Overwatch 2: When Will Bastion Be Added Back to the Game?

Anyone playing Overwatch 2 knows that launch week has been plagued with issues, but the events of this week so far take the cake. Recently, some players have experienced major bugs where large chunks of their previously fully unlocked roster of Heroes has become locked. It was discovered that this was due to Blizzard removing two characters who were breaking the balance of the game already.

Balancing issues around Damage characters Bastion and Torbjorn were rearing their ugly heads. On October 10th at  3 p.m. PDT, Torbjorn was locked from Competitive play and Bastion was removed from Overwatch 2 entirely. This is a major, and hopefully temporary, shake-up early on in Overwatch 2‘s outset.

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Why Was Bastion Removed from Overwatch 2?

Players of Overwatch 2 were experiencing major balancing issues where both Bastion and Torbjorn had abilities that were easy to break. A bug with Bastion’s Ultimate Ability was allowing players to continuously spam opponents with artillery attacks much longer than intended. At the same time, some players were finding you could trigger Torbjörn’s Overload for twice the length of time the ability normally runs by timing the button press just right. Due to these issues, Blizzard was forced to remove Bastion from the game and temporarily ban Torbjorn from ranked play.

It was after the patch that took them out that players started to notice the bug where their roster would disappear. At 7.p.m. PDT on Tuesday, Blizzard acknowledged the issue, categorizing it as a server-side bug, and announced they would be taking the servers down at 8.p.m. This maintenance period seemed to solve the issue for most players but not all, according to Kotaku.

When Will Bastion Be Added Back to Overwatch 2?

Currently, we don’t have a time frame on when Bastion will return to Overwatch 2 in unranked and competitive play. Blizzard and the official Overwatch channels have not posted any updates since announcing the servers were back online Monday evening. Since the issues caused by the removal don’t seem entirely fixed, it is likely we will not see Bastion re-appear until everyone can access the rest of the Heroes they’ve unlocked.