Lifeweaver is struggling to find his footing. A lot of debate has been around whether a support that offers a lot of healing but little damage can work as a design. I think the defining feature of Lifeweaver is his utilities which are already powerful and highly creative. I think leaning into these strengths of utility and versatility is the best way forward rather than simply buffing his healing, damage, or sustain.
The following are my recomended changes for Lifeweaver:
Life Grip:
- Can be cancelled early by hitting the ability button again, unless the target is over a pit. Doing this makes the target freeze in place until the ability is over.
This opens up a lot of creativity with life grip, now you can move an ally anywhere between their current position and you, instead of only being able to move them all the way to you. You can also cancel it instantly to give your ally healing and iframes without moving them.
- While in life grip, allies can hit interact to end the ability early.
It’s silly that the only way to escape life grip is to use a movement cooldown. This way all heroes can escape life grip at any time, similar to the previous change, this makes life grip more versatile and offers a way out of bad grips. It may be frustrating for the Lifeweaver player to have their ability cancelled but sometimes grips are bad through no fault of the LW player, they can’t see what the target sees. Still, if this just leads to people feeding by automatically cancelling grips that would have saved them, maybe this should be an option the LW can turn off.
- Cooldown reduced to 18 seconds
The only time Lifeweaver has been a decent pick was when Life Grip cooldown was 16 seconds. While I think having it that often was a little obnoxious, I think 18 seconds is a good compromise
Petal Platform:
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Petal Platform will now return to the ground when there are no players on it, making it reusable.
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Duration after first activation increased to 10 seconds
These buffs make Petal Platform much more versatile and powerful. Now you can reliably use it to rotate your entire team to highground or continue to juke enemies by going up, then down, then up again, it also means it’s not as bad if an ally triggers or falls off of it by accident.
- Can now be frozen in place by Lifeweaver hitting interact within 5 meters of it
The freeze option is to allow Petal Platform to still be used in hallways to block enemies. This also opens up new uses by allowing the Platform to stall at a specific height, avoiding enemy sightlines while still staying off the ground for instance.
Rejuvenating Dash:
- Cannot be used on the ground regardless of any control option
Lifeweaver’s original control scheme is clunky and unintuitive, the fact that it gives a competitive advantage by allowing dashing on the ground undermines the point of adding a new, more intuitive control scheme.
Healing Blossom:
- Now does 50% of its healing over half a second
This change lowers LW instant healing potential slightly but allows him to pre-heal his teammates instead. For comparison, Ana darts do their healing over 1 second and still feel almost instant, so I don’t anticipate this change feeling too dramatic. This change also disincentives spamming low charge blossoms as you will now need to wait at least half a second between blossoms on the same target to get maximum efficiency
- Healing charge now preserved for up to 1 second while using Thorn Volley
While I don’t think LW needs buffs to his damage potential, this change will make it easier to weave in small amounts of damage between heals
Tree of Life:
- Radius increased to 15 meters
While Tree of Life provides powerful healing, overhealth and cover, it can be a little too difficult to get your team to play around a small, static area.
Thanks everyone for reading - a humble game designer