Introduction

Lucio's movement is probably the most essential and versatile part of his kit, but it can often times feel overwhelming and confusing when starting out. Terms like skimming, late jumping, and one ticks get thrown around to explain rollouts, and names like Lijiang under, Hanamura double curve, or Pole 2 Pole get used for training suggestions. In this document I want to go over the how, when, and why of Lucio's wallriding techniques and remove the cloud of confusion around those by coining these essential terms and names and building a solid foundation of wallriding essentials.

Controls

Before we turn our attention to the main topic of this document there's some setup we must do, especially concerning Lucio's two individual settings:

Enable backwards wallriding
Wall jump on release starting with the former.

The Enable backwards wallriding setting allows Lucio to latch onto a wall while moving backwards. Enable backwards wallriding is off by default. This means Lucio can only latch onto a wall when moving forwards or standing still and facing the wall. This can be very counter intuitive, defying your expectation of when Lucio will latch onto walls, and will significantly limit your movement options. For example, pre-jumping in surf can get significantly harder. It is therefore highly recommended to turn to setting on to unlock the full potential of Lucio's movement and allow things like shooting at the enemy while retreating or doing corner climbs while keeping an eye on the enemy.

The latter of Lucio's two specific settings, wall jump on release, is on by default and aims to simplify jumping off walls for you by inputting the 2nd jump input required for Lucio to jump off walls, instead of just dropping down, for you. This can be helpful for new players, taking away some of the complexity of wallriding, but is widely viewed as starkly limiting your control over jump length, and making some techs like one ticking harder to do, for an only marginal gain of consistency. The setting allows you to manually input a 2nd jump input before the automatic one and it also allows you to manually cancel the 2nd jump input by pressing crouch after or while holding your wallride to cancel the wallride and automatic jump input. When holding your jump button while pressing crouch, releasing your jump button will count as the 2nd jump input. When canceling the automatic jump input after releasing your jump button you will have to press it again for it to register as the 2nd jump input. Depending on your preference, and the amount of control you require you can leave this setting either on or off. This guide however does assume that you're playing with the setting off.

After going over those two settings, let's discuss button layout. Starting with another almost mandatory recommendation for PC players:

Binding your 2nd jump input to either scroll wheel up or down.

Having a jump button on either of those will make a lot of techs a lot easier. Those include things like skimming, b-hopping, and one-ticking. This is due to scroll wheel allowing much faster consecutive jump inputs, making those techs less reliant on spamming, or perfectly timing your jump inputs.

All other settings are mostly attributed to personal preference. Some people prefer jump on right click and soundwave on space, a lot of console players bind jump to a bumper or pedal instead of A / X, and many players bind crouch to a mouse side-button.

Wallride mechanics

After setting up Lucio's controls to be comfortable for you, the next step is to understand how his wallriding mechanics fundamentally work. This will help with understanding why certain things like staying at the same spot while repeatedly wall jumping, or turning multiple sharp corners close together don't work, while other unintuitive things like clearing massive overhangs do.

Starting with the most important mechanic, the wallride itself. You can start a wallride by going near any vertical wall and pressing jump. This will make you wallride along the wall until you either release your jump, or a wall drop-off happens. Wallriding gives you an extra 30% speed boost compared to your ground speed. Unfortunately, there are some caveats to what walls are actually wallridable and which are not. Like already mentioned, the major criterium is the verticality of the wall. However, there are 2 exceptions to this easy rule. The first one concerns the edges of maps, especially those walls near the void. A lot of those walls do not have correct mapped collision and wallride hitboxes and some have none. This means wallriding even the possible map edges can be finicky to near impossible at times. The second exception has to do with roofs, especially those found on the eastern style maps. While the bunk of the roofs may not be wallridable due to being a curved wall, some parts are. This includes almost all the edges of these roofs as well as some spots on the middle of the area for some. There's no rule to these middle spots and if you want to use them, you'll have to learn them by heart.

The next important mechanic to remember is the wall drop-off. This mechanic will throw you off the wall you're currently wallriding when encountering a corner and end your wallride, and is based on 2 parameters:

The angle of the corner. The sharper the angle is the more likely you'll get thrown off. If you're turning 2 corner that are only minimally apart the angles of both corners will get interpolated, leading to a potentially bigger angle than any of the 2 corners alone.
The speed at which you perform the turn. When trying to turn corners at high speed the probability of getting thrown off the wall rises significantly. This is mostly only achievable by attaching to the wall shortly before the corner, due to wallriding slowing you down to the base wallride speed.

