You are intended to primarily focus on healing and rescue. I’m sorry you don’t like it but that’s how the character plays, it’s just like Mercy.
Also you don’t have to, never had to, and never should have been charging his healing to max if you were doing that. That’s one way it can feel his healing is ineffective, you put too much time between shots and also potentially waste time by sitting on a full charge for any amount of time. It’s Mercy except you actually have to get good at healing.
Forgot kiriko did it too honestly
Unlike mercy where as soon as your pocket takes damage you can instantly swap off dmg boost and heal them. With lifeweaver there is a huge weapon swap delay whicy already makes the character feel slow and clunky and then on top of that you have to charge a heal up before you can do anything to help
He is nothing like mercy except for the fact he doesnt need to aim. That is the only comparable factor. He has none of the skill expression that mercy has with her mobility and juggling beam targets. He just stands at the back and braindead spams heal blossom across the map. He is the pinnacle of lazy and boring hero design
Continuing the discussion from Overwatch 2 Retail Patch Notes - June 13, 2023:
His thorns are far superior to Mercy’s pistol due to the much higher projectile speed. You are also massively overstating how long it takes him to switch weapons.
Any oppurtunity Mercy has to damage boost, Lifeweaver has an oppurtunity to shoot. If your team starts to need healing, you swap back. If things are dire, you use the pull.
Lifeweaver also doesn’t have low mobility. His dash is plenty good at getting him out of sticky situations especially when combined with his platform. His platform alone is often good enough to move him where he needs to go or evade an enemy. Due to the massive range on his healing combined with the angles he can get with his platform, he doesn’t need to be moving to places as often as other supports might. Playing Lifeweaver well means you need good map knowledge, creative use of his abilities, and being able to adapt to an odd spot on the fly. Don’t underestimate the platform and what it can do for you.
Also lol skill expression on Mercy, you’re just mad because you’re bad at Lifeweaver. You’re playing him like somebody that doesn’t understand Mercy plays her. It seems bad and boring because you’re bad.
Right about the size of it.
You’re hilarious if you think Mei wall is more trolly.
Also dude. Mei wall also needs changes, this doesn’t make Life grip magically good by any stretch of the imagination.
If we’re changing either of them. Remove grip.
Yup!
YUP
Except that the problem is it isn’t f to accept.
Give it a start up barrier with the prompt, if they don’t accept after 2 seconds, don’t pull them and give the Life Weaver a shorter cool down.
It ruins agency and it is unhealthy for the game.
No it’s still an f from a fun to play with perspective.
Cool, but it’s still terrible to play with.
A based take today for once Nerf.
No, you just care about agency which is normal.
Or if they use grip at all. Ruins my agency in a way that other heroes don’t have to.
me when trying to fill the word count
Mercy pistol literally has a higher dps but keep deluding yourself. It might have higher proj speed but the proj size of thorns is tiny meaning theyre harder to hit on moving targets, it has spread meaning past 15-20m you start to miss shots and obviously it has a lower dmg per thorn than mercy gets on 1 bullet meaning you have to hit more of them consistently to keep the same dps as mercy.
In a 1v1 you are more likely to kill the enemy as mercy than as lifeweaver. Not only because mercys gun is easier to hit shots with and does more consistent chunks of damage but she isnt the size of a tank so is harder for the enemy to hit and if the fight turns sour she can dip and fly away. Lifeweaver has none of that opportunity. Someone gets on him, he is literally dead.
No lol. Mercy can swap between dmg boost and healing instantaneously. lifeweaver has a delay when swapping to dmg and then another delay when he swaps back to healing. So already the actual fluidity of swapping between heals and dmg is night and day between the 2.
But then on top of that, unlike mercy who after instantaneously swapping back to heals can immediately start healing, lifeweaver after the swap delay has to also charge up his heal.
To summarise;
• mercy can immediately switch between healing and dmg and when she does can immediately start healing or dmg boosting.
