates a pillar under it. he can have out 2 platforms.
4. reduce dash cd by 1 second. he will dash the same distance, but can now teleport a further distance to the top of a platform if he targets a pillar with this ability. think of it liek a kiriko step.
5. his ult now has a wide platform to stand on top of.
6. his damage needs to be much easier/reliable to hit! this is what will appeal to more casuals. perhaps take inspiration from junkrat grenades or bap heal, instead dealing damage over time in an aoe where they explode. maybe they could even be revealed through walls while poisoned to his team.
So having been playing lw for a few months, i think me (granted im a silver/gold scrub so take my ideas with salt) have the problem of him being very good if im with someone really good, similar to mercy being a win more? type support vs a over all "good" support (think anna only needing to land 2/3 of her skills to be of some value). I do have some change ideas i think would be intresting but im not sure how they would play out in practice so again take with some salt
1: the weapon : I kinda wish they would change his weapon to either a charged weapon to either charge up a heal or charge up a scailing damage "thorn" spike, yes youd lose the rate of fire but trade for bigger hits, imagine hanzo arrows but on a support? or b: change the healing to be shot out like the thorns but as petals? so he ends up being able to be more aggressive like kiri or moria in regards to heals and damage .
2: dash, perhaps to help him be a bit less clunky allow it to also go vertical like all the other mobile supports?, like either jump "dash jump" for horizontal or jump jump for vertical
3 : life grip.... honestly im not sure what can change about it... but i do wish theyd add some "protective" coding so you dont (cant) "accidently" pull someone off a ledge or soemthing, like end early or extend the pull to always land safely on a surface.
4: platform... so wild idea, and this is a 2 parter, firstly change its key binds, give it 3 activations 1: plant it 2: "move" it 3: end it, or just 1 and hold to force it to end early before having it move. Secondly... allow it to be placed on walls, make it more used for getting allies out of a area, or pushing enemies in a direction, like throw it on a wall and force them into the open vs a dva bomb.
5: ult is honestly fine? out side the obvious skill issues it has that he/it shares with mei ice wall, maybe it drops fruit for major burst healing?
I think he works well as a choke breaker, but he’s just super niche. I think they should take inspiration from Thresh from LoL with his life grip. He can throw a bubble on the ally, but the ally choose to interact with it to get pulled; similar to Symmetra’s teleport, except it’s on them. And if they don’t interact with it, it just gets refunded (maybe idk).
Healing, I’d make it a mix of Kiriko, Mercy, and Lucio. He can hold down heal and the lotus blossoms and petals fly to whoever he’s attached to, but he will also have a small AoE heal around him for whenever is next to him. None of it will be huge healing, but it’d be consistent and give him a better pacing.
Obviously this wouldn’t necessarily make him functional necessarily, but for me personally it’d make him more useful.
When it comes to life weaver, I think the biggest fix (besides the UI idea, which is genius) is to give him something new to do so that he doesn't have down time. My biggest idea for this is reducing enemy movement speed with vines. Make him a cool down that either holds a target in place, or a mini air affect that causes enemies to move slower (think reverse Lucio) and thus harder for them to escape from your DPS. Or if they want to perfect his gimmick of giving allies better angles (flower, life Grip) make it so that the range/defense provided by them is stronger. I.E let life Grip grab people from father away and heal a bit more so that the lost space is made up for better, while making it so that maybe life weaver has to be completely solitary in the same way mercy res is (or... something) and make it so the flower doesn't disappear and need to be remade. Just make it so it breaks when you reposition it like pylon.
Another idea I had was giving him cleanse. Have life Grip have a cleanse affect, and let tree cleanse and be unbreakable in exchange for it not being able to heal through shields and being destroyed by EMP again. With those two things ALONE he would have a much bigger role to play and make him a rival to Kiriko, who has a insane pick rate just for Suzu.
Or...you can make it so that flowers don't have a charge time at all. He can just, shoot them. Like Ana does. Removing their charge up and cool down after spamming them would immediately make him a more reliable healer without any other changes honestly. If they want a hero that JUST heals but does it better then any other support, make his healing more important. I think with this new meta too, buffing his healing numbers a bit more then other healers that have better gimmicks would allow him to stand on his own two feet while being more viable.
You could reduce the back hit box and give him a horizontal movement option incentivizing grip pulls aggressively into fights
You would be able to pull off more moments like a petal high noon or a flying rein pin since you can play more in the front
Why not Just get rid of the charging part of his heal and just make it have a cooldown instead. So he doesn't have to hold charge and wait.
