Overwatch Overwatch Lifeweaver Guide and Overview

Using the power of life-giving light and plant matter, Lifeweaver heals the wounds of his allies. The lock-on mechanic of his primary healing makes Lifeweaver a very accessible hero for new and experienced players alike.

With a very defensive kit, Lifeweaver never wants to be the first on his team to advance, he prefers staying in the back where he can keep an eye on his allies and assist wherever needed. Petal Platform and Life Grip are on longer cooldowns than most Support abilities, but their game-saving potential makes up for their low deploy frequency.

Lifeweaver is an excellent choice whenever you want to focus on healing and saving your teammates. His kit enables unique positional strategies since he can move his team to places no other Support can.

TLDR

Play As

• Play corners. The charging and lock-on qualities of Healing Blossom enable Lifeweaver to position near cover better than most Supports. Stay covered when charging, and peek only when firing the projectile.  
• Life Grip allies that your regular healing won’t be able to save.
• Use Petal Platform to give yourself and allies without vertical mobility access to high ground. 

Play Against

• Focus your dives and flanks on Lifeweaver . He won’t be personally killing you, so your only hindrance is his allies' protection.
• Save your best cooldowns until after Life Grip has been used. After you’ve seen someone get pulled, you have a long window of time to attack where your target can’t be saved by Grip.
• Pick a hero with vertical mobility. Lifeweaver can easily avoid you if you can’t chase him vertically when he uses Petal Platform.

Strengths

Lock-on healing

When playing with high mobility allies, Lifeweaver's lock-on primary fire makes a big difference in how consistently your allies will be receiving healing. Also, you don’t have to focus much on aiming and can give more attention to hero positioning and strategy.

Team verticality

Petal Platform has the unique ability to give vertical access to heroes who would have no other way of reaching high ground. It can be used multiple times in a row, so anyone who needs it can activate the Petal once placed. Even raising up the enemy can be the disruption your team needs to win a fight.

Instant save

Life Grip is the easiest way to instantly save an ally. No other Support ability has the ease and consistency of Life Grip when it comes to pulling a teammate from the grips of death.

Weaknesses

Weak against dive

When a team running a dive comp sees the enemy is playing Lifeweaver, they just see a free kill every fight. Diving Lifeweaver poses no direct threat to the enemy as he primarily relies on evasion and team peel to survive.

Single-target abilities

Other than Tree of Life, all his cooldowns are single-target focused abilities. He can only heal one person at a time, and Life Grip’s long cooldown generally means only one teammate is getting saved per fight.

Struggles to be proactive

Lifeweaver's kit is very reaction-oriented. To get the most value out of his abilities, he has to wait for the other team to make a play and try to counter. While you can get creative, he lacks the playmaking potential that the other Supports possess. If your team isn’t making it happen, Lifeweaver struggles to force the win.

Primary Fire: Healing Blossom

Tips for Healing Blossom

• Go for full charge
• • Overall, you’ll do far more healing by letting each Healing Blossom shot go to full charge than shooting more projectiles at lower charges.
  • Get to at least 80% charge before releasing.
• Jiggle peek
• • Between every charge, you should be jiggle peeking a corner or another type of cover. Don’t just stand in the open where you’re exposed to danger when you could be safely healing your team.
• Prioritize small and fast allies
• • When playing with another Support who has to aim their healing, help them out by focusing on the heroes that are harder to hit, like Genji.
• Settings
• • Under hero settings, you have the option to toggle or hold Healing Blossom.
  • Hold is on by default, but some players prefer not having to constantly hold down their button. Experiment and see which you prefer.

Secondary Fire: Thorn Volley

Tips for Thorn Volley

• Focus on healing
• • Lifeweaver is one Support that you want to play as a healbot. Your healing brings more value on average than your damage.
• Self Defense
• • Expect to be dove often. In these moments, keeping yourself alive and fighting the enemy is more important than ignoring the enemy and healing your allies.
• Poke pressure
• • TThorn Volley doesn’t have good bullet spread or projectile speed, but it has no damage falloff. In poke phases of fights, your team shouldn’t need your constant healing, and you’ll be free to spend more time switching to damage dealing.

[SHIFT]: Petal Platform

Tips for Petal Platform

• Move the immobile
• • Heroes like Reinhardt, Ana, and Cassidy have no vertical mobility of their own. Petal Platform gives them pathing options that are normally impossible. 
  • Defensively, these same types of heroes can use Pedal to run away or walk over walls to get away from the enemy.
• Disrupt the enemy
• • The classic Pedal move of raising up an Ulting Orisa remains a great strategy to this day.
  • Other examples of using Pedal to disrupt enemy attacks could include raising an ally out of Graviton Surge, or off the floor after being stunned or frozen.
• Give yourself a way out
• • Keeping yourself alive remains your number one priority, so if you feel you need to save Pedal for an enemy Tracer flanking you, then save Pedal for yourself.
• Throw out early
• • The cooldown of Petal Platform begins immediately when you throw it out. On defense or when a fight is just beginning, you can place one down where your team might need it, use it, and then already have another ready to go.

