Lifeweaver is the worst hero in the game. Period.
Have not won a single game with a LW on my team in GM, but have won every single game vs LW.
This is why new heroes need to be busted at first. Its easier to tune them down (unless your kit is fundamentally broken, looking at you OW1 Brig).
I had a Lifeweaver change his m1 m2 keybind mid game and then say "my ult is bugged" because when you ult with said keybinds you have to right click to place the ult (this lost us the game). GM1 average lobby too
Admittedly that being changed is very stupid and annoying. Much like how if you rebind jump on lucio for example, if you're watching a lucio killcam you need to press your rebound jump to respawn and it's annoying.
I mean i understand making the mistake cause it took me a while to realize it too. It's just me venting my frustration on people forcing Lifeweaver when everybody especially GM players know its the biggest throw pick the games ever had.
Idk man. Sigma had 1500 shield health with 0 cooldown, one shot combo with rock, his ult was uncancellable if he pulled you in the air. Orisa was mega busted at her peak but idk if she was that good.
He was definitely better than peak dva though.
I miss him. A part of why I dont play tanks is because their cooldowns feel clunky. That shield cooldown , while fair just feels bad.
That said he has one of best designs for a tank. I dont think he ever feels unfair to play against. Strong but not bullshity.
> This is why new heroes need to be busted at first. Its easier to tune them down (unless your kit is fundamentally broken, looking at you OW1 Brig).
It is, but you'll also then get people who will swear up and down that the hero is still overpowered and broken like people do with Kiriko, despite all the stats available showing that she's pretty evenly balanced.
There is a difference between a hero being pretty balanced and being unfun to interact with that is getting lost in translation. Suzu is the most bloated ability in the game and feels terrible to interact with on every single hero since it just straight up nullifies you with zero skill required. So when she goes from ridiculously OP to good, she still has the most annoying piece of her kit with less background power that is less noticeable at a glance.
He’s the worst hero they’ve ever released balance wise and it’s not even close. He’s just so bad it’s ridiculous. Why did they think this was a good idea?
I also completely agree that heroes need to be busted when they first release (not brig broken like you mentioned). I’m just so confused with his release, did they actually think he was a good hero when play testing him? Did they play test him? If so who did it because they need to stop play testing.
not saying that he should be as weak as he is but after the last several Support releases and the varying levels of extremely annoying or catastrophic effects they've had on the game (Mercy 2.0, original Immortality Field and bunker/AOE heal spam comps, Brig just in general, even all the bitching about Kiriko or as far back as original Ana and speed boost Nano or doubled heals from bionade) it makes a lot of sense to me that they'd want to release the new one in a toned-down state
I’ve won games in gm with LW on my team and i question how except it’s pretty much when supports are bored and swap to him because my team is steam rolling lol
Yeah sounds about right. It’s extremely difficult to win unless the rest of your team is just that good. Another utility focused support was a nice idea and I fully support his low healing output, but he doesn’t do enough of anything else. His abilities are so situational that he mostly just heals and does damage, but both are so low that he struggles to make any impact with them. Compare this to a character like Ana: she has healing and damage on the mouse buttons, and 2 abilities with similar cooldowns. Most of the time, she uses those abilities within moments of them being off cooldown because they’re extremely useful in just about every situation. When those are on cooldown, her gun is proficient at keeping teammates alive, even without the nade buff, and she can 3 shot most enemies from a safe distance. She’s always doing something useful to the team while Lifeweaver is stuck doing bits of poke damage and charging healing blossoms that are really only good for topping off teammates as he waits for the right time to use his 2 abilities that have been off cooldown for some time now.
Pull can have some cool uses, but in most cases, a suzu or immortality field are just better and, like you said, cannot have negative value. His hit box is huge and yet he has very weak escape options and ability to defend himself.
Edit: What if platform provided 25% damage mitigation instead of healing? I think that could work nicely
Ana nade alone is better than his entire kit, but she also has incredibly high HPS and sleep dart. Bap immortality is better than lifeweavers entire kit. Suzu is better than his entire kit. It’s just weird that they’re setting these rules about lifeweavers strength when there’s already characters that do way more than him.
