Lifeweaver, the idea was to create a support hero that spent most of their time healing, need little aiming skill to heal, and brought transformational abilities to the battlefield. Take, for instance, the weapon swap.
They were basically going for another Mercy like hero,however Mercy works because of damage boost,so even though she’s not shooting anyone herself she’s still contributing to her team’s damage.I don’t see how a passive hero like her could work without some sort of damage amp.
Agreed, i kinda feel like the reload on heal is unnecessary and his thorn valley ammo should be upped a bit.
No ammo i think is fine as it reloads in the background
The funniest part of the article is the confusion over Weaver having more success at low levels. Easy to figure out. Weaver stands on his platform and goes up. Low rank dps don’t know how to aim upward, so he gets an uncontested high ground to rain down damage or healing from. 
I still think his healing needs a small buff but we’ll see what these changes do.
You have more hope than I.
Well let’s see what this is.
Removal of Parting Gift is one of the most stupid decisions taken by balance team lately, lmafo.
Again forum crybabies wins. That’s just sad.
I’m happy with this. All the explanations make sense (though doing a final controls pass near release is pretty much standard practice for everyone for a reason) and I’m generally okay with all their changes.
I’m a little nervous about them saying they want to make new heroes more powerful going forward, because I think it’s much better for the game if new heroes err on the underpowered side.
The new control scheme would be a positive addition and all, but as it appears that only the old scheme will allow Weaver to dash without jumping, swapping to the new one is strictly handicapping oneself. Amazing.
But it’s a very pointless ability that rarely helps your team. It’s basically used a majority of the time by the one who killed you. No reason to have an ability that’s passively works against the team.
I wish they would leave parting gift in but as a small aoe healing for a few seconds for allies. Rest of the changes sound really nice.
That and I have to imagine the pull plays a part in it. Lower ratings make more mistakes, and it is easier to see other player’s mistakes than your own. The pull is probably forcibly preventing a lot of these mistakes from happening in the first place.
That’s a heavy heavy if, and depends on the lifeweaver also not being a metal rank player making the same mistakes. What’s very common from what I’ve seen is the Lifeweaver misjudging and losing fights because they keep using the pull at bad moments or straight up out or rage.
Yes, mistakes will happen across all ratings and it is ceetainly more prominent the lower in rating you go. I do expect them to perform worse or not have as good decision making skills. But the ability makes sense that it helps a lot for those who are lower since the mistakes are going to be more frequent it’s easier to make a pull that shouldn’t be absolutely terrible.
It’s hard to tell either way though since while it’s easier to stop them from making the mistake, not only does lifeweaver have to recognize it like you said but the enemy needs to be able / know to capitalize off of the mistake. Which, lower ratings are also less likely to do lol.
I think another part is his huge box, players in the games I’m in would bully him due to low mobility and huge hit box without having the offensive strength of say Zen. A diamond + player should easily be able to take advantage of that and just delete him due to the lack of defensives for himself beyond a small dash that gives a mediocre self heal.
Their reasons for removing Parting Gift is ‘to help make him easier to use and understand’.
Why? What’s difficult to understand about ‘I’m dead - Here’s a health pack!’ Support players aren’t brain dead, Blizzard - we don’t play the role because we can’t play the others. Stop making Supports easier to play! We’ve got 4 of those types of heroes already! Out of the 9 we have access to!
Bua was supposed to be complex and hard to master! Removing it to ‘make him simpler’ is honestly insulting. It’s bad enough you made Ana far easier to play when you increased the size of her healing bullets/projectiles. Now this?
Traits shouldn’t actively hurt your team.
We saw Lifeweaver’s win rate climb faster than other heroes when they launched, perhaps due to the surprising piece of data that his win rate is much higher for low-skill players than it is for high-skill players.
Bruh!
As a fitly bronze support I can tell you that he sucks even before playing him.
“Looking forward” to repeating the same story as ana when she launched underpowered and have been op ever since.
Basically the exact changes I want after playing him for the past week. No weapon swapping, tweaks to movement slowing, Tree buffed, and deleting the awful passive. The only thing I’d add is a cleanse to life grip and I think he’ll be in a strong spot. Nice to see the OW team listen and act promptly for once.
So this post was very interesting to me on a couple points. Fixing the controller scheme is welcome.
The first point that caught my eye was this:
“When we first began working on Lifeweaver, the idea was to create a support hero that spent most of their time healing, need little aiming skill to heal, and brought transformational abilities to the battlefield.”
Wow, they almost created a hero I would be really interested in trying. I’ve mentioned for years that OW needs more characters like Mercy. True support healers that dont rely on dps at all. Get creative and develop heroes that use abilities to assist the team and have survivability aspects. Stop making every character a shooter. It really is ok to have heroes that arent dps focused at all. There is skill in using such characters. The downside is it requires people willing to work as a team and look out for those healers. OW is rarely a teamwork focused experience. Plus, Blizzard only wants to cater to the dps hero crowd, the ones hungry for esports and COD. Healers that cant go out and get kills is boring to them lol.
Still, just try it Blizzard. Don’t be afraid to go against the grain, against the dps crowd.
The second point isnt from one line, but that entire last paragraph talking about balance and how new heroes land at launch. For them to mention that both Rammatra and Lifeweaver landed ‘soft’ is telling to me. We all have to remember that OW2 is going to live and die based on each new character driving engagement. That means driving us to play more and driving us to buy the premium battle pass and overpriced skins. So when their first two new characters drop (remember that most people got Junker Queen and Kiriko for free, no battlepass) and arent showing them a spike in engagement, they are going to get worried fast. I mean if you want some evidence of the lack of buzz around this game, check out the twitch charts. Consistently down in viewership and consistently outside the top 20. These two characters sure didn’t drive up external excitement.
They need everyone to love each new character and really get behind them. It’s the only content they have to drive excitement. So I would guess this will be the trend. They try to create characters that will make a big splash and if they see a ‘soft’ launch, they will go into emergency mode to rework them.