Time-jumping soldier Tracer’s build was a bit too lore-accurate in Overwatch 2’s Stadium mode as the hero could buy upgrades, sell them to regain currency, and then use the Recall ability to rewind time, hold on to those upgrades and pocket the cash, essentially turning her into an unkillable tank. So, in the meantime, the hero’s been entirely banned from the mode just days after her release.
Overwatch 2’s Stadium, for anyone who hasn’t touched the shooter this year, is essentially a mammoth seven-round mode that lets you save currency to buy stat boosts, ability modifiers, and create some wild builds. Buildcrafting… in Overwatch!? It’s much more entertaining than it has any right to be, but its unique structure opens the door to some quirks.
Since Stadium needs to be balanced on its own, Blizzard Entertainment has been adding heroes to the mode slowly. Months after its debut, for example, the mode only just added arguably the game’s most famous face, Tracer. But Blizzard giveth and taketh away.
Just two days later, Tracer’s been temporarily removed from Stadium. Blizzard hasn’t come out and said it outright, but the ban probably has something to do with an exploit that turned her into an absolute machine. The Twitter clip above shows how fans were snapping up upgrades, refunding them, and then recalling to retain both the stat buffs and currency. Rinse, repeat.
Some Tracer health pools reached almost 2,000 HP, making her about four times more spongey than most tanks in the game. When you take into account that Tracer has one of the smallest hitboxes and is also probably the fastest, most restless hero on the roster, well, it’s not hard to see why the exploit made her nearly invincible.
Of course, trying to sink 2,000 hit points into a flickering opponent that’s tiny as a stick is very annoying, but there’s something amusing about a time-jumping hero being able to time travel to, urm, launder money.