• lifeweaver cannot immediately swap between healing and damage as he has a delay and when he does swap to healing he cannot immediately heal someone instead having to charge his heal up first. Meaning an additional 1 second delay to heal someone after the initial weapon swap delay
…. And then have to charge a heal which by that time someone is dead because you took too long to heal. Which is the EXACT reason why the best way to play him is to healbot because then you are always ready to heal. If you never swap to dmg you never have to worry about your heals not being ready when you need them.
Yes he does
His dash which moves you 6m and heals for 25hp…. It literally does nothing. It is the most embarrassing excuse for an ability they have ever added
Except when you are on your platform you cannot heal people under you or close around you because the platform blocks your own healing los 
If all you are doing is sitting in the sky on a platform spamming healing across the map not actively contributing to the fight, you already have lost. You are already down a player because you are hiding in the skybox while your team 4v5 on the ground.
No he is bad and boring because that is what he is. He is a low skill healbot support who only works on low ranks which is probably why you are seeing great success with him.
Some of the highest ranked players in the world cant get higher than plat with him but i guess they’re just not playing him right and they should listen to chiefwambam on the ow forums
That is nothing like how mercy is played. Mercy is primarily a damage booster. Her damage boost uptime should be sixty percent or higher, unless your other support is a literal potato.
I’m concerned about how they needed a whole season for this
I can’t take anything you say seriously if you really think Mercy’s gun is better, you are clearly terrible at the character
You keep telling yourself that. It depends entirely on your team for damage boost to be used that much. Mercy isn’t meant to be played that way, she just can be if nobody is taking damage.
As someone who plays and enoys him, I think these buffs were definitely the right steps. He could still use something else yo make him worth picking over otehr supports, but he’s actually viable now and not just a sitting duck helpless as his team dies around him now.
I think his Tree’s pulses should cleanse cc effects, such as anti and freeze and hinder. I think that would be a perfect buff for him that would justify picking him over others.
Not a great buff, but still a buff to one of the already most survivable supports.
Means you have to hold a charge for less time to get the same heal amount. Tap healing is better now to quickly save someone, and normal healing feels better because you have to spend a little less time doing it, giving you more room to utilize your thorns
Definitely a buff. Not too much, but just enough to actually feel like you can fight back. You won’t be assassinating anyone too often, but it can still help you defend yourself now. Plus, we don’t have to reload as often and can use it more to begin with since we don’t have to spend as much time healing.
Makes it so people are less likely to accidentally set it off and waste it. It won’t help people that are doing it intentionally, but it will still help a lot.
Can actually save people now when a lot of the time they just die. More often too, so you don’t have to be as scared about “wasting” the cooldown.
Wasn’t really a nerf. All the other changes and buffs combined mean he’ll be gaining that extra ult charge at the same rate he was before. All this “nerf” did was adjust for his buffs so he’s not getting tree more often than he was. Good gameplay with the higher heals and damage means you’re getting tree just as often.
But this is his weakness. Unlike Mercy who can immediately start healing after contributing with boost or after the weapon swap delay, lifeweaver has to swap then wait even longer to charge for his healing to be worth anything. This limits his potential since any time you’re using his secondary his allies are in much greater danger than a Mercy doing the same thing.
The other poster isn’t stating it wrong in pointing out these flaws. They are the reason he saw massive buffs that people still find are “conservative” because that is a rather huge drawback to contributing towards damage with him.
That’s the pull, it’s why he has the pull
Mercy can’t help an ally in dire need like LW can. She can maybe resurrect them, emphasis on maybe. There are tradeoffs.
And I still say the delay is being way, way overexaggerated here. The weapon swap is no time at all and the charge for a decent heal is less than a second. If someone isn’t in critical danger where they need you to heal them instantaneously or they’ll die, then it’s fine. Those situations aren’t as common as people think, or they shouldn’t be as common anyway if people are playing right.
