Rick's vod review- Speed Boop loses his cool

Hi, Speed boop here, the one guy who should probably not do so many vod reviews in such a short period of time, yet continues to sacrifice his sanity in order to please those around him. I'm going to call the person I'm reviewing rick, as that is the name of his twitch and is the simplest thing to call him. To be honest, I'm happy that I'm dealing with plat gameplay. Plat is where you usually find a mix of both good and bad play, which is much easier for me to write about. Rick, to put it nicely, you have a lot to improve on. I shouldn't try and spoil anything, but there are a lot of things I'm going to have to discuss.

At the beginning of the first round, I see two things. A- You have a simplistic, but admirable understanding of wall riding. I will discuss wall riding a bit later, but overall, good. B- Around 2:00, you completely shit the bed and go into the enemy team, forget and mess up the escape spectacularly. Attempting to play offensive is good, yes, but if you go in without anyway to get out and aren't able to really find a reason to go in (which you really didn't have), don't. Stay with the team you were already with. From then onto 2:30 where you die, you get lost and do a lot of bad things that will be discussed later, but you are simply destroyed by the enemy team. I don't think the loss of the point is on you, as your team crumbled along with you, but you could have done better. Now, I think I can discuss wall riding. See, I'm going to make the quick assumption that you are using base controls and are not using an elite controller. As a lucio connoisseur, I think that you would like to wall ride a lot easier. There's a simple way to make wall riding easier- Jump on left trigger, boop on Left stick. Trust me, it works. That's really all I can do to help you with wall riding other than simply pointing you to my guides. After the respawn, your team recuperates and are pretty split up. When you drop the beat around 3:15, I am actually happy. While the ultimate completely fails, you attempted to use it more offensively than what I usually see. This isn't a bad habit at all, but what I believe is hindering you from correctly using the ultimate is definitely game sense. Once you get on point, it's obvious that you immediately start using heals when in most combat scenarios. While you do make some exceptions, aura usage is a common issue throughout the whole vod. In fact, that's probably your worst issue other than game sense. After the beat drop and the following loss of many of your team, you needed to back out much sooner than you attempted to. I do like you and your team grouping up around the 4 minute mark, and the attempt on the point is at the least a valiant effort, but overall both you and your team make a lot of mistakes and lose the fight. The use of your ultimate earlier definitely hurt your team when they got graviton surged, but you couldn't really have predicted that for several reasons. The loss of the point occurs shortly after.

I'm going to be extremely blunt- you do not understand aura usage. A lucio uses primarily speed boost, at higher levels. Healing, while initially helpful, only ends up often hindering your team. You don't understand quick swapping at all, which is ok, but still definitely on your bucket list. You also seem to either forget which aura you are using and get stuck on them easily. This is most commonly seen with heals, but it occurs with both. Not only does your over reliance on heals hinder your ability to help your team, it cuts your mobility massively. Speed boost and wall riding make lucio one of, if not the most high mobility character in the game. I know that the stigma is that Lucio should be helping is team and should help them using heals to keep them up and occasionally use speed boost. Yet, it's really the other way around. If you need a simple way to think of it, only use healing when someone needs it and is in or close to your aura. That is it. In fact, since Lucio's ultimate is mediocre, you should often be letting the other support do the healing to get their ultimate faster. You need to not rely on healing as a crutch. At the end of the day, being heal focused is really just going to end up hindering you from both climbing and just getting better at Lucio's other mechanics. Lucio isn't a simple hero to learn once you start getting into the details. If you want to get better, you need to learn these mechanics.

At the start of round two, you are again lost in your team, and end up doing very little in the taking of the point. At 6:30, I do see something, while unintentional, still good. That boop on the doom fist is one of the few times in this game where you attempt to peel. Again, I define this in the guides, but peeling is a fundamental part of playing Lucio. Not only by using boop, but using speed boost. In a lot of cases, you might have a better chance of keeping someone alive if you speed them away from the danger instead of simply healing them. Of course, this would usually require communication, which is another issue. You clearly have a mic, and are completely avoiding using it. My guide on callouts is a good way to understand the basics, but at the least talk with your team about stuff like enemy positions or what aura you are using if you deem that information important. This passive attitude, both in gameplay and in chat, is again holding you back. Around 6:50, this is clear, as you try and heal the McCree instead of possibly just speeding him out or using boop on the road hog to hold him back. A bit later, you get distracted from your team by a Genji and don't follow them in while pushing, and this ends up biting you in the ass when they die and you did nothing to try and prevent it. From then onto around 6:35, you are consistently inconsistent with your focus, trying to figure out who you need to pay attention to and end up in fairly bad position due to this, although you go unpunished. At 6:38, You drop the beat and end up saving a life with it. This is another good example of your usage of the ultimate. Sound barrier is good for responding to certain ults, but is also good when you want to keep a teammate or several team members from dying and having a better chance to retaliate. One of the other good things I see you attempting to do is to make sure that you are always around a teammate and are getting something out of your aura, even if that is you just healing with no reason to heal. Even after the point is taken you still are using heals and are just standing around playing very passively. From 9:00 to 9:30, while most of the mistakes continue, there is a strong lack of awareness in both your positioning and ability usage.

