Lucio
Lucio
- Lucio has received quite a few nerfs over time. Why? He is a solid support and is very likely the best support. If you need a support hero, Lucio will always help your team a lot.
- Lucio is superior at healing multiple members of your team at the same time. Lucio normally heals 12.5 hitpoints per second with his healing aura, but can increase this to 40 hitpoints per second for 3 seconds when he uses Amp It Up, which is on a 12 second cooldown.
- Lucio can almost match Mercy's healing by using Amp It Up, but its long cooldown means that there is a lot of downtime for when he can best help his teammates survive incoming damage.
- Switch between speed and healing often. Obviously whenever your team is in a fight, being spammed at, or someone on your team needs healing, stay on heal. If none of those 3 things are happening, you should be on speed. Basically if there's on one person that needs healing and he's only missing a bit of HP, stick on speed.
- Lucio's speed boost can help teammates run out of enemy ultimates (Mei's Blizzard!) or help teammates playing McCree and/or Reaper maneuver during their ultimates. Lucio can also knock close-range enemies away from his teammates and weaken their ability to do damage, such as D.Va, Reinhardt, Roadhog, Reaper, Winston, Symmetra or a Genji using his Dragonblade.
- Use Amp It Up during critical moments. You shouldn't spam Amp. You need to have Amp ready to use during fights. If you aren't amping your heal for the fight, Lucio is a very lackluster healing support. If there is a low HP enemy running away, don't be afraid to amp speed and chase them down. The majority of your amps should come in the form of healing, but keep an eye out for opportunities to use speed amp. Also, you should always speed amp your team at the start of the round if you're defending or if it's control point.
- Use your right click often. It doesn't do a ton of damage, but it's more or less free damage on a 5 second cooldown, so use it whenever you're trying to kill someone. On maps with ledges, like Nepal or Lijiang Tower, knocking 2 or even 1 hero off before the fight starts greatly impacts how the fight plays out. Hunt for chances to knockoff, stand around corners and stuff.
- Wall Ride has an extremely high skill cap. If you get good enough with it, you stay off the ground for basically as long as you want. There's is a guide about Lucio's Wall-Ride ability in the making, be sure to check Gamereplays in a few week's time.
- Lucio is naturally better at keeping his entire team topped off on health and providing instant support once the teammate comes into range.
- If the other team has a Zarya, try to save your ult for whenever she drops hers. If they don't have a huge damage follow up, it will save your whole team. Otherwise, use your ult preemptively, not re-actively. People can get blown up very easily, so it's better to pop your ult sooner rather than later. That being said, you should obviously use your judgement and wait as long as you can.
My general rule is that if I'm going into a pub game completely blind, not knowing how good or bad my teammates are, Lucio is the better pick. Lucio is better at healing himself and getting away from flankers, I feel like he's a safer pick when you can't count on your teammates to protect you. There's also the nice bonus that he can contribute damage while healing, which makes a difference when your DPS (damage per second) players aren't the greatest.
If I've played a game or two with the team, and they're doing a good job of working together, or there's one really awesome player worth pocketing, I'll switch to Mercy. With a good team Mercy's ult is the best trump card in the game, it is up far more often than sound barrier, and it is easier to use, because you can use it re-actively instead of having to anticipate the damage. And sometimes, you will find a DPS who is on fire, follow them everywhere, keep them topped off, boost them at all other times and collect free wins.