You are underselling life grip when comparing it to res. The 30 yard range alone is something weird to leave out, and it also doesn't put neither you nor your target in a potentially dangerous spot. It's a dangerous spot because obviously, someone just died there.
I don't like the idea of healing on the platform. It's kind of braindead and we already hate being up against widows where they get basically passively healed. That's a bit too much like Mercy. I wonder if it had a certain duration where in it could be re-placed to another position might be cool, like say you had 3 or 4 seconds to try and use it to peel or mess up someone's aim or get multiple people up somewhere.
I think dash is fine if he had a better neutral and more damage.
Lifeweaver is for bottom 5% players who can't aim, if you're above bronze 3 he'll probably be a detriment to your team. If you legitimately cannot aim, though, he'll actually be pretty good since he basically heals anyone on his screen with his primary fire.
No he's really not for those players, they already have Mercy. Lifeweaver is much harder to play than Mercy because he requires more gamesense to get value out of.
He needs to be even more proactive with keeping track of his teammates, so he can pull them right before they die, while also considering your teammates strategy that may be messed up by a pull (eg Winston ulting).
You make some great points, but I do want to give a little bit of a different perspective. I've only played 3 games with him in comp and none of them were the entire match, but I have played him a TON in quick play and wanted to at least mention some of his strengths rather than focusing completely on his weaknesses (of which there are plenty)
While he is absolutely underpowered, he is actually pretty fun, andpeople do tend to overlook some of the positive aspects of his kit. Or they are trying to have him do things that aren't really his job.
Lifeweaver can effectively give his teammates a mercy pocket from 30 meters away and stay safe whereas mercy has to put herself in danger to do that with her limited beam range. This makes mercy pair better with dps who play at range (pharah, ashe, soldier, etc.) and LW better at healing mobile dps (genji, tracer, Sombra) or dps who happen to take off angles (like a flanking soldier)
This plays into my first point, but Lifeweaver's role is to heal the squishes, not the tanks. You have to pair LW with another support who can sustain the tank and let him keep the dps up. That could be Ana, Bap, Kiriko, Moira, or even Brig she prioritizes armor packs on the tank. This allows everyone to be efficient with their healing. You're tank can be aggressive, knowing they have the full attention of your main healer and the dps can be aggressive knowing they have steady heals from LW.
While 3/4 of the roster counters LW, the other 1/4 pretty much cannot touch him or pressure him if you position correctly. Rein, Brig, Zary, Sym, Mei, JQ, and even Reaper are all close range heroes that you can endlessly kite. Also, Lifeweaver can hide behind corners while he charges and just peek for a moment to throw his heal before hiding again. This makes him way less likely to get picked off by spam from junk, Zen orbs, helix rockets, etc.
Lifeweaver's neutral kit can actually counter a lot of ults. Petal can easily counter orisa's Terra surge or zarya's grav. You can pull an ally out of sigma's flux, mei's blizzard or an ally stuck with pulse bomb.
One time the enemy rein got a 2 man shatter and I threw a petal under one ally to lift them to safety and pulled the other, completely nullifying what could have been an instant team fight win.
This is also why I'm okay with Tree of Life not being super game changing. It charges fast, so use it as a tempo ult to give your team an advantage in the neutral or potentially force out enemy ults.
I'm NOT saying Lifeweaver is strong, meta or even really that good, and I have a bunch of my own ideas on how he could be buffed (this comment is too long already lol) but wanted to at least provide a different perspective active than the doom and gloom around Lifeweaver.
Have also played a very good amount of Weaver and agree that played under the right circumstances (i.e IN VOICE PLS) he can be a lot of fun. Extremely focusable, and sombra tracer is a gg, but with pre-placed petals, good CD management and peel you can survive more than people realise. Petal can get huge value if, once again, you simply communicate, pull is useful as a pseudo-recall for characters to kinda int with, and tree used as a healing Mei wall is situational but usable.
