Usually, when Overwatch 2 accidentally patches in a bug, the team at Blizzard will remove a hero from ranked play for a bit while they sort out the issue. It’s pretty uncommon for a bug to completely mess with the competitive balance of the game such that it affects all the characters in the shooter’s roster, but that’s what happened when Overwatch 2’s 17th season began yesterday, and players immediately figured out how to exploit the game’s Perk system.
Perks in Overwatch 2 are a relatively new addition. These unlockable upgrades allow you to tweak a hero’s ability set with “minor” and “major” changes. For instance, Soldier: 76 getting a speed increase to his sprinting, or Orisa replacing her javelin spin with the shield she had in the first Overwatch. Under normal circumstances, you have to choose between two minor and two major Perks after you gain levels throughout a game, but after Overwatch 2’s latest patch, fans have found an exploit that lets you equip all four of them, making every hero superpowered by the end of the game.
If you’re playing with a controller, you press L1 or R1 to pick between Perks on the fly, but after the latest patch you can apparently pick both if you press both buttons at the same time. Players caught onto this pretty quickly, so it would not surprise me if Blizzard patched this out in the next 24 hours. But if you can boot up Overwatch 2 before they do it, you can enjoy some absolute chaos.
When the system is working as intended, Perks is one of the coolest things Overwatch 2 has done in a long time. Both it and the new build-centric Stadium mode are giving us a lot of freedom in how we play, which is a breath of fresh air after years of Blizzard trying to rein in how people play Overwatch. After years of struggles, it feels like Overwatch 2 is in the best place it’s been since it launched in 2022. Except when a bug like this happens, of course. But Blizzard will likely be squashing it very soon.
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