Respawn Details Major Character Tweaks to Apex Legends Roster
Apex Legends developer Respawn was hesitant to tweak its characters and make significant gameplay changes around launch, as its 50 million players were still learning to play the game. Today, though, the team revealed the first major changes coming in the battle royale's inaugural competitive season.
The first weapons to see changes are the Wingman and the Peacekeeper. Respawn has reduced the rate of fire in order to move the Wingman into "the hand cannon space and away from full auto Deagle." They've also adjusted the rate of fire on the Peacekeeper with the Shotgun Bolt attachment too, making players more vulnerable if they miss their target. The scarcity of energy ammo and weapons makes mastering these weapons a challenge, so Respawn has increased the availability of both. These weapon changes are already live in the game.
Season 1 will introduce significant character changes, too. The hitboxes on some of its large-rig characters will be adjusted – Respawn says they're currently underpowered compared to the five small and medium rig characters. Since changing hitbox sizes has a significant impact on the game, the team is waiting a bit longer before rolling out a patch so it can debug the updates.
Each character will get some minor tweaks as well, and you can read those in the full patch notes on Reddit. In other news, a new Legend named Octane might be coming to the game soon, if the rumors are true. We're loving Apex Legends – you can read our thoughts on the game in our review.
Details:
Leeeeeee-RSPN here with RespawnSean, Jayfresh_Respawn & Scriptacus to give a quick update on how we think about live balance at Respawn and the current state of live balance for Apex.
HOW WE THINK ABOUT LIVE BALANCE AT RESPAWN
TL;DR - We make less frequent, better tested, higher impact balance changes in order to minimize the impacts on your time spent mastering the game.
A core philosophy of our development process for Apex Legends is to listen to player feedback, parse through all the data we get from the game, try things, and then playtest them a ton to get them just right. And… repeat. The goal is to ship polished, closer to the mark updates than if we got things out rapidly and iterated in the live environment. We know y'all are putting a ton of time into the game and mastering every nuance (like Wraith portalling people off cliffs for the final kill lolz). Our goal is to make less frequent, better tested, higher impact changes, so it minimizes the effects on your time spent mastering a particular mechanic, weapon, character, etc. You shouldn't have to read our patch notes every few days just to keep up with how characters and weapons now work.
The exception here is that we will be very quick to adjust things that are way out of balance (for example, if we released a new character that completely dominates the meta from Day 1, we'd address it ASAP).
We didn’t want to make any hasty changes around launch, because we know a ton of players are still learning the game with lots of new Legends dropping in everyday. The week one meta vs. the week two / three meta was meaningfully different from what we've seen, so want to make it sure it settles a bit before we act. For example, Mirage’s power level has dropped a bit as players have adapted to getting Bamboozled. :) We want to let you know we're constantly reviewing the state of the game and considering and testing a variety of changes.
With the above philosophy in mind, I wanted to give a quick update on where we stand with the current state of character and weapon balance and provide an early preview of the things we’re planning to do for Season 1.
WEAPON BALANCE
Overall, we feel that the current weapons present solid options for a variety of gameplay styles. We've found that the Skullpiercer Wingman has been on the stronger end, but it’s designed to be a weapon with a higher skill ceiling. Our adjustments are attempting to move it more into the hand cannon space and away from full auto Deagle. We’ve also adjusted the rate of fire of the Peacekeeper with Shotgun Bolt attachment, so players will have a larger window of vulnerability if they miss their shot. Additionally, the scarcity of energy ammo and lower number of energy weapons overall has made those weapons difficult to main, so we’ve increased energy weapon and ammo availability.
WEAPON ADJUSTMENTS LIVE ON ALL PLATFORMS
Wingman
Rate of fire reduced from 3.1 -> 2.6 shots per second.
Skullpiercer Headshot damage multiplier reduced from 2.5 -> 2.25
Increased base hip fire spread and decreased the rate at which hip fire spread decays (shrinks back down).
Peacekeeper
Shotgun Bolt rechamber rate has been reduced for the Peacekeeper only.
Level 1 mitigation 10% -> 7.5%
Level 2 mitigation 20% -> 13%
Level 3 mitigation 25% -> 16%
Wingman and Peacekeeper availability has been reduced in all zone tiers.
Increased availability of energy weapons & ammo in all zone tiers.
Why no P2020 or Mozambique buffs?
We love y’all’s ‘Bique memes, so we’re hesitant to lose that :P
In all seriousness, our goal is to have a power curve of weapons. "Power curve" just means that some weapons will be weaker and more common, while others will be stronger and rarer. Some weapons are intentionally less powerful until fully purp’d with hopups and attachments, while other weapons on the bottom of the power curve are your early game, better-than-melee, but-gotta-upgrade-out-of-ASAP weapons. We’ve seen some good feedback from players about how to make these pistols more exciting without losing out on the goal above that we’re listening to. We’ll be continuing to watch player data and feedback and trying things out internally but for now, they’ll remain the same.
ADDITIONAL PATCH NOTES
Fixed some script errors that we identified were occasionally causing disconnects during matches.
Caustic occasionally causing disconnects while throwing is Ultimate.
Pathfinder occasionally causing disconnects when activating a Survey Beacon.
Players occasionally causing disconnects when removing an attachment.
Gibraltar occasionally causing disconnects when pulling up his Gun Shield.
Players occasionally causing disconnects when entering Spectate Mode.
ADDRESSING LEGEND BALANCE AND HITBOX FEEDBACK
TL;DR Our goal is to be able to have characters with different rig sizes, hitboxes and ability kits, and still have each character be roughly equal in power level, win rate and viability of pick.
For character balance, we look at a combination of things: pick rate, win rate, and character v. character matchup win rate among other metrics, and, of course, player feedback. The results between the 5 small and medium rig characters have been positive - they are all in a safe band of relatively equal power. Our large rig characters, however, are underpowered and their natural size appears to be a large contributor. We’re planning on adjusting the size of the large character hitboxes to better fit the model. If these changes are insufficient to bring these characters in line, we’re also considering a range of other changes such as natural damage reduction as well as individual kit power tweaks. Because many of these changes are significant, we want to make sure they are heavily tested before they go live, in the event they are necessary. Below is a quick overview on the roadmap of how we’re thinking about bringing large characters back in line.
Overall, we want to try to increase the power level of the large rig characters, before we consider large nerfs to everyone else. While we’ve made small adjustments, we’re hopeful that increasing the power of large rigs is healthier than nerfing everyone else.
LEGEND ADJUSTMENTS WE'LL MAKE AT THE START OF SEASON 1
Major balance changes:
Hit box size reductions and optimizations for Caustic, Pathfinder and Gibraltar
We’re better sizing hitboxes to character gear & model
Since these adjustments have a MAJOR impact on the game, we want to make sure there aren't any major bugs, so we didn’t want to rush them out
If these adjustments prove to be insufficient, we’ll consider additional adjustments during Season 1
Minor balance changes:
Caustic
Traps - Reduced cooldown to 25 seconds from 30 seconds
Traps - Increased radius and proximity radius by about 10%
Traps - Removed a 1 second delay on the smoke dealing damage to players
Pathfinder
Insider Knowledge - Increased the number of beacons in the world to 12 from 10
Lifeline
Care Package - Removed slight chance that level 4 armor and helmets will drop
Wraith
Into The Void - Cooldown increased from 20 -> 25 seconds
Bangalore
Double Time - Reduced move speed bonus to 30% from 40%
[Source: Reddit]