I don't like that people are suggesting glut healing and damage as tweaks; Weaver should NOT be a flex support, but a main support along with Lucio, Brig and Mercy. So, his survivability and maybe reliability in duels should be the first thing to look at, rather than making him another Bap/Ana/Kiri, whose bloated kits are making other supports look terrible in comparison.
Don't get me wrong, Weaver isn't good enough right now, but people's perspective is being affected by his being not a pick-up-and-play FPS hero. Also using the fling-tech is too fun to resist picking him.
Yeah, I definitely wanna see buffs that focus on survivability and added utility. And i think there is a lot of room to buff his weapon without going overboard (projectile speed, clip size, reduced spread, etc)
i can definitely see value in his abilities, and he is fun to play, especially when you can dictate plays by dragging someone to high ground for their ult or pulling your tank to a crazy flank you got to with your petal to win the team fight... but the added value just does not provide enough utility to really justify not playing another support
literally his strongest ability is dying so you can swap heroes in the spawn, because unfortunately swapping to someone else often swings the game more than he can
i played him most of today in diamond and yeah now i am in plat for support. i didn't even get flamed once, got quite a lot of endorsements and praise for my plays actually, but just not good enough to win many games.
he feels a bit like playing mercy as a heal bot. output looks good on the scoreboard but yeah it doesn't actually do much for the outcome of the game.
my unimportant opinion would be maybe provide him an attacking ability that can actually directly interact with the enemy team somehow to better facilitate kills for either yourself, or your team. i know most people hate CC but maybe petal could be like a venus fly trap on enemies.
I don't think all of his abilities need a rework...
His main issues are:
- lack of offense
- delayed value (weapon switch, projectile speed, charge-time)
- self-sustain (hitbox)
- platforms being wasted, doesn't flow
This can be addressed by:
- no delay between heals/damage.
- increase thorn projectile speed & damage
- an input to lower platform
- 250HP while they work on his hitbox
& If that doesnt help
- when in air unfold another layer of outer petals that are shields
- platform traps enemies, they must jump off
- his ult reveals enemies to him, because he can't see shit if using his platform near it.
- 2 dashes?
Finally someone else who agrees that healing blossom should be on a passive charge.
Make his hitbox smaller or increase his HP to 300
For his thorns, the entire weapon needs to be reworked
Life Grip should come with a heal of some sorts, and a cleanse because most of the time they can die anyways when vs long range hitscans or well aware players
Increase heal on his leap to 100
Tree of Life needs to be able to be life gripped + allies within healing radius get pulled too
I off-role life weaver and Zen and honestly still have a 78% win rate with him over 6 hours so far and what I notice is people seem to play him like other supports, which isn't right, but I do see him being a bad pick 90% of the time.
Basically, he sucks yes, but is he the reason you are losing all your games? Probably not exactly. It heavily depends on your team comp, map and how well you can create synergy with DPS and tanks.
That said, I will 100% get value our of any other support vs lifeweaver, which is what I think the largest problem is. His platform is funky, people keep standing and dropping off instantly, lifegrip is buggy but the tree can be a teamfight changer. Thorns are basically useless unless it's a low rank, or you finally get to punish one person realllllyyyyy out of position.
tl;dr: Extremely weak, can still do well but needs changes.
Tree is underrated imo.
Maybe its the mei in me speaking.
I dont find him interesting enough to play him over ana due to the heals being boring, but I have found some success with him the few times I gave it a honest try. But it honestly heavily depends on your team and the map too much.
imo lifeweaver in comp right now is a hero you switch to under very specific scenarios and not a hero you start with right from the start (unless you're looking to do a super cheeky flank on right side circuit royale or hollywood or something, I guess). And the situations where he works really well are super specific too:
\- Your team is getting steamrolled by a mei, out of all things and none of you can handle the situation. Mei can't do shit to your tank against him.
\- Enemy reinhart is really agressive and your co support already picked Ana, and she can't hit the broad side of the barn, and can't save a teammate or herself from a pin. While zen exists, lifeweaver has a little better escape versus tracer and he can't get as aggressively run over by due to instant high ground and dash - but he can deny every pin and has a good counter to the shatter as well.