If those 2 combined are too high overwatch will automatically cancel your wallride. This is not preventable, so watch out when turning corners. Now, after learning how a wallride can be started and at what point it will disconnect, the next step is to start getting some speed and discovering the extra restrictions that applies to wallriding, and especially connecting to a wall. First, a wall drop-off is not only an automatic mechanic, it can also be triggered manually. This is exceptionally easy to do since all you need to do is release your jump input. Now, after a wall drop-off occurred, you have around 0.23 seconds to do a 2nd jump input which will give you an additional 2.5 m/s speed and a mid-air jump. I will refer to this mid-air jump as a “wall jump” throughout the document.

Jumping off a wall will place restrictions on when and where you can start your next wallride. The of which is the wallride cooldown. This mechanic prevents you from starting another wallride anywhere for 0.5 seconds. This hard time restriction together with the speed decay caps your maximum movement speed at around 16 m/s peak for standard settings and 21 m/s peak for gravspeed settings.

The next limitation is the same wall distance. You cannot wallride the same wall twice without having sufficient distance between the drop off and connect spot of 2 wallrides. The minimum distance is around 2 m. This has implications for scaling a wall, as we'll later see.

As the name implies, the same wall distance only counts for the wallrides at the same wall. A wall in OW is determined as any connected, straight piece of wallridable surface. This especially means any curved “wall” is split up into many small segments in OWs understanding. In practice this means, any 2 walls can be wallrode without any distance between them as long as they're different in OWs interpretation of walls.

Now that we know what rules apply to wallriding I want to bring up 2 more things that influence how fast you'll ultimately move. The first of which is the direction you're holding. Since your maximum mid-air speed is tied to your maximum ground speed, holding anything except W, or stick forwards for controller players, will result in you slowing down significantly, since the ground movement speed when holding A, D, or S is reduced compared to holding W.

The last thing affecting your speed is your mouse movement. However, your mouse movement does not only affect your speed, but is also the critical last component which will allow you to easily change direction while wallriding without using WASD. Generally speaking, Lucio will jump into whatever direction you're currently facing. However, he will not exactly go towards that direction but will be dragging behind. This is because your facing direction is not the only thing acting towards Lucio's air movement. You can imagine your facing direction being a force, that's dragging Lucio into that direction. But there's also another force, the force of your current movement direction which applies to Lucio's new movement direction. The direction Lucio will go into at the end is a compromise of both those forces. This applies when jumping off a wall as well as moving in the air. When jumping off a wall the fact if you're looking up or down also plays a part in where Lucio will go. If you look up Lucio will jump higher for the trade-off of some speed. If you look down Lucio will jump flatter, also for the trade-off of some speed. Looking straight ahead will therefore give you the most speed, which means you should only look up / down if the next jump is not possible otherwise.

However, your mouse movement can only affect your direction so much and if the angle between the 2 acting forces is too steep Lucio will drastically slow down to allow turning into that direction. This steep angle is also another reason why pressing A or D slows you down so much.

Before we move on to the next segment, where we will finally explain Lucio's different techs you can do with those mechanics, I highly advise you to try out and get comfortable with the things mentioned until now. It is very important to have an understanding about these mechanics to be able to easily comprehend why certain things work and what you can and cannot do when wallriding in-game. You can pause the video and come back after having tried and understood these mechanics.

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Jumps

Jumping is the most integral part of Lucio's wallriding kit. Without jumping off walls you can't gain speed, move around the map without walking, dive Widow's, or better dodge shots. This chapter will herefore explore the basic jumps you can incorporate into your movement to make wallriding a more useful part of Lucio's kit.

Jump

A jump is the most basic and most ambiguous wallriding tech. When most people use the word “jump” they mean any kind of wall jump you can perform. This means it is irrelevant what kind of wall jump you do, anything's fine. “Jump” is also often times used interchangeably with “Skim” - the next tech we will cover.

Execution

To perform a jump just go to a wall and press jump twice. You can hold the first jump input as long as you want, but you have to do the 2nd one in the maximum 0.2 seconds allotted for a wall jump.

The first jump input will attach you to the wall, starting a wallride. This wallride will be held until a wall drop-off is initiated by either turning a corner too fast or releasing the jump key. This will put you I the state for a wall jump for roughly 0.2 seconds. Doing the 2nd jump input in that time frame will make you perform a wall jump. Omitting the 2nd jump input will just make you fall down.

Pros and Cons

Jumps have some advantages and one major downside. First of all, they're incredibly easy to do, making them very consistent. They're also faster than just wallriding, allowing you to beat 90% of surf players with one single tech. However, their massive speed loss at high velocities due to holding onto the wall before jumping off make them a poor choice for anything but the first jump of two. They also having a limited jump length, due to the wallriding.

