It functions perfectly fine in solo queue. I almost exclusively solo queue in comp unless a team decides to stay grouped/adopt me.
If it functions perfectly fine in solo queue why is the leading advice for new LW mains that they should turn off text and vc chat because they’ll get flamed for grip?
Why is it that they’re warned they’ll get banned if they stay in those chats?
Doesn’t really seem that solo queue friendly.
Just because it “functions” in solo-queue doesn’t mean its a good ability or a solo-friendly one. At its core, Lifegrip still has more negatives than positives.
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If someone asks for a petal platform, tell them “say UPPIES!”
You’re welcome to list them, but I disagree. The idea you propose certainly raises more issues than the current iteration of grip has.
Lifegrip has been talked about to death already, but the biggest problem with it is that it literally cannot be used proactively.
It’s a poor man’s rez but much more niche and with less impact. Plus, the problem its trying to solve (being a strong defensive ability in lieu of rez) is already solved better by other support abilities like Bap field & Kiri Suzu. The other problem its trying to solve (positioning) becomes less and less relevant as you climb up in rank.
Lifegripping a tank from danger and forcing them to give up space is far less optimal than placing a Bap Lamp down, hitting them with a suzu, or even rezzing them – which are all options that would allow the tank to continue fighting in the front lines and are all abilities that can completely change the tide of a fight when used optimally. Lifegrip doesn’t have that same impact because it forces tanks to give up their space. I’ve found that in most situations where I’m using Lifegrip on a tank to save them, the fight is probably lost anyway.
Also, sometimes pulling the target doesn’t even save their life – I’ve pulled so many teammates at low health just for them to die seconds later to a stray bullet or something. Maybe they were anti’d, maybe they had a burning effect on them. Grip doesn’t help with any of that. And it doesn’t feel good for either the LW or the player you pulled. It’s a waste of a cooldown whereas another support ability in the same situation would have produced more favorable results.
Lets also not forget the inconsistencies that this ability has that others like it simply don’t. Like your pulled target accidentally getting stuck on terrain, your pulled target using a movement ability and effectively cancelling your pull, your pulled target still falling off cliffs because of latency, etc.
The ability is just fundamentally problematic. The only times I legitimately feel like I’ve used grip to do something that some other support couldn’t do is when I use the pull to save people from environment kills. Other than that, anything LW can do with grip, other supports can do better without grip.
My suggestion may not be perfect, but it at least allows for more proactive uses of the ability, which is healthier for the game, for LW, and everyone on LW’s team. I staunchly disagree that grip as it is now is an ability that’s actually needed in this game. And I’m saying this as a LW main.
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This is also how movement abilities work with grip too?
You get gripped and use a movement ability then it cancels grip and the CD isn’t refunded. Just how it works.
You already used and clicked the ability button for your movement prior to being gripped. Even if you are gripped immediately after using a movement ability, you still clicked and activated the CD so I don’t see why it should be refunded.
There are such things as bad movements making you VERY vulnerable to hitscans, hook, etc. I see it ALL the time while playing LW where someone uses their movement and I have to pull them away immediately after they use it.
Such as:
- Junkrat using a concussion mine and going airborne.
- Ashe using coach gun to get away, only to put herself into danger.
- Sombra translocating away from a failed assassination attempt during a fight.
- Winston leaping up into the sky while 50hp
- Doom/Mauga/Rein charging to get away from dmg or charging INTO the enemy while very low.
There are many instances where people actively and deliberately use their movement to get away and their mistakes should not be refunded. Just like how LGrip shouldn’t be refunded if someone cancels it w a movement ability.
That’s just my viewpoint from having to actually pull so many people after they use any form of movement. Yes there are mistakes that LW can cause a problem with by gripping someone right after they used a movement ability, such as pulling them into harms way and having no way out since the movement is on CD. However, this also works both ways and there are plays to where you canceling grip can result in your own death. But everything is intentional and once you click that button you have already committed to using that ability and I do not think that it should be refunded, there’s reasons as to why you might be getting pulled IMMEDIATELY after you use your movement abilities.
