Apr. 19 PTR Wallriding

1. Limits potential of wallriding.
Latejumping and lateskimming are two techniques that are now obnoxiously difficult (and in some cases impossible) to perform. These were techs known by more dedicated Lucio players that allowed you to quickly increase and maintain your momentum when performed correctly. These also tie into wallride speedboost stacking (which I'll just call speed stacking). Currently on the live servers if you chain together wallskims you will accelerate and can reach ridiculous amounts of speed IF you can wallskim without losing any of it (from wallriding too long or bumping into anything; it's much harder than it sounds on paper). On the PTR the maximum speed stacks you can obtain is around two. This greatly limits Lucio's speed potential for those who were good enough to reach it, and it's not like imposing a limit on it made things any easier for new players.

2. Wallriding is now sticky. I won't blame any non-Lucio players if they can't tell the difference between how wallride works, but I assure you it feels absolutely horrible and clunky to use now. Thanks to the auto corner wallriding Lucio players have less control over their own movements. The best comparison I can give is if Genji or Hanzo had auto wallclimb integrated into their base kits with no option to turn it off, or if Mercy's Guardian Angel had took you to wherever your ally moved to instead of where they were when you activated it and cancelling it had a one second delay. Sure, it's convenient in *some* cases, but most of the time you want to be able to *control* where you're going, not have the game decide it for you. Attaching to the wall is also much more generous (you can be further from the wall and still start riding along it) while detaching from it requires you to move further away, making it feel "sticky" like the wall is trying to grab onto you and keep you on it. These combined with the overall decreased speed thanks to the speed stacking cap makes wallriding feel much less user-friendly and less smooth than it was before.

3.   These changes were not needed in the first place. Lucio was already a very accessible hero; you didn't need to know every mechanic of wallriding to perform your job and carry your weight with him. However, wallriding took playing Lucio to a whole different level. It was beautifully designed in that gave Lucio players something to invest their time in and continually improve with. You could see which Lucio was better of both teams by seeing how they moved and used their wallride both in and out of combat. It wasn't the only way of course, but it was one of them. In addition, these changes are punishing towards Lucio players for reasons already stated in #1. Lowering the skill ceiling of a gameplay element that was widely considered balanced is rarely a good idea, especially when nearly nobody had problems with Lucio's old wallriding mechanics prior to this update. As the common saying goes: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

So now that I've gone over why the wallriding changes are detrimental to Lucio, let's go over some possible solutions for this.

1. Revert the wallriding changes entirely. This is the easiest and most obvious way to fix all of the problems caused by these changes.
2. Give us an option for old and new wallride. This way those who prefer Lucio's old style of wallriding can continue playing with it, while those who like the new wallride can play with it as well. Old wallriding would include speed stacking while new wallriding would include chaining jumps on the same wall, so both would have their advantages and disadvantages. Heroes like Mercy already have options that greatly change how they are played (namely Guardian Angel's prioritization), so it would not be out of place in the game.
3. Give us an option to turn off auto corner wallriding. If the new sticky mechanics are here for good, then at the very least give us an option to enable and disable corner wallriding similarly to backwards wallriding. This way players can choose if they prefer manually controlling their movement or if they prefer being able to turn corners without inputting more jumps.
4. Only apply sticky and auto corner wallriding after riding on a wall for a certain amount of time. This also gives the best of both worlds as techs such as lateskimming would still be possible and long corner wallrides would also be possible. With the correct timing you would be able to control which style of wallriding is applied to your own gameplay while having both options accessible.

Thank you for reading, and here's to hoping Lucio sees improvements in the near future.