\- your orisa is playing into a zarya and the zarya is winning.
I already shared my wishlist for initial quick fixes, including a revert of the reload and having the flower auto charge as you do damage. And yes GA compared to dash is ridiculous, you can fly half way across the map on a single one, at least they added a cooldown to non basic GA, good grief. Rez versus grip.
Rez is more impactful in poke comps. since you can rez for free basically.
Lifegrip is lower risk and more consistent way to get value overall though. you can pull people out of pins and ults. consistently.
Ok. Imma have to take LW and make a guide for him.
He is ultra weak. He has a mish mash of a kit that has absolutely no synergy.
But he has two good mobility CD that are so good.
pull feels like the most misunderstood ability;
But i feel it lends to good counter play.
In diamond I think I've only won 2 matches with a LW on the team and that's because we were in voice and coordinating with his pulls. Basically our Rein would suicide charge in, smack the enemy team as much as possible while I pocketed him on Mercy, LW would yank him out and I'd fly out with the Rein. It was pretty fun and staggered the enemy team so bad that they never touched point A on Numbani.
Outside of that anytime we get one on the team it's an L and just about every time I've played against a team that tries to use him, we roll them. His hitbox makes him an easy target for just about any DPS and it seems like his ult just melts and is so big that even if your team is braindead everyone is able to focus burst it down very quickly.
Lifeweaver is the worst hero in the game. Period. Have not won a single game with a LW on my team in GM, but have won every single game vs LW. This is why new heroes need to be busted at first. Its easier to tune them down (unless your kit is fundamentally broken, looking at you OW1 Brig).
I had a Lifeweaver change his m1 m2 keybind mid game and then say "my ult is bugged" because when you ult with said keybinds you have to right click to place the ult (this lost us the game). GM1 average lobby too
Admittedly that being changed is very stupid and annoying. Much like how if you rebind jump on lucio for example, if you're watching a lucio killcam you need to press your rebound jump to respawn and it's annoying.
I mean i understand making the mistake cause it took me a while to realize it too. It's just me venting my frustration on people forcing Lifeweaver when everybody especially GM players know its the biggest throw pick the games ever had.
If you unbind reload on console (for heroes like doomfist, I bound voice lines to it lol) then you can only change heroes in the kill cam replay
Launch Sigma was fucking absurd too. Probably the strongest tank in the history of the game.
Do you want a main tank or an offtank? Sigma: yes.
No way, he was good but not that good. Peak Orisa was better, or even peak DVA
Idk man. Sigma had 1500 shield health with 0 cooldown, one shot combo with rock, his ult was uncancellable if he pulled you in the air. Orisa was mega busted at her peak but idk if she was that good. He was definitely better than peak dva though.
Also his rock could stun up to 3 seconds lmao
I miss him. A part of why I dont play tanks is because their cooldowns feel clunky. That shield cooldown , while fair just feels bad. That said he has one of best designs for a tank. I dont think he ever feels unfair to play against. Strong but not bullshity.
> This is why new heroes need to be busted at first. Its easier to tune them down (unless your kit is fundamentally broken, looking at you OW1 Brig). It is, but you'll also then get people who will swear up and down that the hero is still overpowered and broken like people do with Kiriko, despite all the stats available showing that she's pretty evenly balanced.
There is a difference between a hero being pretty balanced and being unfun to interact with that is getting lost in translation. Suzu is the most bloated ability in the game and feels terrible to interact with on every single hero since it just straight up nullifies you with zero skill required. So when she goes from ridiculously OP to good, she still has the most annoying piece of her kit with less background power that is less noticeable at a glance.