Although I joked about it, I did like your earlier idea. The problem is that would take a lot of power and decision making out of LW’s hands. I don’t think that’s worth. Is there an even middler ground?
My pain point is that it takes me from where I want to be, overrides my decision, and places me somewhere else.
I dont really care about my ability cooldowns potentially being wasted, and refunding them also provides no value to being pulled on a hero that has no mobility.
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I understand. But you can say that for many, many abilities you encounter in the game.
This is true. Ana for example would gain nothing from this idea, but then again she wouldn’t have hopped up on high ground just seconds prior, either, so the pain point I’m trying to address isn’t relevant here.
Aside from Mei wall, this is only true for enemy abilities, which is an important distinction. The enemy is… well, your enemy. Avoiding the enemy is basically the point of the game, and you counter that with positioning, planning, etc. You don’t really have the option to plan around being life gripped. The only way to do so is to not be in their line of sight, which (for all intents and purposes) means being in an extremely bad position. LW has a fair bit of mobility (including on demand personal high ground) and can LG from 30 meters away from the safety of your backline, with no aim requirement. When an enemy is trying to contest you, your positioning is any area that your team controls (or rather, where the enemy does not).
I guess in essence I dont think this really solves any real issues with the ability. It just makes some very niche scenarios not completely suck.
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That’s all I want. This is a mega selfish thread. 
Your points about avoiding the enemy make a lot of sense, and I generally agree with you. I do wonder how he would have felt if he had been released a long time ago when the game was establishing itself, or if he hadn’t been the first with such dramatic team CC. I wonder because I kinda get the feeling the devs will put in more abilities like grip sooner or later. It feels like natural ability creep progression to me and we all know that train don’t go backwards easy.
That’s all speculative, though.
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I don’t think this is necessarily true, while Grip and Wall may be the major abilities you think of that could interrupt your gameplay there are many abilities that also affect you or bring enemies TO you. Lucio, Queen, and Kiri all speed boost you which indirectly makes your aim sensitivity higher unless you are standing still. I don’t like that at all but that’s how it is, idc. Then you have Boops and pulls with Hog, Queen, Brig, Lucio, etc.
Cause like you said
You can’t avoid enemies who are booped into you, hooked into you, or knifed into you. There are plenty of misplays that can occur even if you are in a good position because someone on your team decides to boop or pull someone into you or wall you off.
Yes grip takes agency away, I get it and I’m not going to go back and fourth so I’ll just say what I have to say and then just agree to disagree on the subject, because unless the devs announce that they are reworking LG…they have no plans to change it anytime soon. I don’t care about my agency as a player, I just don’t, so LG really doesn’t bother me personally and I weigh the pros and cons and the pros just vastly outweigh the few cons that come along with losing my agency/positioning if I get to stay alive.
People are just not encountering these mishaps every single game and at the end of the day it depends on if the player playing the hero is actually good or not, or if you are not playing well and out of position as a teammate and just don’t seem to notice. LW pulls you when you are crit and about to die, I don’t find the point in complaining about his ability when people are using it correctly to save you if you were to die anyways.
But, like I said, this ability is something that you and others on the forums dislike when it comes to another person being able to displace you (which I understand). It just gets upsetting seeing LW topics turn into this stupid debate about LG when we as LW players cannot change this core feature of the character that is very hard to change as it is a core mechanic of the hero and is used in SUCH a variety of ways.
Idk, maybe he’ll get some rework of the ability. But it’s hard to rework something that requires urgency and fast decision making on one players end, especially if people want it to be this like…leash? where a player would have to click interact (which most players dont even know how to use or have bound mind you) to decide when they should be pulled. It’s just hard to come up w a good solution to him, I’m always down to try new things of course, if it doesn’t change him too much.
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While misplays can be annoying and certainly not beneficial to you, they aren’t overriding my decisions and actions. They’re just making my currently chosen actions less valuable.
While I can see where you’re going with the speed boost thing, I generally would not agree that its conceptually the same as being life gripped. One is a very abrupt, jarring, and actually removes/undoes decisions I’ve made. The other is a small buff that may have a very very minor detrimental impact on my aiming (which I dont personally think is really true).
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I’m also not saying I have a good solution to LW. I agree LG is a core part of his identity, and I haven’t really seen any good compromise/suggestion that doesn’t make the ability effectively worthless. My personal opinion is that he should just be scrapped and completely reworked, as I think pretty much his entire kit was a mistake. But that’s just me, and I realize it’s certainly not ideal, nor what many LW players would want to hear.
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I don’t think it takes much away from Weaver’s decision-making though. All it does is give your teammate a get-out of jail free card that they can choose to use or not.
With this rework, even if a teammate chooses not to use it to pull themselves back to safety, you still have a good defensive ability in bubble.
I think its more of a perception issue from the LW player, because it may seem like they’re losing something by giving up the ability to yeet people around the map instead of letting their teammates choose if / when they get yeeted. I don’t really see it that way.
Do you have any ideas fot a middle ground?
No, you can’t. Seriously the closest thing is Mei wall, and that is a map geometry change. This ability is explicitly there to do what Nighthawk says.
The enemy is your enemy, you can shield, dodge, reflect, eat, kill them, boop them and move to avoid them hitting you with anything that would affect your agency.
You can LOS Life Weaver. That’s it.
Altered, but still completely under your control.
You can. This is prediction. It’s a misplay as well, not the intended usage like Grip is.
Additionally that’s still them hitting the enemy with it and then the enemy doing something with the result.
Which is why it’s frustrating to see people ardently defending it as ‘such a wonderful thing with no flaws’ when you know it has flaws and LW’s keep pretending that no one is allowed to have a problem with this failure of a kit design.
Yeah, but it turns an ability that LW was supposed to be able to use himself into a weird, one hero passive.
Hmm. What if it was a two-step ability that allowed Weaver to pick a spot that a teammate could be pulled to, at which point they could optionally do so kind of like TP but without the need to have it be based on Weaver’s physical location. Timers and cooldowns all up for discussion.
My one caveat is that players should be forced to pick an interact key before they can play the game. They tried to force it to the same buttons for everyone a long time ago and that had a lot of problems but now you don’t even have to have it bound for comp. Sad times.
Huh, that gives him a lot of aggressive potential, how would this be placed in the environment? LOS? Mini-map? Reyna orb like thing?
Would teammates need LOS to the pull spot?
This also feels like it could open up some actually fun yo-yo strats. As long as people actually have a choice to either go with the pull or to just not.
Yeah absolutely. Check for a bind before the game starts. (This might cause issues with pc players who leave a controller plugged in to charge but it just means they bind it on the controller they aren’t using as well.)
Idk about resetting all movement cooldowns… Maybe just the cooldown of a movement ability that was interrupted by life grip? Like a refund.
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I’m no expert in this field so bear with me as I make my brave foray. I think I remember something from the devs about how a mini map was considered but I don’t know when. Let’s say there’s a map now, enemy locations aren’t shown on it but all teammates and team interactables are. I think because Weaver has plenty of mobility with the petal, he should need LOS to place this grip spot.
In order to use it, ehhh, I can see arguments for LOS and against. I think a (generous?) LOS to the grip spot makes the most sense. Weaver shouldn’t have to be in the picture for it to work, if the choice is up to the individual. I say generous because I’m thinking of high grounds that you can’t see from directly below, so not flat like petal. Maybe the grip spot is also a tree.
Actually on the LOS thing, I changed my mind. I think it should be AOE, which is similar but more useful and dynamic. In that case though, I think it should lose the immortality.
I’m imagining someone getting dragged along a wall and out of a room they were gonna die in like they’re in my favorite demon possession flicks, lmao.