[2021] Legend Monday: Gibraltar | January 25 2021

Unfortunately a couple meaningful tweaks to the gun shield just missed the cutoff for next week’s patch: (1) Bleed through and (2) damage counting towards stats/evo to mitigate some of the shield economy difference in poking engagements against a Gib.

Nothing at the start of the season for Lifeline, but we are exploring options to reduce some frustrations surrounding her passive. Taking some power from that and giving it to her underwhelming ult is what we’re looking at in particular. We didn’t want to act too hastily in nerfing the combat utility part of her kit without giving her a bump elsewhere. The other aspect is with communication. Let’s say we add a cool down to it: how do you best communicate it’s on cool down to the Lifeline, downed teammate, and enemy? That requires testing, getting feedback on what feels right, iterating, etc. Did want to let you know we are working on reducing that Lifeline frustration without discouraging people from using her.

Edit: Wanted to add that we really wanted to get the gun shield change in for 8.0. But we discovered a bug in how damage is registered by the gun shield with single projectile vs. multi-projectile weapons.

Both fair ideas. We're looking at helping out the ult in particular, perhaps having it look at your squad's loadouts and give you a guaranteed upgrade. In its current state it's often useless past midgame. And like you mention it sometimes is actually a hindrance to rotations and can bring unwanted attention. Regardless, there's a lot of room for improvement there that we're experimenting with for introducing alongside the passive tweaks.

I think those who are against a nerf are justified. I always want to tread carefully when tweaking abilities that provide combat utility. I don't think there would be much incentive to pick her if we hit that passive too hard (other than small hitbox). She would just be a decent medic instead of combat medic. So instead of giving her the Pathfinder treatment (initial 35s grapple change) and straight up nerfing her kit, we want to move power around. Unlike old Path, Lifeline has a stable/reasonable pick rate. Her win rate, however, has crept pretty high particularly in higher MMR lobbies. It's not surprising that the the true potential of abilities are fully realized at this level, and statistically significant changes in win rate amongst legends don't really occur until you look at the top 5% (this is good, it means gunplay is more important than abilities for the vast majority of the player base). So Lifeline's high win rate at high MMR aligns with the frustrations that many players feel, and we want to resolve that without hurting how it feels to play as Lifeline.