Gaming
Gaming
Overwatch star DSPStanky tells how to master Lúcio
We talk to the world's greatest Lúcio aficionado about how to better your boops.
He's versatile, he's a healing demon, and he's also one of Overwatch's most adept trolls. Everyone loves having a talented Lúcio on their team, and fears in equal measure the prospect of chasing an enemy on skates as they dart around the point.
Being a good Lúcio player is much harder than simply lingering around your team and distributing passive heals, but often players are at a loss as how to make the most of his kit. To help out, we decided to get in contact with an expert – streamer and Lúcio lover DSPStanky, who's been thrilling Overwatch fans with his compilations of amazing healing beats for the past year. Known for his amazing wall running skills and technical grace, he's the perfect person to help unravel the mysteries of stellar Lúcio play.
What attracted you to Lúcio?
When I first started playing on console, I liked Lúcio because of his movement, but I couldn't really nail it down. It was really hard to do what I wanted with him. Then, after a couple of weeks of playing Junkrat, Hanzo, Tracer, D.Va and all the rest, I had a thought one day to change my jump binding to left trigger and that instantly fixed all my problems – I could really move the way I wanted to with Lúcio. So yeah, movement at first is probably what drew me to him.
Anyone who has seen your videos knows you're a force to be reckoned with. How did you get that good?
A lot of it is just free time and practice. It's muscle memory at this point, and I've got decent game sense so I know where I’m going within the space of the game. At first I sucked just like everybody else, it just came with some practice and really exploring the map and really getting what surfaces are where. If I get knocked around I'll know that there's a wall behind me and I can jump off of that. Really, when it comes to being able to manipulate your momentum, a lot of it's just having a plan; if you get knocked away then knowing whether there's something behind you, and that you can jump around and use that momentum to redirect back toward the fight.
With post-rework Lúcio, it really matters to have something that you can spam repeatedly, like right click or scroll wheel like a lot of people use, or a thumb mouse button because the way that you stack momentum now is that if you just barely tap a corner with perfect timing, you'll gain a huge burst of speed and your momentum will continue. A lot of people use those controls so that they can spam that jump button faster as they get closer to the wall.
What should your priority be if you're being a good Lúcio player?
You can't just focus on one thing with Lúcio if you want to climb and be good. You've got to learn how to do everything. You've gotta learn when to be passive, when to be aggressive, when you should be supporting your team, when you should be on the walls distracting enemies, when you should be going for a stray pick, when you should be peeling for your support and when you be helping out your DPS heroes by jumping in with them for flank or something like that.
As Lúcio your job really boils down to being a firefighter. You have to run around putting out fires around the map, especially on defence. On attack you're the node centre, you can really orchestrate team fights well by micromanaging your crossfade, moving between heals and speed, which is something that I do a lot. That's why a lot of people who play Lúcio are shot callers or target callers, because they're already paying attention to everything so they already have a pretty good macro sense of what's happening in the game at that moment. It allows for them to shot call very effectively.
Sometimes in your videos you're crossfading almost constantly. Why?
Every time I swap it's for a legitimate reason. If I'm in a team fight and I see someone on low health who's not in immediate danger, I'll swap to heals to get some ult charge off of them and get them back up. If I see someone else trying to push in on an enemy, I'll swap to speed so they can push in easier. If they're trying to disengage, I'll also swap to speed so that they can run away faster. Then when it comes to wall riding I swap to heals to slow myself down at random times. I break up my rhythm and momentum so that I can't get shot easily.
You're known for a daring, almost troll-like style of play. How can other Lúcios emulate that?
That comes from just trying to read a situation well. In solo queue I do dumb stuff all the time. People are like 'why did you do that?', and it's because I'm trying things out to see if I can get away with it.
For instance, jump in against one or two flankers and just jump around and dodge to have them focus on you, and then run away. If you swap to speed and then run on a wall you'll boost away and they won't be able to get you. That's one way to distract two members of the enemy team while the rest of your team goes in for a five versus four, and they'll typically win that. Another way is boop kills. Make sure you're watching like a hawk to see if an enemy goes anywhere near an edge, and then speed boost into them and knock them off. Stray picks with one or two boop kills will help you win engagements very easily.
Some people think you can only use boop for knocking people off. Boop is so versatile.
Some people think you can only use boop for knocking people off, but boop is so versatile. You can kill a Genji with low health because he can't deflect boop. It's good for knocking people into pulse bombs, good for knocking people into gravitons and knocking people into corners so they can't get away from you. Lúcio's kit is all about versatility and using all his cooldowns creatively to disrupt the enemy.
You beat us to the next question: how to achieve the ultimate boop?
I'm still surprised at how many people don't know how boop works. We'll start with how boop used to work: it used to only take into account horizontal movement. It's not momentum, it's velocity so whatever direction and speed an enemy is moving in, if you boop them that's generally where their going to go. If you boop them whilst they're sprinting toward a pit then they're going to fly. If they're running directly at you full force and you boop them, they're barely going to move at all. Consequently if they're moving perpendicular to you and you boop them, and add all that momentum on a right angle, they're going to fly off.
Boop now takes into account upward momentum as well so now if someone is jumping from above, on top of you, you can boop them and juggle them. They won't go very far, but they'll still be in the air like sitting ducks for a good second or two. That's something I'll do with Winstons when they're about to land – I'll boop them up so that they're out of the bubble they've just placed and my team can focus them down.
Another fun way to use the new boop is that you can run behind a Reinhardt shield and look straight up, and you can boop the Reinhardt directly upward. If your team also has a Rein, then he can Earthshatter everyone behind the enemy Rein.
Who are your most important targets as Lúcio?
Priority targets are low health opponents. Rarely do I put somebody into a corner and fight them one-on-one. Usually I'm waiting to see if they've taken damage and they’re low health so I can zip in, finish them off, and zip out. Mainly I go for supports, but if there's a tank or a DPS hero and they're low health, and I know I can get in there, pick them off and escape, I do it. Rarely do I jump into a one versus six situation and be like 'okay, shoot me', unless there's a need to contest the point or something like that.
How do you suggest players practice their moves? Just dive into Quick Play?
Something I did a lot was to start a custom game skirmish for 30 minutes and just wall ride around, find all the health packs, find every nook and cranny, and really practice carrying momentum forward whilst finding routes to high or low ground.
There's no one tip I can give anybody that's going to make them instantly better at Lúcio, except that you can go to the Controls setting, then click the drop down for heroes, then go to Lúcio, and scroll down a little bit, then there's an option to turn backwards wall riding on. Definitely put that on, because that's the way wall riding should have been when Overwatch first came out. Now you can wall ride facing any direction, you don't actually have to be looking at the wall in order to ride on it.
What about Sound Barrier? Any tips for Lúcio's most important ability?
Sound Barrier gives you a tiny little jump when you use it. I see a lot of unskilled Lúcios jump off the tallest pillar they can find, and drop the beat because it feels good and looks cool, but in that second or two it takes you to freefall to the ground, your entire team can get wiped. So my biggest tip for Sound Barrier is that if you're in mid-air, but there's a surface right next to you that's a little bit higher than you are that you can use Sound Barrier to get to, then do it, because you'll drop the beat faster.
The biggest tip is to just never use it from up high, always use it on the ground. If you're up high on Volskaya, don't drop the beat onto the point, just do it where you're standing. It's still got a 30m radius, Blizzard reverted the 20m radius nerf, so as long as everyone is in sight of you, they're probably going to get it.
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