The Big Change That Was Made To Overwatch's Lucio

Blizzard recently released a patch for Overwatch that added the character Ana as well as buffed certain characters. However, some of the buffs were secretly slipped into the game and gamers only discovered them when they actually started playing the certain characters, like Lucio.

Kotaku is reporting that Lucio has actually received a rather significant buff in Overwatch. He can now run on walls indefinitely. I'm not sure if this was intended, but he can also utilize his wall-run on perpendicular surfaces, so making 90-degree turns and continuing his wall-run is also possible.

Additionally, Lucio no longer has to jump off of walls with protuberant corners, he just glides off instead of instantly falling down. So if you wall-run and get to a corner you don't have to jump to land on the next platform, you can just run to the end and Lucio will automatically hop off onto the platform. This is actually demonstrated in a three minute video by YouTube user ProfessorGanymede, who Kotaku links to in their post. You can check out the video below.

The really weird part about this is that there doesn't appear to be any drawbacks to this buff. Lucio can run on the walls, turn in the opposite direction and shoot at foes and he won't fall off.

This rather major buff for Lucio comes on the heels of Blizzard's patch for Overwatch where they explicitly explained in the forum post that Lucio supposedly received a debuff. His ultimate ability cost actually went up by 10%. Somehow they forgot to mention that he has a seemingly definite wall-run, too.

The one thing that really took me by surprise was how Lucio can now make 90-degree turns at ease. This will make him extremely hard to hit, especially if this buff stays in effect for home console players. Analog sticks just don't have the precision tracking in Overwatch to hit someone who can scale the environment like that.

The buff doesn't make a whole lot of sense if the idea was to make Lucio a top pick amongst players. According to the player stats that Blizzard released for Overwatch, Lucio is already the second most popular character in the game when it comes to player-picks, according to Killping.

Maybe they just wanted to increase Lucio's efficiency on the battlefield? It seems like it might be more of a mistake than a legitimate buff. Given that the patch recently dropped for both PC and home consoles and that Blizzard is still testing and re-testing the game as often as possible, I wouldn't be surprised if Lucio's new ability to wall-run without limitations turns out to be rather short-lived buff.

I suppose a lot of it will depend on how much the wall-run is abused and whether or not players have a proper counter for it. It's all about maintaining that balance.

Lucio's enhanced wall-running is currently available right now in Overwatch courtesy of the latest patch, which also houses the newly implemented sniper character, Ana. You can pick up the game right now for the Xbox One, PS4 or PC.