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Null Jump

When performing a walljump without any momentum you gain considerably more height than normal. This phenomenon is called a null jump. Null jumps give you the same height as looking straight up when performing a jump.

Execution

Null jumps are arguably the easiest thing to pull off. Simply stand next to a wall and do a normal jump. The only thing you need to pay attention to is not gaining any horizontal speed when attaching to the wall. This just means to jump off the wall quickly.

Pros and Cons

The quick and easy gain of height is the major advantage of null jumping. However this can also be achieved by simply looking straight up during the jump without having to sacrifice your speed. Therefore null jumps are generally not recommended.

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Skim

Skims are the tech you'll likely use the most when wallriding since it's the tech that gets you around the map the fastest. A skim can be described as a tighter jump. Every input is as short and close to each other as possible.

In practice this means that your first jump input should only be a tick long to reduce your time on the wall to a minimum. After the first input you perform the 2nd input on the next frame to reduce the time between the wall drop-off and wall jump.

Execution

A skim, like any other tech, relies on the same basics as a jump. Attaching and detaching from the wall with the first input and doing the wall jump with the 2nd. Reducing the time spent wallriding to a single tick, however, lets you keep almost all your speed, because the wallriding can't slow you down fully in only a single frame, making it perfect for going fast. Reducing the time between the wall drop-off and wall jump reduces your overall jump length, letting you perform more skims, and gain more speed, over a shorter distance.

Pros and Cons

As we can see, skims are the ideal tech for movement, being the fastest possible tech, still being very easy to do, and therefore also being consistently hit. However, they're not the perfect fit for every situation. Sometimes you require more distance to the next wall than a skim can give you, or you want to turn a sharp corner. In both of these situations skimming becomes a crux. Skimming also won't allow you to get the maximum speed out of jumps started from ground speed, due the single tick of holding the wall not bringing you up to full wallriding speed.

Tips

A small tip for all keyboard and mouse players:

Using scroll wheel jump for skimming will make it a lot easier to hit the tick windows and will make skimming much more consistent. Concerning the speed at which you should scroll, a wise man once said: Not faster than a sane person would pet a cat.

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Late Jump

A latejump is another of the more ambiguous techs for Lucio. Many people use latejump and lateskim, the next tech we will cover, interchangeably. This is not a problem most of the time, since they're close to the same thing, however, for the purpose of this document, I would like to make a distinction between the two. Latejumps, like jumps, are a useful tool for turning sharp corners or for doing jumps from ground speed that require you to cover a long distance to the next jump.

Execution

To perform a latejump all you have to do is hold the wall like in a normal jump, but then delay the 2nd jump input to the maximum time of roughly 0.2 seconds.

Delaying the wall jump to the maximum possible time will give you a longer jump distance, since you travel the distance between the wall drop-off and the wall jump

the distance of the wall jump itself.

Pros and Cons

This is also the main advantage of latejumps, they let you cover greater distances than normal jumps. They however have the same disadvantage as jumps, mainly losing speed due to holding the wall. In additions they're also quite hard to time when starting out. With this, we can conclude that latejumps should be used where you would normally use a jump, but the jump requires more distance to the next wallride point.

Tip

Latejumps are a staple of Lucio's kit, meaning you should definitely learn the correct timing. We'll also need them for later techs.

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Late Skim

A lateskim, as already mentioned, is almost the same as a latejump. Lateskims are used for bridging longer gaps as well, using the same principle as latejumps. As their name suggest however, they are derived from skims instead of jumps.

Execution

With this, their inputs are almost identical to those of latejumps. The 2nd jump input is delayed to the maximum again. The first jump input, contrary to latejumps, is reduced to a single tick, just like with skims. Therefore the name, lateskim.

Same as with latejumps, the delayed wall jump gives you the extra length this tech provides. And just like with skims, the one tick long wallride ensures that you lose close to no speed.

Pros and Cons

This preservation of momentum is also the big advantage lateskims have over latejumps and why they're preferred in almost every situation. Together with skimming they are the fastest method of moving around the map. Just like with every tech, lateskims are not perfect for all situations. Their harder timing makes them unsuitable for perfect consistency and their short wallride time makes turning corners harder.

Tips

Lateskims, are the most important part of Lucio's kit, next to skims and bhops, a tech we'll turn to shortly. Using scroll wheel to input a single tick can help with getting the one tick wallride down, although scrolling only one bump might be hard to do.

