Game-breaking Overwatch bug lets Reinhardt Earthshatter from almost anywhere

Reinhardt’s Earthshatter is one of the most impactful ultimates in Overwatch, capable of winning fights by itself when timed properly and with good follow-up by the rest of your team. Now, a couple of streamers have discovered a trick that makes the tank ultimate even deadlier.

Earthshatter’s biggest weaknesses include the cast time and the fact it can be blocked by shields. During the animation, Reinhardt can be extremely vulnerable, not just to normal attacks, but to stuns too, which can cancel the ultimate outright.

Being able to stay away from such stuns, such as a McCree Flashbang, can be key, and catching foes off-guard with a sneaky Earthshatter can be buckets of fun for the whole family.

While the idea of hitting enemies with a sneaky Shatter while jumping from the high ground or by hiding behind them isn’t anything new, being able to hit opponents below you on a payload while remaining on the high ground certainly is.

Twitch streamers Flats and Emongg discovered you can do just this in certain situations and there is quite a bit of potential.

After Emongg himself ended up getting hit by the ultimate from the low ground in an actual match, the streamer duo decided to put their minds together to discover how and what other maps this trick could work on.

How to Earthshatter from high ground to low ground

As showcased on Havana, Dorado and Blizzard World, while Reinhardt is on the high ground, he can get his Earthshatter to travel down and hit enemies below.

The trick seems to come down to the position of the payload being underneath a catwalk or bridge and getting Earthshatter to travel down. As for why this is, a highly upvoted comment on the YouTube video makes a lot of sense.

“The way this works is that the payload is in a diagonal shape so as you are up on the high ground it acts like a stairway down to Emongg,” user Joe Mama wrote. “They game does this so if you use shatter on a staircase it will go down not straight into the air.”

It will be interesting to see if Blizzard decides to patch this trick out and how they approach it, especially with how much potential it has. For the time being, it’s definitely something tank players should add to their bag of tricks and something everyone else should be wary of.