[E]: Life Grip

Tips for Life Grip

• CC counter
• • Life Grip can pull allies out of all hard stuns and crowd control abilities. Even ultimates like Cage Fight, Grav, and Flux that lock heroes in place are countered by Life Grip.
  • Anytime an ally gets stunned and is vulnerable to death, Life Grip is worth using to save them.
• Enable hyper-aggression
• • Whenever you haveLife Grip, one ally can go for crazy aggro plays, knowing that you can pull them out if needed. 
  • Example: A Reinhardt can pin into the enemy backline, get a kill, and be pulled out before he dies.
• Be thoughtful
• • 18 seconds is a very long cooldown. You can’t afford to waste Life Grip just to reposition one ally you think is overextended.
  • Pay attention to your team's resources. A Winston might seem like they’re about to die, but is planning on using Primal. They’ll be one angry monkey if they get pulled out of the fight.
• Help me, I’m falling!
• • Life Grip is the only ability in Overwatch that can rescue an ally from being knocked off the map. When you see someone get booped off, pull them back to solid ground.

[SPACE]: Rejuvenating Dash

Tips for Rejuvenating Dash

• Short Cooldown
• • Most of the time you can feel free to use Rejuvenating Dash for some quick healing, or to reposition yourself. 
• Save for dodging
• • When the enemy team is flanking or diving you through a match, try to only use Dash for the specific purpose of dodging the dive attacker. 
  • Combine dashes with using Petal Platform as an elevator up and down to maximize your evasiveness. 

Ultimate: Tree of Life

Tips for Tree of Life

• Needs LoS
• • Make sure your Tree of Life placement maintains LoS to yourself and your team throughout its duration. The AoE is decent sized, but not massive, so also make sure and place it near where your team wants to stand (e.g., the objective or where the fight is going to happen)
  • Example: When your team wants to fight on the objective but is being pushed back, place your Tree of Life in front of your team so they can walk into the enemy team and stay within its AoE.
• Ignores Barriers
• • Unlike other AoE healing abilities that require LoS, Tree of Life ignores barriers so don’t worry about enemy shields. 
• Use as a wall
• • The massive tree can be used as a wall to block choke points and doorways so the enemy team can’t walk through it. Great when capping the objective and the enemy team is returning from spawn.

Minor Perks

Petal Protection

• A bit of extra Sustain, and ult charge.
• Lifeweaver can use the healing himself, which is especially good when petal dancing to avoid an attacker.

Dashing Escape

• Survive dive
• • Lifeweaver needs all the survivability he can get against dive attacks, and the extra distance from this perk can make the difference between life and death against close-range dive enemies like Vendetta.
• Keep up with mobile teams
• • Also good to selecte when your team consists of highly mobile heroes like D.Va or Winston.

Major Perks

Sow the Seed

• Best for rush and brawl allies, as they get a lot of milage from movement buff and a burst of overhealth.
• Throw the seed in front of where your teammate is going, so they can pick it up as they chase the enemy.

Superbloom

• The math
• • In 2.5 seconds, Lifeweaver will fire 55 thorns, and you need to land 16 of those to trigger the detonation.
  • You miss ~1/3 of your shots and still trigger Superbloom.
• Self defense
• • Lifeweaver's attack pressure is pretty low, and the extra incremental burst damage is useful when forced into duels. 
• Anti-tank
• • Especially against non-barrier Tanks who can’t block your attacks, you can pump Thorn Volleys into their large bodies and trigger Superbloom detonations over and over.
• Pair with another high healing output Support
• • When you want to focus more on damage, play with another high-healing Support. If your other Support is Zen, for example, your team can’t afford for you to be spending time triggering Superbloom.

The main feature Lifeweaver wants in a map is natural cover. He’s squishy, has short range in his mobility, and has weak offense. Therefore, he relies on natural cover to play around so he can evade enemy attacks while staying alive and healing his team.

High ground is always good for Lifeweaver since only he can create a Pedal elevator for non-mobile allies. Open maps with spaced out natural cover are difficult for him to position on, as transitioning between exposes him, and his abilities start to feel limited by their range.

Best Maps

• Nepal
• Route 66
• Throne of Anubis

Worst Maps

• Junkertown
• Havana
• Rialto

Lifeweaver brings consistent ranged healing to teams, and especially to teams with highly mobile heroes. Equally as important are his utilities in Petal Platform which can be used to grant access to high ground to immobile allies, and Petal Platform which allows him to save an ally from the brink of death.

Tanks like Reinhardt and Mauga are the perfect pairings for Lifeweaver because their primary weaknesses are lacking vertical mobility, range, and poor escape tools: all of which, Lifeweaver can offer them. Let either of them charge into the enemy team, dumb their cooldowns for kill, then pull them out before they die.

When it comes to DPS, take advantage of his lock-on healing with heroes like Genji or Tracer who zip around and are difficult for many other Supports to sustain.

Also those who can use Petal Platform for a combo like Deadeye or Configuration: Assault are another type of good choice for similar reasons as the brawl Tanks.

The best Support for Lifeweaver is Brigitte because she can protect him from enemy dive and flanks while he sends out constant healing to the rest of their team.

Because he primarily brings healing, other Supports who offer more ultility like a speed boost, anti-healing, or CC are also ideal pairings.

Specific Hero Counters

All dive heroes like D.Va, Wrecking Ball, Echo Genji, Jetpack CatSombra, etc. excel at diving Lifeweaver, chasing his dash, going up to Petal Platform.

Ana: Nade and Sleep Dart are up twice as often as Life Grip. Force Cleansing Grasp Minor over Life Cycle. All LW does is heal, anti-nade shuts him down.

Focus your dives and flanks on Lifeweaver . He won’t be personally killing you, so your only hindrance is his allies' protection.

Save your best cooldowns until after Life Grip has been used. After you’ve seen someone get pulled, you have a long window of time to attack where your target can’t be saved by Grip.

Pick a hero with vertical mobility. Lifeweaver can easily avoid you if you can’t chase him vertically when he uses Petal Platform.