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Bunny Hopping

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Environment Dependent Jumps

All jumps in this category require some special map geometry to work. This is due to them altering your jumping path to achieve some useful properties that otherwise would require bigger trade-offs, like losing speed to lose height.

Head Hit

With the headhit we're slowly treading into territory only really useful for rollouts, trick jumps, and lucio surf. Headhits aim to achieve the advantages of oneticks without the disadvantage of losing speed. It works by hitting your head into a ceiling.

Execution

Head hits require a ceiling directly over your jump off point. All you have to do to perform a headhit is to skim while having a ceiling directly above your head.

The skim acts as your normal jump, however because there is a ceiling above your head, you're going to hit your head on it, cancelling all your upwards momentum. This means you get the same downwards trajectory as with a onetick.

Pros and Cons

Executing a skim instead of the wallride you do on oneticks allows you to build speed while still lowering your overall height. This is the major advantage headhits have over oneticks. This extra speed also leads to its major disadvantage. If your next jump spot is too close the wallride cooldown will still be active when you get there. You therefore have to choose between oneticks and headhits on a per situation basis.

Tips

The jump for a headhit is not limited to only skims. You can do any jump you want, as long as a ceiling is above your head at the point of inputting the wall jump.

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V-Curve

With the name being an abbreviation for vertical curve, this tech is used to get on top of overhangs.

Execution

As an extension of lateskims the method to performing v-curves is to setup a lateskim directly below the overhang you want to clear. After that you turn 180 degrees while looking straight up in the air when performing the walljump part of the lateskim. If done correctly you will describe a 90 degree, vertical curve which will bring you next to the overhang you want to clear. You can now skim the overhang to get on top of it.

Pros and Cons

V-curves are a great tool for quickly positioning yourself on high ground, as well as to escape enemies. They are however difficult to perform and kill your momentum by virtue of stopping mid-air.

Tips

To train performing v-curves simple doorways of buildings are a good starting point. After which you can slowly increase the difficulty up to trick jump like the Hanamura double v-curve.

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Ramp Jump

While sharing a part of their name with the later introduced ramp slides, ramp jumps are the exact opposite. While ramp slides make you gain speed and lose height ramp jumps make you lose speed and gain height by slamming your body into an upwards slanted non-walkable surface.

Execution

While the principle behind ramp jumps might sound easy, performing one is far from it. You need a decently slanted surface to boot. After you found a fitting one your next step is to build speed and slam your feet into it. Depending on the angle between you and the ramp, the speed, and probably how far into the wall you would have been placed on this tick, you can get almost catapulted into the air.

This, like many other techs, happens because your forward momentum gets transformed on impact. In this case it gets transformed into upwards momentum. Due to small differences in position having a butterfly effect on the outcome ramp jumps like curve boosts can appear to be almost completely RNG. I recommend praying to whatever higher deity you believe in before performing one.

Pros and Cons

Compared to the difficulty of this tech, the advantages are almost negligible. It is slightly faster than climbing a wall and preserves a bit of forward momentum. The biggest advantage is honestly the style points it adds to a rollout. See PlasmaNapkins “Overslide” and “Evergreen” for an example. In comparison, its major disadvantages of requiring special surfaces and being incredibly inconsistent firmly place it in the realm of “not usable outside of trick jumps.”

Tips

Like with ceiling boosts, a lot more edges than you might think have a small, curved part you can use to ramp jump. In addition you can ramp jump off other players heads.

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In comparison to ramp jumps, wall climbs are a lot easier to execute, requiring only basic wallriding and no luck. They also allow you to climb much higher, given you have a high enough wall. They're not perfect though, they will take longer than ramp jump and also leave you vulnerable in the open while climbing.

Tips

Some of this can be mitigated by climbing the wall before the fight starts, earning you a surprise attack on unsuspecting enemies.

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Corner Climb

As a variant of the wall climb, a corner climb uses a corner to remove the same wall distance requirement which leads to a faster and easier climb.

Execution

The principal of a corner climb is the same as that of a wall climb, jumping while looking up. However, using a corner means you can largely stay in the same place. By alternately looking at the two intersecting walls while climbing you wallride off them alternately and remove the need to have a certain distance between your two jumps.

Pros and Cons

Corner climbs are inherently faster and easier than wall climbs. To achieve this, they lose the already lacking dodging capabilities of the wall climb, only changing your position vertically.

Tips

To fend of attackers while climbing you can perform a corner climb while looking away from the wall. This allows you to shoot at enemies while climbing but will slow down your climbing speed. This can only be done when “allow backwards wallriding” is turned on. You can also climb 270 degrees corners with some delicate positioning.

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