A new Overwatch trick as Lucio can catch enemies totally off-guard by making them think you’ve wasted Sound Barrier before hitting them with a counterattack.
Sound Barrier is easily one of the best defensive ultimates in the game, granting allies temporary shields that go away over time, but provide significant protection against incoming damage.
It does have a couple of big flaws, however: there’s a cast time where Lucio himself is very vulnerable and his voice line straight up tells enemies he’s ulting by screaming “let’s break it down.”
Luckily, streamer McMagicMarv has discovered a neat, yet advanced, trick that makes Lucio stall his Sound Barrier in the air, and as you’ll see, it can completely mess with the heads of your foes.
The trick itself is actually similar to another of his techniques with Reinhardt that lets him stall Earthshatter and delay it mid-air.
As shown in the YouTube video, when Lucio is in a special “bounce spot” that makes him move once every four seconds, he can effectively activate his ultimate, but never complete its animation and throw out the shield until you’re ready to.
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This means that enemies can think you’ve wasted Sound Barrier and McMagicMarv even jokingly suggests complaining into the match chat in order to “complete your ruse” and get your teammates to play along.
Because the enemy might think you no longer have a defensive ultimate available, the enemy team might try pushing in offensively or better yet, using their own ultimates only for you to counter by using Sound Barrier for real.
It’s definitely something you’ll probably only get away with once per game and it’s quite situational as well, but if you can pull it off, you could end up tipping the odds in your favor.
After all, Overwatch is a game where ultimate economy matters, and being able to manipulate that by pretending yours is in a bad state can make your opponents over invest. It’s unclear if Blizzard are working on a patch to fix this, but until then, be sure to capitalize on this while you can and reap the rewards.