Analyzing LW's Superbloom perk

Note: I originally made this post before the perks were released. I’ve updated some things since now that we’ve had hands-on experience

According to a post I saw elsewhere on this forum, Superbloom’s extra 30 damage activates upon landing 16 thorns within 1.5 seconds (Thanks Ayanga for doing the research and clarifying the actual number :pray:)

LW’s weapon fires 22 individual thorns per second, so 33 in 1.5 seconds. So to activate Superbloom, you would need to be hitting about ~49% of your thorns at the time on that specific target

One full clip of thorns takes about 4.5~ seconds to deplete. Once Superbloom starts activating, it does so rapidly as long as your shots are accurate enough, potentially less than 1.5 seconds apart. To test it, I unloaded a full 100 thorn bodyshots into a Reinhardt in the practice range and counted the bursts. It went off a total of six times (and the Rein was left with just a sliver of HP, for the record). So 6 bursts = an extra 180 HP damage in total, or 40 extra DPS or so

So while firing, without factoring in reload, LW could reach a theoretical maximum 173~ DPS with all bodyshots, 306~ with all crits vs non-Tanks, and 240~ with all crits vs Tanks

Also, I STILL don’t know for sure if Superbloom’s extra damage is affected by crits, so I just treated it as if it isn’t to be safe, and as far as I can tell it isn’t. But if it IS able to crit, then these numbers are even higher

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The fact that Pull gets a cleanse effect for one of his perks and its not on his base kit makes me mad

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LW is so much cooler than he gets credit for. I think the bad rep is more about the playstyles being used to only focus on healing instead of throwing in some disruptive DPS on flanking heroes.

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I just updated the OP now that we have hands-on experience with Superbloom. It’s amazing. It’s actually twice as effective as I initially thought before release :dancer:

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His bad rep is unfortunately deserved. His gun just isn’t good in a game like Overwatch, with all the mobility, healing and stuff. Of course, it can be deadly if you get a chance to just hold W+M1 at someone, but generally it’s very low impact.

Mhmmmmm?

Could you say that again? These thorns are incredibly loud