A lot of the same habits continue from then on after your death. Not only do you run away using heals (9:50), but lose track of teammates faster than I lose a train of thought without my ADHD medication. At 10:00, you use your sound barrier, and it was terrible. No one was pushing in, and no one was in danger. Even if sound barrier isn't that strong, you can't use it without finding a good reason to and not knowing whether it will do something in a fight. When you get dove by the genji, another issue emerges. You seem terrified of combat. Even if you are a more passive Lucio, you shouldn't simply try and run away from an attacker. In fact, a lot of your behaviors mimic that of a mercy. The usage of heals, the backline position, the passive attitude to combat, all similar to how someone would play mercy. I'll say what I've been saying over and over- LUCIO IS NOT MERCY! Stop playing like her! It's so painful to watch, especially due to how fucking common it is. Yes, Lucio is a good alternative for a lot of Mercy players, but that does not mean the play style is the same. Lucio is intended to make your team harder to kill and have an easier time tracking down and finishing enemies. That is his role. Don't tell me that you use healing because your team needs it, because to be blunt, Lucio sucks at healing. Unless you have a Zen, you aren't supposed to be the main source of healing. I'll finish this tangent later, but there are a lot of things to be discussed about it. The hold and eventual capture of point B was good, but you didn't do much to actually help your team do it. I'm sorry if I seem cynical, but there are a legitimate well of problems in this gameplay. I guess me yelling that Lucio isn't mercy was over the top, but it's probably the only way to really get that message through. Sometimes you just need to shout in peoples faces to prove a point.

Just to prepare you, but the next two paragraphs are not going to feature any discussion of the gameplay. I think I need to give these issues their own part, as they are so integral to your flawed gameplay. I don't want to be mean, but you have a void of game sense. Yeah, it's not nice, but you need someone to tell you. The lack of awareness and focus in the game is baffling, and not only is this connected to things such as your positioning, but also to your aura usage. While I can't tell you the easiest way to build up game sense, there is work to be done. If anything, you should just be making sure that at the least, you're doing something that might help the team. Healing is just one of them, but you seem to think that's the only way you can help them. As I'm watching this, I'm internally yelling at you to use speed boost. When you need to get somewhere or when you and your team need to, you are often scared to use it at all, fearing that if you don't use healing, your team will be hindered. The irony is amazing. While this is mainly about aura usage, it is also with other abilities like using boop for peel and using your ultimate, two abilities that you constantly misuse or underuse. Sadly, this is where the other issue comes into play.

Just from the gameplay, I can assume that either you have played Mercy for a bit, main her, or have simply been told to play a heal heavy play style. While this enrages me to an unreasonable degree, I will be a bit more lenient. But again, I have to say that you are definitely too passive. As you said in your post, you had gold healing with a Moira on your team. You should NEVER have more healing than your main support, as that means either you are doing something very wrong or your other support is doing something very wrong. Again, as the wise stanky once said, Speed is key. Aka, you should be using speed more than heals. If you believe that this doesn't work in plat, that's an entirely different issue. You shouldn't do something just because it works in your sr. These things can become toxic habits that are hard to break and make it even harder to climb. So playing like a mercy, while it might be temporarily advantageous, is not going to get you far and may even prevent you from climbing entirely. I know making a full mindset change is hard, but that's learning lucio in a nutshell. I'm sorry if this felt like a detour, but I needed to get both of these of my chest.

At 12:10, you are extremely passive and hold back way too much than necessary. For heavens sake, they were near a pit, and you have boop. You can connect the dots. With how the enemy team were playing, going in for a boop would likely go unpunished and would help in the overall take of the point. But yet again, your passive behavior both literally and figuratively holds you back. Your later death, while comedic, isn't really the topic of issue. What is an issue is your splitting from the tanks for no discernible reason. Did you think you were in danger? While you do get the point, you are definitely behind in ultimate economy, which is pretty easy to guess judging by the amount of damage that your team took during the point capture. While I don't expect you to entirely think about this, you should be mentally preparing yourself to deal with the enemy ultimates. After that, for about the next minute or so, you play relatively fine, doing some stuff and using more speed boost. This is a definitive improvement over the rest of your gameplay. Your death at 13:40 goes back to my point about ult economy. You could have assumed that people like their soldier and other people who had gotten in a lot of damage would be close to having ultimates. So if you had prepared yourself, you might have survived. Around 14:05 and at 14:15, you fuck over your soldier, completely abandoning him and not attempting to help him. You saw him pushing up and failed at both healing for him or peeling for him. While I'm only really pointing it out now, several similar events like the one with the soldier occured through the vod, with me only now mentioning them as the soldier one was the most egregious. Around 14:30, you push in way too far, which contrasts with your extremely backline position. Your positioning should match your play style, even if that play style is blatantly wrong. While there are the same issues that I have been hammering in since the start, nothing really of note happens until your sound barrier around 15:10. This was another good sound barrier, as it had a reason and did what it was intended to do. You also get a pretty nice boop on the rein not too much later. Good stuff. Even with these actions, you still lose the point, and eventually the game.

I think I already yelled at you what you need to work on, but I will say that the major one should be aura usage. That is both the most important one and most likely the hardest one to fix. Sadly, the other flaws are among that list. I wouldn't focus too much on wall riding, as that really isn't what needs to be worked on immediately. Still, I would change your control scheme in order to make your life a bit easier. I don't think I can do much beyond what I have already done. Speed Boop out.