More than five months after the release of Overwatch 2, Cassidy’s magnetic grenade remains one of the most controversial abilities in the game, with many players calling for its removal.
While it’s always been a contested issue, the magnetic grenade debate has resurfaced on the Overwatch 2 community subreddit after several clips of the grenade appearing to teleport to its targets went viral.
One player summed it up the debate: “The damage is simply too high for such an easy ability to use. You can throw, then roll away to safe cover and get an easy kill. This makes fan the hammer look harder to pull off in comparison.”
Why is magnetic grenade so strong?
Since its introduction in the 2022 release, the magnetic grenade has been a hot topic for many players, including Cassidy mains themselves.
The ease of using it and the high damage it deals are the main sticking points, especially when compared to the flash-bang grenade he had before. The new one even deals splash damage, allowing Cassidy players to sometimes earn easy kills on low-health enemies they didn’t even see.
One Cassidy main summed the ability up as extremely unreliable.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
“I currently main Cassidy in Grandmaster’s and I don’t understand how it works. Sometimes I am perfectly looking at a sleeping Winston and it misses, other times I accidentally whiff it and it still sticks to the Genji who is behind me.”
The flash-bang was removed as part of Blizzard’s rollback of crowd control outside of the tank class, but several players said they would prefer to go back to the old grenade, as the new one is just not fun to use or to play against.
Additionally, several clips have surfaced of the magnetic grenade passing through walls to reach nearby enemies, which has led to many jokes about how the magnet is so strong that it can break reality.
This isn’t the first glitch that Cassidy’s suffered from. He was recently put under the microscope by Overwatch 2 mythbusters because of his notoriously unreliable Deadeye ultimate.
This ultimate is actually coded in a very unintuitive way which allows it to miss on targets that quickly change direction before firing.