Honestly, parting gift could work if its only for teammates it's a powerful passive so ig to balance it out it also includes enemy's so maybe they should re add it but this time only for teammates and let's say it only heals 90 hp
maybe during his cast time the targeting locks and has mini zen orb kind of healing to the target, maybe they can glow pink or something. imagine a dps can sort of hold an angle that way and when they are escaping you can release the mouse to use your burst. basically just mercy but with a springloaded healing burst baked in. this would be quicker to activate and more reliable than a burst ability with travel time and aim like suzu or armor pack but not quite as powerful as either, giving it perhaps a cool niche as well as just making it more engaging for the weaver i think. to offset this more effective left click, just remove life grip ez (hero fantasy will be the same because you can actually save people with your healing)
Seems like the best solution is to make his healing ability work a bit like Zenyatta. When spammed, his flower should quickly restore hp and have no auto tracking, and could damage enemies - making him give more pressure when healing and eliminating his weapon swap entirely. When bloomed and charged, his healing could instead apply a life flower on the target, that blooms when their hp is less than 100% - restoring a moderate amount of hp over time, and could be marked as a notification on their hud that they're flowered. His full charged flowers could also be applied to enemies instead and apply negative healing; when the target receives healing, the flower blooms and absorbs 50% of incoming healing over 3 seconds. Lasts 10 seconds before the flower fades. The flower would also poison the target, dealing low consistent damage over time but no direct damage. The poison effect could stack, but also be non-lethal on its own, making it a powerful pressure tool that can allow him to seriously pressure angles and reward him for charging his attacks. He would have slightly better throughput on heals when tossing 'weaver seeds', but his strength is more geared towards providing those HoTs and DoTs.
Since his petal platform find itself not very useful at times - and not something you need to hold onto like lifegrip - is it not possible to allow him two cast modes? One for a repositioning petal and the other perhaps a chip damage/crowd control option. Roots on the ground, or an exploding lotus fruit? Something.
No doubt there’s room for more design in his kit, but regardless it’s difficult to get around the core that his healing mode is just badly made for what it has to do. So all other changes take the characters design further away from the developers intention of making a character like mercy
@@realth8572 that's the thing - his identity is the issue. Only Mercy can be Mercy. A derivative still has to be Mercy (but X). So far he's Mercy with worse playmaking options, which is impressive because Mercy is often joked to be a skill-less character. But at the very least the skill expression of Mercy is overt. Lifeweaver's skill expression isn't in the use of his abilities, it's in not using it.
One way to make Life Grip more reliable would be to turn it into a buff/status condition. Using the ability will initially apply the buff and not put Life Grip on cooldown. At any time, the Lifeweaver can use the ability again. They can use it on another target (removing the buff from the first target) or they can use it on the same target in order to pull them towards Lifeweaver.
If the target gets below say, 50 HP, they are instantly pulled towards the Lifeweaver. Pulling a target (manually or automatically) puts the ability on cooldown.
This sounds pretty OP, to be honest. But it WOULD give the target some indication that they are free to jump in, without requiring the Lifeweaver to communicate with them (much like a Mercy beam).
For ever more reliability, you could make it so Lifeweaver constantly has the marked target's HP on their HUD, much like a Mercy or Zenyatta. You could also make it so the LW can heal the Life Grip target without having to aim at them, thus giving the target another indicator that they are receiving focused and reliable support.
Of course, line of sight should still be required both for the healing and for the grip effect.
Honestly, though, I would rather they just completely redesign the hero. Both Life Grip and Petal Platform are extremely annoying abilities to play against.
13:00 I hear the vine boom sound effect after every “no”
No burst damage
No duelling input
No money
No job
No future
No girlfriend
this is some of the best video game analysis ive ever seen and you need waaaayyyy more attention
Honestly i just want to have a option to deny life grip if you don't have a dash.
I've lost count of the amount of times i got life gripped when i was 2 shots away from killing somebody while i'm at a 60%+ health just to watch my target walking away scot-free after i got dragged accross the map
Just spitballing here.
What if there was a low healing beam that went to the targets (10hp/s) with the healing burst?
Another one. Have consistent beam output but you can stop it to charge a big healing, potentially giving overhealth and healing more adaptively.
The way to fix lifeweaver would honestly be giving all supports a team hp and cooldown indicator in one of the corners. This way he knows when he show pull vs when he should let the other person use their movement ability.
(also, make it so when hes been using thorns for long enough, when he switches back to healing its already fully charged)
For real the hp indicators in the pve feel like they should be in regular matches
the ammo already does reload if youre using the other mode for a bit
@@thestardustblu Ya but i meant the healing would be fully charged (to 80 hp)
Easy fix.
Primary fire: stays the same
Secondary fire: charges up when you aren’t healing or firing. When you start firing, release a high spread burst of needles that shreds enemies up close. After the burst, he fires at range as he always has when the button is held
Petal Platform: stays the same
Regenerative burst: no longer heals, but can be used on a 1 second cool down and can be used to gain some height.
Life Grip: instead of pulling teammate right away, marks the teammate with a symbol that lets them know they can grip to lifeweaver with the interact key. If the teammate ignores the option for more than 5 seconds, lifeweaver can use the ability again on a much shorter cooldown.
Tree of Life: stays the same
Passive: heals a percentage to self of all heals given, including the ultimate.
Blizzards fix.
Fail to change the character in a meaningful way for 12 months
What if they made it so lifegrip was instead an ability you preemptively place on an ally (think sort of like harmony orb, but on cd), this is displayed as some sort of floating thing on them (prob a flower) with a duration marker. At any time before it runs out the ally can press the interact key to activate a lifegrip, pulling the ally to lw's current position. Line of sight would prob be required, maybe similar to harmony orb where there's a grace period but you cant activate it unless direct los is there.
This would put the urgency and decision making into the hands of the target (avoids accidental double ability usage) and lets the target know when to make riskier plays without having to just hope the lw is looking at them.
A similar thing could be done with the healing, allowing to essentially preheal a target for like 75 hp or so, and that health will slowly drain to heal the target once they take damage. (Should also be displayed to the target)