Get up to date on the nerfs, buffs and tweaks to Lucio’s wall riding.

There are basically three things that have held true since Overwatch’s release:

1. Overwatch fans will continually look for ways to get an advantage in competitive play.
2. People will get incredibly salty over winning and losing.
3. Lucio is a mandatory support pick at the highest levels of play.

When you take all three of these things into account, the following story of Lucio’s PTR changes becomes a lot simpler. As our favorite audio medic might say, let’s break it down. A medic needs to start by diagnosing the problem, which Geoff Goodman laid out like this:

Previous to this update, there was a bug that made it possible to input multiple jump commands very quickly while riding on a wall to trigger a super boost. This was only possible by binding mouse wheel to jump or potentially some other macro program to simulate this.

This exploit is now fixed, so those that were using it will notice it doesn't work anymore. This doesn't affect anyone who was using Lucio normally, only those that were abusing this bug.

By using this exploit, Lucio players could get a big competitive advantage by zooming around the map. There’s just one problem: another ability ended up getting hit while developers were under the hood on Lucio: wall skimming.

In April 2017, Lucio got a neat little buff. When he launched off a wall, he got a burst of speed. This gave rise to “wall skimming”, where you jump off walls and land on other walls, bouncing around the map like, well, a frog.

Lucio is, at his core, a character who jumps and skates and speeds around. He challenges Tracer to a race in spawn, after all. A Lucio with limited mobility doesn’t seem like a Lucio at all. Furthermore, the ability to race into a fight and execute a huge boop onto the enemy team, scattering them, made Lucio feel like the Offensive Support.

He suddenly lost that, and his wall riding felt more like a wall gentle stroll.

It turned out that there was a reason for that.

We've increased the boost he gets off walls, but there was an extra vert component that wasn't increased proportionally so thats probably why he feels heavy, he isn't getting as much lift as before.

We're going to do another PTR patch today, i'll see about getting this vert boosted as well.

Lucio and his wall riding are still very much a work in progress, and we can likely expect to see more tweaks hit the PTR before the developers are done with fixing the musician up.