Overwatch – Advanced Lucio Tips

After 300 hours of Lucio and 200GB of recorded footage, I’ve finally finished my compilation of highlights from my Lucio career, and I can’t be more excited it’s finally published and out for everyone to see. I’ve come an extremely long way from when I wrote this article, and I feel prepared to bring you four new tips for improving your Lucio play. These are more advanced than the ones I gave before, and are intended for those who already know Lucio’s fundamentals.

1. Bunnyhopping. Due to Lucio’s skates, Blizzard gave him different acceleration/deceleration values from the other heroes, and this means you can use physics to maintain a speed boost, either one from an Amp It Up or from hitting a sloped incline. In fact, bhopping even easier than in Source games because all you need to do is jump the instant you hit the ground. Binding “scroll down” to jump and having a mouse with an unlocked scrollwheel is the easiest way to do it. Speaking of controls, consider changing around the default scheme because LShift is not a good key to have bound to crossfade in my opinion. You’ll be switching songs far too often while your other fingers are mashing WADS and my left hand got strained really quickly, so I bound crossfade to RMB, which allows my left hand to focus solely on movement. I’m also a proponent for the “hold to crossfade” option in the main menu because it’s intuitive (simply think of it as ‘hold to sprint’) and because you’ll automatically switch to heals while frozen or hacked.

Also, that channel I just linked to? Every Lucio main should watch it. Jamie Allegro has got some amazing videos to learn new tricks about Lucio. Here’s another of his tricks I want to mention:

2. There’s a 2/3rds of a second delay between successful wallrides. This most comes into play when trying to gain height through multiple wallriding jumps. You’ve got to wait at least 2/3rds of a second before you can wallride again, and once I learned this I became capable of using corners to traverse sheer walls like Genji or Hanzo (albeit less elegantly) by timing my jumps and ping-ponging between walls. This strat unlocks huge swathes of the map that wouldn’t otherwise be possible for Lucio, so it’s a great skill to have in your repertoire.

Speaking of jumping while wallriding, I get loads of mileage out of using a series of rapid jumps on columns/sloped walls to keep airborne indefinitely. I can do the strat at 5:21 through sheer muscle memory at this point, and it increases your survivability to an insane degree. Like most shooters, people have a problem looking up, and since Lucio heals in an aura it’s also great for keeping everyone on the point healed while keeping yourself out of the direct line of fire.

3. Dodging Roadhog hooks. My Lucio got so much better once I learned how to bait Roadhogs into blowing their hook. In a nutshell; you need to trick him into throwing it the wrong way, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. Just go one way, and then hard dodge to the other in anticipation, just like dodging tank rocks in Left 4 Dead but without the part where your enemy telegraphs his attack:

That may sound difficult, but it becomes second-nature after a while. This tip works for any hero, but Lucio has an edge due to the gliding momentum he gains from his skates.

4. How to Boop effectively. I cover this in a two-step guide during my video, but the most important element of a Boop is actually your opponent’s movement. If you time your Boops so your target is moving away from you, they’ll fly much further and you’re more likely to land the kill. If they aren’t moving away from you, reposition yourself so they they are. Some ways I use include wallriding upwards (they often take a step back in order to get a better shot at you), running past them while whipping a side-Boop (demonstrated here) and reversing direction suddenly, especially if they seem deadset on their current trajectory. You might notice a lot of the time I also leap onto the wall right before Booping; I don’t know why but I seem to have more success with my Boops in that position. Timing will take your Booping skill to the next level.

I doubt this is the last time I’m going to write articles on Lucio; I’ve never played a character in a class-based shooter who merges my two favorite playstyles (healing and mobility) quite as well as he does. With enough map-sense and practice, you can tip the scales in your team’s favor in almost any situation, as this Genji found out: