Overwatch 2 Finally Gets it Right With Wuyang After Lifeweaver’s Failure

The Overwatch 2 roster is always expanding, adding new heroes that, at their best, change the game’s meta in a new and refreshing way. While some heroes do this very well, heroes like Lifeweaver just fail to make an impact outside of the novelty of being new. Wuyang, on the other hand, has a lackluster design that’s more than made up for by his fun, useful, and well-balanced kit. Though Wuyang’s character design is somewhat simple compared to other Overwatch heroes, he brings new life to the support roster in a way that fits right in with those heroes already there, something Lifeweaver failed to do.

Overwatch 2 Wasn’t Ready for Lifeweaver

At his introduction, Lifeweaver was a risky hero to release. Two of his abilities, his Petal Platform and Life Grip, both fundamentally change the way the player can navigate the map, allowing him to traverse from low to high ground with ease and letting him pull an ally to him. Conceptually, these abilities were really cool, introducing a new genre of ability that could open the door for entirely new strategies or composition styles.

Read Next

Overwatch 2’s Move Away from “Oddball” Characters Is Just Disappointing

What actually happened was that Lifeweaver became a healbot, spending eighty percent of his uptime focusing on healing his teammates rather than using his abilities to create positional advantages as was intended. His healing was incredibly slow but pumped out huge numbers and left little to no time for him to be dealing damage or otherwise impacting teamfights. That’s not to say that Lifeweaver can’t be useful in a match—he can be incredibly useful in the right scenario—but that his kit just wasn’t suited for the meta he entered.

Lifeweaver’s Kit Left Him Out of the Overwatch Meta

Lifeweaver is a slow-paced hero, with abilities that change fights in subtle ways. He has no horizontal movement other than a small dash but offers quite a bit of vertical mobility. This means he’s best suited to spam-based comps and works well with long-range heroes and maps. Unfortunately, spam hasn’t been super prevalent in Overwatch in quite some time other than on maps like Circuit Royal, Junkertown, and Havana, the maps with the game’s longest sightlines. Instead, most games will see hybrid or brawl comps being played, taking advantage of the game’s many speed-boosting supports and close-and-mid-range DPS and tank heroes.

Additionally, Lifeweaver’s Life Grip specifically is an ability that can drastically damage a team’s cohesion. A Lifeweaver player with poor situational awareness or poor communication with their team can ruin a teamfight with the wrong pull, throwing off the team’s intended fight plan or interrupting an Ultimate ability that wasn’t communicated ahead of time. Lifeweaver is a hero that requires a huge amount of communication and proactive, critical thought to play well, and high-pressure situations don’t always lend themselves to any of these things.

Lifeweaver is situationally very useful, but what was really the nail in the coffin for him was the fact that there were already supports that worked so well as duos, leaving no room in the lineup where he was the objective best choice. Teams that run Lucio will almost always want a Baptiste or Kiriko, teams that run Brigitte will want an Ana or Juno, and so on and so forth. There’s no real duo of supports that benefits from a Lifeweaver over one of the two already there. Conversely, Wuyang’s abilities will allow him to slot right into preexisting support dynamics.

Wuyang Is the New Support That Overwatch 2 Needed

Wuyang’s kit is an excellent blend of new and old interactions that lend a comfortable but refreshing playstyle. His weapon is similar to Mercy’s but doesn’t need the active engagement her staff does unless the target needs extra healing, while his Guardian Wave offers an AoE heal and knockback that can support his team in the same way Ana’s Biotic Grenade does. He has mobility, allowing him to slot easily into brawl comps to fill a similar role to Moira or Kiriko.

Wuyang is a special mix of many of the supports that already exist in Overwatch 2, and this means it’s not difficult to think of places where he’ll belong. With Lifeweaver, his kit was so different from anything players had seen before that it was tricky to find his niche; Wuyang won’t have that issue. His unique weapon means that there will still be a learning curve to mastering this new hero, but it won’t come at the cost of throwing off a team’s game plan and composition.