Director’s Take - Lifeweaver’s Growth and Balance

news.blizzard.com:

Lifeweaver came out last week and landed with quite a splash. There was a lot of conversation about his abilities, his background, and let's be honest here, his… hotness. Let's go into detail about where we think he's at, what we're going to do with him going forward, and his effect on our philosophy on heroes and how we release them.

Currently, Lifeweaver is performing in multiple variations in Quickplay while players are learning the new hero. We saw Lifeweaver's win rate climb faster than other heroes when they launched, perhaps due to the surprising piece of data that his win rate is much higher for low-skill players than it is for high-skill players. Lifeweaver is a complex hero, and he has an amazing kit with abilities that can have a high impact in a match. However, these factors can make it harder to balance a hero at launch. Could there be aspects of his kit, like the slow while charging heal, that punish high-skill players? Could the auto-aim on his heal have a much higher benefit for low-skill players?

We've also heard from players that his control scheme feels awkward, with weapon swapping between damage and healing and Petal Platform on alternate fire cited the most. We'll be changing these, but I wanted to give a little context into how we ended up with this scheme. When we first began working on Lifeweaver, the idea was to create a support hero that spent most of their time healing, need little aiming skill to heal, and brought transformational abilities to the battlefield. Take, for instance, the weapon swap. Early in development, his weapon was a lot less effective than it is today, but steadily over time, it was tweaked in a number of ways that ultimately led to the Thorn Volley that you see today. We