People are still somehow asking for this a year later and it just simply makes no sense. I seriously don’t get how anyone thinks this is a good idea. Let’s iterate on this idea and all it’s suggested versions real quick
Initial idea, you can press f (the interact button) mid-grip to cancel it. Okay, but the thing is so fast that by the time you press f you are already mostly back to your original position, and likely in a worst of both worlds situation where they’re far from the fight they want to be in but they’re also not at the useful position you may have pulled them to. It doesn’t help that they likely don’t know precisely where they’re being pulled to and thus have to make an uninformed guess. Okay, but if it’s a bad thing to cancel it then players will just choose not to cancel it right? At that point you’re just making the argument that you should have a special greifing option added as a way of spiting your lifeweaver, the character you complain about griefing.
But let’s iterate on this idea. Maybe since the ability is too fast to be cancelled, we can add a sort of windup period where it takes a second or so after the ability activates before you get pulled. This already makes the ability worse for noncombat uses like getting someone back from spawn faster. And also there’s the problem the LW may leave LoS in that period, but let’s just assume it pulls them to his original location, it’d be visually clunky, but serviceable. But here’s another problem, do they get shield during this windup period or not? If they do, then you just created a mega-OP version of protection suzu and LW will primarily use grip to give people mid-fight immortality that he intends for them to cancel. If they do not get the shield, then the ability’s strongest usecase of saving someone who is about to die is gone.
So maybe instead of press to cancel, we do the other way around, the person lifeweaver selects has a second to press grip or else the ability is cancelled. Between reaction speed and latency, this would add around 0.3-0.5 seconds of delay before you get gripped. Once again your target is dead. Unless you want to add in the shield during the confirmation phase, which not only creates the immortality problem from earlier, but now you’d also have to add in a cooldown every time someone declines the ability. And also, this would likely create a meta where lifeweaver’s optimal strategy is to spam e constantly on a target so they can escape at will, which is just tedious gameplay.
Maybe we lean into this and rework the ability a little bit. Lifeweaver now has a “grip tendril” that he can place on one teammate at any time, and he can switch what teammate it’s on. If the target presses f at any time with the grip tendril on them, then they get pulled to lifeweaver. So essentially lifeweaver can preplace a grip in case it is necessary, and you have plenty of time to react to it because it’s on you before you even need it. This still has problems. If an injured teammate comes into lifeweaver’s LoS right before dying, he can no longer save them. If a teammate without the tendril suddenly takes a lot of damage all at once, this can no longer save them. Another problem, it’d be incredibly frustrating if you were about to press f and it suddenly got placed onto another ally. Maybe you can add a grace period where you can still use it after it leaves you, but then you’d either need a period where both people can lifegrip, which is clunky, or to have a period of delay before the new person can use it, which again defeats a major point of the ability. Then there’s some more practical issues. What if lifeweaver isn’t in LoS anymore when you choose to be pulled to him. Pulling you up to a wall would be awkward. Pulling you to the last valid position lifeweaver was in would work, but then it’d be frustrating from the enemy perspective that a phantom LW would pull you away. Maybe you could make it expire when out of LoS like harmony orb does, but once again it’d be unpredictable and frustrating for the person being gripped to know when your escape is about to expire. Then there’s a practical problem, what would this do for people like Illari who have crucial gameplay abilities already on the interact key, we can just take that away from her for several seconds, and any solution like adding more keys to the game or having double tapping or anything like that is suboptimal. Then balance wise this would take most of the skill of the ability away from lifeweaver, which is very bad for such a powerful ability. And it also would just be blatantly overpowered to begin with. An immortality you can choose to use on yourself is just way more powerful than one you have to get from a teammate. Maybe a benefit would be if the enemy could see the “life tendril” so they have fair warning about the immortality I guess.
Maybe we can iterate further so lifeweaver places some kind of “grip station” deployable object that allies can choose when to grip to and enemies can destroy so there’s fair counterplay. At this point, we’re just talking about a completely different ability. Maybe an interesting one worth exploring, but a completely different one.