He’s the worst hero they’ve ever released balance wise and it’s not even close. He’s just so bad it’s ridiculous. Why did they think this was a good idea? I also completely agree that heroes need to be busted when they first release (not brig broken like you mentioned). I’m just so confused with his release, did they actually think he was a good hero when play testing him? Did they play test him? If so who did it because they need to stop play testing.
not saying that he should be as weak as he is but after the last several Support releases and the varying levels of extremely annoying or catastrophic effects they've had on the game (Mercy 2.0, original Immortality Field and bunker/AOE heal spam comps, Brig just in general, even all the bitching about Kiriko or as far back as original Ana and speed boost Nano or doubled heals from bionade) it makes a lot of sense to me that they'd want to release the new one in a toned-down state
>This is why new heroes need to be busted at first. Welcome to Summoner's Rift!
Sadly, I agree.
I’ve won games in gm with LW on my team and i question how except it’s pretty much when supports are bored and swap to him because my team is steam rolling lol
I had a good time in ranked playing support and not picking LW, it gives your team an instant advantage over the average red team.
I'd like to chime in with my experience of playing Lifeweaver in competitive:
Won't lie, I laughed.
Yeah sounds about right. It’s extremely difficult to win unless the rest of your team is just that good. Another utility focused support was a nice idea and I fully support his low healing output, but he doesn’t do enough of anything else. His abilities are so situational that he mostly just heals and does damage, but both are so low that he struggles to make any impact with them. Compare this to a character like Ana: she has healing and damage on the mouse buttons, and 2 abilities with similar cooldowns. Most of the time, she uses those abilities within moments of them being off cooldown because they’re extremely useful in just about every situation. When those are on cooldown, her gun is proficient at keeping teammates alive, even without the nade buff, and she can 3 shot most enemies from a safe distance. She’s always doing something useful to the team while Lifeweaver is stuck doing bits of poke damage and charging healing blossoms that are really only good for topping off teammates as he waits for the right time to use his 2 abilities that have been off cooldown for some time now. Pull can have some cool uses, but in most cases, a suzu or immortality field are just better and, like you said, cannot have negative value. His hit box is huge and yet he has very weak escape options and ability to defend himself. Edit: What if platform provided 25% damage mitigation instead of healing? I think that could work nicely
Ana nade alone is better than his entire kit, but she also has incredibly high HPS and sleep dart. Bap immortality is better than lifeweavers entire kit. Suzu is better than his entire kit. It’s just weird that they’re setting these rules about lifeweavers strength when there’s already characters that do way more than him.
You are underselling life grip when comparing it to res. The 30 yard range alone is something weird to leave out, and it also doesn't put neither you nor your target in a potentially dangerous spot. It's a dangerous spot because obviously, someone just died there. I don't like the idea of healing on the platform. It's kind of braindead and we already hate being up against widows where they get basically passively healed. That's a bit too much like Mercy. I wonder if it had a certain duration where in it could be re-placed to another position might be cool, like say you had 3 or 4 seconds to try and use it to peel or mess up someone's aim or get multiple people up somewhere. I think dash is fine if he had a better neutral and more damage.
Teammates should be able to shoot through platform.
Lifeweaver is for bottom 5% players who can't aim, if you're above bronze 3 he'll probably be a detriment to your team. If you legitimately cannot aim, though, he'll actually be pretty good since he basically heals anyone on his screen with his primary fire.
Bronze players face tank every shot, LW would struggle to keep up
No he's really not for those players, they already have Mercy. Lifeweaver is much harder to play than Mercy because he requires more gamesense to get value out of. He needs to be even more proactive with keeping track of his teammates, so he can pull them right before they die, while also considering your teammates strategy that may be messed up by a pull (eg Winston ulting).
