Cassidy climbs up the perfect spot for his High Noon. He’s on the high ground, and he can see every single opponent. The circles around the skull indicating the ult is ready to unleash are closing in, and the player behind the screen is eagerly anticipating a team kill. All of a sudden, they’re yoinked off of their vantage point and pulled to their teammate. No more enemies are in sight, the ult runs out, and rage ensues.
This imagined scenario is now a reality in Overwatch 2 thanks to the addition of Lifeweaver, the newest support hero added to the shooter in season four. Lifeweaver’s Life Grip ability has introduced the rage-inducing ability to pull friendly players to him every 20 seconds.
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Clearly, Overwatch 2 developers intended for Life Grip to be a very helpful tool for healers to use when they see their teammate stepping into danger. But pulling away the autonomy of players is just asking for a new Life Grip YouTube video to appear named “Pick ‘em and Flick ‘em,” or something similarly stupid, which likely isn’t what Blizzard Entertainment intended.
In a press conference, hero design producer Kenny Hudson said the development team is optimistic players will use the ability as intended, as a way to pull teammates out of near-death firefights or back from a fall over the edge of the map.
“When we were coming up with this ability, there was a little bit of apprehensiveness,” Hudson said. “[Life Grip is] definitely unique, but what we found was, when we were playtesting that, we actually saw a lot of heroic saves.”
But Life Grip is one of the most irritating tools Overwatch 2 developer Blizzard could put into the game. YouTube is already filled to the brim with videos on how to troll with Life Grip and montages solely focusing on all of the ways trolls have ruined their teammates’ plays. This is now the world Overwatch 2 players enter every time they boot up the game. In an already toxic community, players now have the ability to yank teammates to their demise or frustration three times every minute.
Life Grip’s ability isn’t a new idea, but it is a bad idea for Overwatch 2
This ability isn’t a new concept to MMOs such as World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV, two games that give players the ability to pull their teammates out of danger. But the big sticking point for Overwatch 2 is players can do this move every 20 seconds. In League of Legends, Kalista’s Fate’s Call has a 150-second cooldown, Final Fantasy XIV’s Rescue cooldown is 120 seconds, and World of Warcraft’s Leap of Faith has a 90-second cooldown.
Unfortunately for Hudson, those compilation videos prove playtesters are not the general population. The general population contains a host of toxic players who make it their life’s mission to make others miserable for the lulz. There’s no doubt the developers considered the trolling that would occur with this ability, but it’s likely they overestimated how many players would use it as intended, or could even use it well.
The big difference between Life Grip and other trolling abilities in Overwatch 2 such as Mei’s wall is that Life Grip has such a high potential to kill players, whereas Mei’s wall mostly acts as a minor inconvenience. Sure, there are instances where a Mei wall can kill a fellow teammate, but it requires a far more creative player to pull it off. The resulting YouTube videos are hysterical and even I’ll admit that I take great joy in seeing how creative people can get in their endeavor to get a rise out of their teammates, but it’s not a great look that people seem to be solely queuing up just to try to yeet their teammates off the map.
Lifeweaver can simply jump off the edge, yoink a teammate, laugh about it, spawn in, and do it again 10 seconds later. Is it reportable? Sure. Is Blizzard going to do something about those players? We’ll have to wait and see if it takes action. Couple that with the ability to play the game for free and these bad sports are given endless opportunities to make new accounts and troll to their heart’s content.
Life Grip needs a lifeline to stop players from trolling with it
The developers are going to need to take a better look at this ability if they want the frustration to be kept to a minimum. The most glaring issue is how often Lifeweaver can grab his teammates. Currently, Mercy’s Resurrect is the longest cooldown in the entire game at 30 seconds. For a fast-paced game like Overwatch 2, 30 seconds is a long time. When a kit ability can troll a fellow player, however, 20 seconds feels like nothing in comparison.
Related: Lifeweaver can completely counter one Overwatch 2 ultimate due to bizarre interaction
Lifeweaver’s Life Grip ability warrants a 45-second or longer cooldown. A typical Quick Play match lasts eight to 10 minutes depending on how evenly matched the teams are. In a 10-minute match, Lifeweaver could drag teammates to their deaths up to 30 times. Jack up the restriction to 45 seconds, and that number maxes out at 13. That’s still infuriating, but not unbearable.
Raising the cooldown for Life Grip will force players to save the ability for when they really need it, and it makes its use so infrequent that trolling with it is much harder. Take away the ability to quickly and easily get a clip to throw into a YouTube compilation of Lifeweaver trolling and players will be far less incentivized to keep trying.
