Team USA won the 2019 Overwatch World Cup in dominating fashion and one of their best moments came when they had to fight through waves of Immortality Fields after South Korea made use of a Baptiste exploit.
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Immortality Field is one of the game’s most powerful abilities as it keeps everyone within its line of sight alive, even through attacks that should result in an elimination. Because of its power, it has the second-longest cooldown in the game at 20 seconds. The only ability with a longer cooldown is Mercy’s resurrect at 30 seconds.
Normally players have to wait the full duration of the cooldown for the ability to come back online, however, as shown by South Korea’s Ho-jin “iDK” Park, there are ways around this.
During Map 3 of the World Cup semi-finals, Team USA was pushing the payload towards the end of Watchpoint Gibraltar and were scoring kills, resulting in a big man advantage.
IDK, who was playing the Lucio, swapped onto Baptiste and threw an Immortality Field onto the payload from his own spawn to try and keep his team alive.
The moment the drone was destroyed, the smart-thinking support main swapped to Brigitte and then back to Baptiste to reset the cooldowns and threw yet another Immortality Field at the payload.
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Once the second drone was destroyed, he swapped to Ana and then once more back to Baptiste for a third Immortality Field that was yet again demolished.
Unfortunately for South Korea, the Americans had superior focus fire and by the time a fourth Immortality Field was used, there wasn’t even anyone on the cart to protect with it.
Even commentator Mitch ‘Uber’ Leslie was impressed with iDK’s “clever little trick” and noted it was a “cheeky tech”.
Long cooldowns in Overwatch are as long as they are for a reason. Many within the community have asked Blizzard to take a look at this exploit and fix it, but it doesn’t seem like the company has any intention of patching out this tech just yet.
Next time you’re in a bind on ladder and want to help your team stall out the point, this easy trick could be the difference between sweet victory and bitter defeat. Unless, of course, you’re against Team USA.