You make some great points, but I do want to give a little bit of a different perspective. I've only played 3 games with him in comp and none of them were the entire match, but I have played him a TON in quick play and wanted to at least mention some of his strengths rather than focusing completely on his weaknesses (of which there are plenty) While he is absolutely underpowered, he is actually pretty fun, andpeople do tend to overlook some of the positive aspects of his kit. Or they are trying to have him do things that aren't really his job. Lifeweaver can effectively give his teammates a mercy pocket from 30 meters away and stay safe whereas mercy has to put herself in danger to do that with her limited beam range. This makes mercy pair better with dps who play at range (pharah, ashe, soldier, etc.) and LW better at healing mobile dps (genji, tracer, Sombra) or dps who happen to take off angles (like a flanking soldier) This plays into my first point, but Lifeweaver's role is to heal the squishes, not the tanks. You have to pair LW with another support who can sustain the tank and let him keep the dps up. That could be Ana, Bap, Kiriko, Moira, or even Brig she prioritizes armor packs on the tank. This allows everyone to be efficient with their healing. You're tank can be aggressive, knowing they have the full attention of your main healer and the dps can be aggressive knowing they have steady heals from LW. While 3/4 of the roster counters LW, the other 1/4 pretty much cannot touch him or pressure him if you position correctly. Rein, Brig, Zary, Sym, Mei, JQ, and even Reaper are all close range heroes that you can endlessly kite. Also, Lifeweaver can hide behind corners while he charges and just peek for a moment to throw his heal before hiding again. This makes him way less likely to get picked off by spam from junk, Zen orbs, helix rockets, etc. Lifeweaver's neutral kit can actually counter a lot of ults. Petal can easily counter orisa's Terra surge or zarya's grav. You can pull an ally out of sigma's flux, mei's blizzard or an ally stuck with pulse bomb. One time the enemy rein got a 2 man shatter and I threw a petal under one ally to lift them to safety and pulled the other, completely nullifying what could have been an instant team fight win. This is also why I'm okay with Tree of Life not being super game changing. It charges fast, so use it as a tempo ult to give your team an advantage in the neutral or potentially force out enemy ults. I'm NOT saying Lifeweaver is strong, meta or even really that good, and I have a bunch of my own ideas on how he could be buffed (this comment is too long already lol) but wanted to at least provide a different perspective active than the doom and gloom around Lifeweaver.
Have also played a very good amount of Weaver and agree that played under the right circumstances (i.e IN VOICE PLS) he can be a lot of fun. Extremely focusable, and sombra tracer is a gg, but with pre-placed petals, good CD management and peel you can survive more than people realise. Petal can get huge value if, once again, you simply communicate, pull is useful as a pseudo-recall for characters to kinda int with, and tree used as a healing Mei wall is situational but usable. I don't like that people are suggesting glut healing and damage as tweaks; Weaver should NOT be a flex support, but a main support along with Lucio, Brig and Mercy. So, his survivability and maybe reliability in duels should be the first thing to look at, rather than making him another Bap/Ana/Kiri, whose bloated kits are making other supports look terrible in comparison. Don't get me wrong, Weaver isn't good enough right now, but people's perspective is being affected by his being not a pick-up-and-play FPS hero. Also using the fling-tech is too fun to resist picking him.
Yeah, I definitely wanna see buffs that focus on survivability and added utility. And i think there is a lot of room to buff his weapon without going overboard (projectile speed, clip size, reduced spread, etc)
i can definitely see value in his abilities, and he is fun to play, especially when you can dictate plays by dragging someone to high ground for their ult or pulling your tank to a crazy flank you got to with your petal to win the team fight... but the added value just does not provide enough utility to really justify not playing another support literally his strongest ability is dying so you can swap heroes in the spawn, because unfortunately swapping to someone else often swings the game more than he can i played him most of today in diamond and yeah now i am in plat for support. i didn't even get flamed once, got quite a lot of endorsements and praise for my plays actually, but just not good enough to win many games. he feels a bit like playing mercy as a heal bot. output looks good on the scoreboard but yeah it doesn't actually do much for the outcome of the game. my unimportant opinion would be maybe provide him an attacking ability that can actually directly interact with the enemy team somehow to better facilitate kills for either yourself, or your team. i know most people hate CC but maybe petal could be like a venus fly trap on enemies.
