Blizzard Finally Took Note of the Longstanding Baptiste Exploit

Cover and thumbnail courtesy Blizzard

• Jeff Kaplan said they have looked into Baptiste's immortality field exploit and are planning to fix it.  

Baptiste is currently one of Overwatch’s Tier 1 supports with an insane kit, that includes a game-changing Immortality Field. While this life-saving ability has a whopping 25 cooldown, an exploit allows players to use it almost instantly. Former Overwatch League pro silkthread experienced this exploit during a ranked match in February while playing on the Hanamura map. 

The hero swapping mechanic in Overwatch allows players to get cooldown resets once they change heroes. If the Immortality Field gets destroyed, Baptiste players can simply go back to base, change heroes for a second and then back to Baptiste to get the ability available again. In maps like Hanamura and Gibraltar where the spawn is very close to the capture points, it can mean a huge advantage.  

This long-standing exploit was first discovered by South Korea at the Overwatch World Cup, making Baptiste a must-pick for maps such as Gibraltar. Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan said in a Reddit post that Blizzard became aware of the exploit on Watchpoint: Gibraltar recently and are now preparing a glitch fix to make sure players can’t use the exploit again. 

While there is no clear indication of how Blizzard will go about the bug fix, it is likely to come out during the 2020 Anniversary Event update. Blizzard may look to take a deeper dive into the cooldown but that is a conversation for a later date, as it may mean tweaking one of Overwatch's core mechanics. At least for now, they’ll need a quick fix.