Jeff Kaplan confirms Overwatch fix coming for infamous Baptiste exploit

Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has responded to a well-known Baptiste exploit that allows the support hero to use a huge amount of Immortality Fields on Watchpoint: Gibraltar, and confirmed Blizzard now has a fix “in the works.”

Baptiste is already a pretty powerful pick in Season 22, but this long-standing exploit ⁠— first discovered by South Korea at the Overwatch World Cup ⁠— has made the support hero a must-pick in all Gibraltar matches.

The exploit is simple: in Overwatch, you can swap heroes whenever you’re in the spawn room. Gibraltar’s final defensive spawn is just meters from the payload, meaning Baptiste players can swap heroes to endlessly refresh their Immortality Field. This makes the whole defending team unkillable.

According to Kaplan, Team 4 first became aware of the support hero’s invincible powers on Watchpoint: Gibraltar “on Monday”. They are now preparing a glitch fix to make sure the Haitian healer can never take advantage of it again.

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“We became aware of this on Monday,” Kaplan said in response to a Reddit thread pointing out the long-standing Immortality Field issue. The Blizzard vice-president went on to confirm the devs plan to crush it soon: “We have a fix in the works.”

How will Blizzard fix the Baptiste exploit?

There has been no indication of what direction Team 4 will take in the bug fix. It is likely their main focus will simply be tweaking the Watchpoint: Gibraltar spawn. Players are so close to the final payload they can swap heroes with ease.

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Blizzard may also look to take a deeper dive into the cooldown. The devs could toy with the idea of chalking them out for a time after a swap. That would likely be a last resort, however, due to the fact that changing characters is a core Overwatch feature.

This map-specific change will likely do little to knock Baptiste out of the top-tiers of Season 22’s meta. It will make pushing against the support hero on Watchpoint: Gibraltar at least a little bit easier though.

Kaplan didn’t give any indication when Overwatch players could expect the fix. It’s likely it will be bundled with the 2020 Anniversary Event update, which leaked earlier this week, however, alongside planned crowd-control and barrier nerfs.