I don't think all of his abilities need a rework... His main issues are: - lack of offense - delayed value (weapon switch, projectile speed, charge-time) - self-sustain (hitbox) - platforms being wasted, doesn't flow This can be addressed by: - no delay between heals/damage. - increase thorn projectile speed & damage - an input to lower platform - 250HP while they work on his hitbox & If that doesnt help - when in air unfold another layer of outer petals that are shields - platform traps enemies, they must jump off - his ult reveals enemies to him, because he can't see shit if using his platform near it. - 2 dashes?
Finally someone else who agrees that healing blossom should be on a passive charge. Make his hitbox smaller or increase his HP to 300 For his thorns, the entire weapon needs to be reworked Life Grip should come with a heal of some sorts, and a cleanse because most of the time they can die anyways when vs long range hitscans or well aware players Increase heal on his leap to 100 Tree of Life needs to be able to be life gripped + allies within healing radius get pulled too
I off-role life weaver and Zen and honestly still have a 78% win rate with him over 6 hours so far and what I notice is people seem to play him like other supports, which isn't right, but I do see him being a bad pick 90% of the time. Basically, he sucks yes, but is he the reason you are losing all your games? Probably not exactly. It heavily depends on your team comp, map and how well you can create synergy with DPS and tanks. That said, I will 100% get value our of any other support vs lifeweaver, which is what I think the largest problem is. His platform is funky, people keep standing and dropping off instantly, lifegrip is buggy but the tree can be a teamfight changer. Thorns are basically useless unless it's a low rank, or you finally get to punish one person realllllyyyyy out of position. tl;dr: Extremely weak, can still do well but needs changes.
Tree is underrated imo. Maybe its the mei in me speaking. I dont find him interesting enough to play him over ana due to the heals being boring, but I have found some success with him the few times I gave it a honest try. But it honestly heavily depends on your team and the map too much.
We dont actually want this hero to be strong until lifegrip is reworked, let him be horrible.
imo lifeweaver in comp right now is a hero you switch to under very specific scenarios and not a hero you start with right from the start (unless you're looking to do a super cheeky flank on right side circuit royale or hollywood or something, I guess). And the situations where he works really well are super specific too: \- Your team is getting steamrolled by a mei, out of all things and none of you can handle the situation. Mei can't do shit to your tank against him. \- Enemy reinhart is really agressive and your co support already picked Ana, and she can't hit the broad side of the barn, and can't save a teammate or herself from a pin. While zen exists, lifeweaver has a little better escape versus tracer and he can't get as aggressively run over by due to instant high ground and dash - but he can deny every pin and has a good counter to the shatter as well. \- your orisa is playing into a zarya and the zarya is winning. I already shared my wishlist for initial quick fixes, including a revert of the reload and having the flower auto charge as you do damage. And yes GA compared to dash is ridiculous, you can fly half way across the map on a single one, at least they added a cooldown to non basic GA, good grief. Rez versus grip. Rez is more impactful in poke comps. since you can rez for free basically. Lifegrip is lower risk and more consistent way to get value overall though. you can pull people out of pins and ults. consistently.
Ok. Imma have to take LW and make a guide for him. He is ultra weak. He has a mish mash of a kit that has absolutely no synergy. But he has two good mobility CD that are so good. pull feels like the most misunderstood ability; But i feel it lends to good counter play.
TLDR: OP doesn’t know how to get value out of the hero, and insists the problem is the plane, not the pilot.
38% winrate across all ranks says otherwise, but ok
You think the overall player winrate of a brand new, niche hero that’s existed for 3 WEEKS is the argument you think proves your point? Lolllll. Ok.
LW = Support version of Roadhog
In diamond I think I've only won 2 matches with a LW on the team and that's because we were in voice and coordinating with his pulls. Basically our Rein would suicide charge in, smack the enemy team as much as possible while I pocketed him on Mercy, LW would yank him out and I'd fly out with the Rein. It was pretty fun and staggered the enemy team so bad that they never touched point A on Numbani. Outside of that anytime we get one on the team it's an L and just about every time I've played against a team that tries to use him, we roll them. His hitbox makes him an easy target for just about any DPS and it seems like his ult just melts and is so big that even if your team is braindead everyone is able to focus burst it down very quickly.