Overwatch 2’s newest addition to the roster—Lifeweaver—has perhaps one of the most controversial abilities that Blizzard has ever created, and it is already getting shown off in the worst ways.
While Blizzard boasts that Lifeweaver’s kit includes some of the most unique utility in the game, his Life Grip ability immediately drew concern from the community as being something that could be used to grief and troll teammates.
Life Grip is a cooldown ability with a softlock targeting requirement that puts a temporary shield around an ally and pulls them in the direction of Lifeweaver. The bubble stays around the ally during travel, protecting them from danger as they get reeled in.
However, players quickly realized that the ability to take another character’s autonomy could lead to some shenanigans, like pulling teammates to a place that they don’t want to be.
In early gameplay footage from test servers, some content creators released a video of Lifeweaver having the capacity to do a couple of high-level trolling of teammates.
The natural first idea was to pull an ally into a pit, like the well on a control point of Ilios, but another gamer realized that they could repeatedly use Life Grip to indefinitely keep their teammate in the spawn room. By repeatedly swapping on and off of Lifeweaver, thus resting his cooldowns, a person playtesting the hero was able to pull their teammate back to spawn over and over without them ever getting to play the game.
In an interview, Blizzard developers expressed optimism about the ability but admitted that the potential for trolling was something they had to keep in mind while making Lifeweaver.
“When we were coming up with this ability, there was a little bit of apprehensiveness,” Hero design producer Kenny Hudson said. “It’s definitely unique, but what we found was, when we were playtesting that, we actually saw a lot of heroic saves.”
While Blizzard’s team attempted to be reassuring that Life Grip would have massive value for those that use it well based on their experiences testing it, the early videos that have surfaced certainly make players fearful of seeing a teammate pick the support once he’s available next week.
Related: Who is Lifeweaver? The lore and story behind Overwatch 2‘s flower-themed support hero
It’s unclear if the clip of Lifeweaver pulling an ally into a pit is a bug or not, but in an interview last week, Hudson indicated that the team attempted to put in failsafes to prevent that sort of play.
“We do have some controls over where Life Grip can be cast from and it’s doing some detection to make sure you’re not doing something really bad like dragging someone into a death plane off the side of the map or something like that,” he said.
Additionally, Blizzard developers said that Life Grip is supposed to be broken by movement abilities. For instance, if a Tracer is being gripped and using a blink, it is supposed to break the Life Grip, giving the player controlling Tracer control of her again.