I’ve played Lifeweaver enough to see that the delays are only a minor drawback, not a major one. The only real reason he’s the worst support is because he’s heal focused in a game where Ana and Baptiste exist. Lifeweaver isn’t bad, the best supports are just too good.
Your arguing that he has the pull to make up for his own healing being clunky and not effective to use?
Literally listen to what you are saying
You are literally saying that his kit is so cumbersome you literally have to use abilities to remove those weaknesses
How about his healing just not be clunky like every other support so he then isnt reliant on wasting his pull to save people just because his healing is badly designed 
I dont see how what you are defending makes any sense at all. If you are literally having to waste his abilities just to do things other heroes can do normally, that sounds badly designed to me.
You shouldnt need to use pull because his heals are too slow and clunky!!!
HIS HEALS SHOULDNT BE SLOW AND CLUNKY TO BEGIN WITH!!!
HE SHOULD BE ABLE TO USE PULL TO ACTUALLY REPOSITION PEOPLE AS INTENDED, NOT JUST AS A TOOL TO SOLVE HIS BAD HEALING MECHANICS
If you cant see how him relying on pull to solve his core design problems is bad design, we will never agree. Cus that is objectively bad design.
Yeah the trade off is, Lifeweaver has sucky healing mechanics so you need to have an ability to save someone to make up for his sucky healing.
Mercy doesnt need a mechanic to instantly save someone from dying. why not? Because she doesnt have sucky healing to need something to save someone from dying lol. Just her healing is enough to usually keep people alive. Killing her pocket target requires a huge investment from the enemy team
Having an ability be a solution to the heroes problem is bad design. He wouldnt need to rely on pull if he just didnt have bad healing mechanics…. Its that freaking simple.
You are looking at this completely backwards. Instead of looking at it from the perspective of pull being the solution you should be looking at it as being his healing mechanic is the problem. Pull shouldnt be the way you make the character baseline playable, abilities should be additive to the base hero, not filling in holes to make up for glaring design issues
This one is so weird to me. It’s especially funny when there’s a victory screen with Junkerqueen - the lightly-dressed lady who they made into an absolute unit of a woman to fit her role as tank - and there’s Lifeweaver, the support, towering over her.
Like jesus christ, bust out the scale tool my dudes.
And yeah, I’m still trying to see if he’s still just a “win more” character or actually decent now. The clunkiness of switching between damage and healing (and the reloading) is still a significant hindrance; and even though his gun is decent, his ideal position is usually at a distance where you don’t get much use out of it even if you do have time. Does have the highest barrier DPS now, I guess, at least on paper. And he can poo on Roadhog, Orisa and Zarya pretty hard (who, afaik, are not exactly meta these days, but hey).
I still get it pretty fast. I actually commend the devs for finally remembering to adjust ult cost at the same time as adjusting numbers. They routinely took two patches to do it, with a period of a busted ult in between (see: Junkerqueen). Try using the gun more, homie - I know it’s anything but seamless (or safe), but worth doing.
The ult still is not good tho. Would it have really have been that much of an issue to just leave it? Wow he can get his bad ult 15 secs faster. Crazy
They could make the the tree an ability and put it on a 30 sec cooldown, it would still be useless garbage.
Its initial burst is only slightly more than an ana nade and the pulses heal a lower hps than most supports can. Then theres a giant vision obscuring object that gets placed in your line of sight and creates massive visual clutter for both teams
Honestly any lifeweaver on my team, pls do not use the tree. I like to actually be able to see wtf im doing and not have this giant pink gyrating phallic object in the centre of my screen. Am wishing it had friendly fire on it at this point. That way we can get some camaraderie between teams as we all come together to focus on melting this one target.
No one wants it.
Its in the way, it looks dumb, and is not even useful. It looks and is as useful as some magic sand creation that was made by a 6 yr old
Good point actually. The one time they remember to nerf ult cost is the one time it’s with a crappy ult that could’ve used the buff lol.