Love the idea of a toggle for fences. Not sure how much it'll actually show up in play in terms of when do situations where this would be useful manifest, but even if it's a once every 20 games thing it could still be super cool.

Picking up ult and gaining shield passively are both okay in terms of making the character clearly more attractive selfishly, but the problem is that Wattson has a very high winrate; one that climbs aggressively with skill as well. Right now she's barely seen, even at the highest level, and even in comp she's fallen off from her near-100% pick rate peak, but it doesn't take very much to push an already strong character from "never seen" to "everywhere and a pain in the butt".

Right now the winrate top 5 breaks down as Horizon > Wraith > Gibby > Lifeline > Wattson. If we put meaningful power into Wattson it's quite likely we'd make a not-so-fun to play character a must pick for people trying to win. That's not great.

Power does make a character more fun, in that winning is fun, but we really need to either find non-power impacting ways to make Wattson more fun (I think the toggle on fences has the potential (hah! See what I did there? POTENTIAL) to do that because you may also screw yourself by turning them off at the wrong time). If all we can find to make her more fun are power impacting changes then that power has to come out of her kit somewhere else.

Nope! Win rates change over time, and especially so for new legends. She released into top 3, has been climbing since and is now the strongest legend in the game. And her win rate is still going up!

Fun fact: after we nerfed her tactical, her winrate went up even more.

And by fun fact I mean depressing fact that defies explanations.

Not a big fan of mirror picks countering each other. It's part of the game for caustic and probably too late to undo there, but I'd rather not introduce other mechanics like that.

I never said Wraith is too weak! She's still number 2 in pretty much every respect, and there's still a wide gulf between her and the rest of the field in encounter win rate. If anything she's still too strong, but now there's two people that are too strong at the top, if that makes sense.

I don't think this would do much, but I wanna jump on this comment to talk about how we think about updating/making a character. What a lot of people here do, understandably, is start from ideas they think might be cool. A lot of junior game designers do that too. You can tell someone's in that pattern if most of their suggestions start with "what if". I call this what if design.

In contrast, as you talk to more experienced designers, you start seeing a problem-first approach emerge. Before we even think about anything we could do, we try to diligently identify and quantify the problem: what exactly is wrong, and how bad is it. This is a problem-first approach and it tends to be somewhat underwhelming because very often once you look at the problem and its impact, the right conclusion to come to is "there's no need to do anything; the problem isn't actually that bad".

Where I'd like us all (including myself; I suck at this) to get is goals-first design. Before we even look at individual problems or entertain cool sounding ideas, we decide what the goal of any segment of systemic design is. For instance, what is the goal of balancing legends? Sure, part of it is to bring down stuff that's frustrating, that feels unfair; part of it is to make it so there aren't any legends where your team goes "well if you pick legend X, you're clearly just trolling" because that's also bad for the game. But in a game that understates its legend design (appropriately! Apex is a gun based game) those will be rare; so what really IS the goal of updating the legend meta?

In my opinion it's force multiplication. We've got a ton of incredibly talented people working on this game, making amazing things: cool looking models, animations with personality and flair, stunning VFX, immersive sound, fascinating lore, and really amazing skins. But when the meta funnels a large percentage of the player base into a very small number of legends, a lot of that work is left under-appreciated. This means in the future, whenever we have the entirely hypothetical choice of making a Wattson or a Wraith skin (and I say hypothetical because that's not how this decision process works, but bear with me) we have to ask ourselves: do we want to make something cool for Wattson that a few players see, or do we want to make something cool for Wraith that nearly everyone will see? One of those will be way more worth the time invested, right?

We can't have everyone picked at the same rate; we can't even get close to it. Some characters like Crypto and Wattson will always be niche picks because of their cerebral approach to a pretty fast paced game. We should try to get easy wins on them where we can, but I don't think a large effort to make Crypto one of the most played legends would be worth the time and person power expended. I do want to make Wattson more fun, but I want to be realistic what our goals are: maybe get her pick rate up ever so slightly while making her a lot more fun for the people who already enjoy her playstyle. What I really don't want to do is put so much power into her that she becomes perceived as a must pick and people who really don't enjoy her feel obligated to run her if no one else on their squad does. I think that would make the game less fun for everyone.

Sorry for the long post, haven't had enough coffee yet to make my thoughts short ;P

Really want to avoid doing that again. We've got some other ideas of where we can hit her power, and honestly her win rate bump after the nerf may just stem from the fact that her pick rate also decreased a bit (so casual Horizon players, who tend to be less good at her, may have abandoned her a bit, leaving us with more hardcore Horizon players). We've got to let that settle for a few weeks.

Our theory internally right now is that she's too safe with the tactical. She can use it in so many situations to get out of trouble, and most frustratingly, she can sit atop the tactical and use a battery while A/D strafing faster than she could on the ground. We're looking at move speed while on her tactical and acceleration while on her tactical to see if we can at least turn her into a bit more of a sitting duck if she chooses to sit on top of it. Not sure how that's going to turn out yet.

But really if anything the Pathfinder changes have taught us that attacking the hitboxes to bring a character's win rate under control without making them less fun is a promising route to try. I'd like us to do this more often.

Horizon has the highest trio win rate in the game (although not by much; her and Wraith and Gibby now make up the runaway grouping at the front of the field). Wraith still beats her in encounter win rate by 2%, but encounter win rate is still a very stark picture (Wraith is at 57%, Horizon at 55%, and the next highest legends are Octane and Wattson at 51%). We want to be more careful with encounter win rate because it is so open to interpretation. I think when we speak of the power of a legend, we speak of their trio win rate now.

And I've said this before, but I talk a lot about power here because a lot of the people posting here have wildly varying ideas of what is and isn't actually effective in the game, but we do not base our balance decisions exclusively on data. Data shows us where to look, but then we apply our own judgment.

Absolutely, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't eventually a legend with passive shield regen, but again: this is a pure power up with no implications on gameplay for Wattson or her enemies. Wattson is already very powerful, so just handing her more passive power isn't the answer.

That may play a very small role. She went from second most picked to third most picked, from 15.4% to 13.5%. That's a small enough drop that I don't think this alone explains it.

It was really hard, absolutely! The team did an amazing job on making an AOE vacuum, the most dreaded type of CC ability, and not make it dominate the game over gunplay. In playtest the ability vacillated wildly between absolutely useless and way too strong. I think one of the great insights that helped it most was that the AOE doesn't need to hold you or continue to move you into the middle very strongly if there's one very strong initial pull, so the best case situation was nailing them with the initial implosion and after that, the black hole got to be a nuisance that slightly warped your pathing. It came in super hot too; we massively increased the initial pull in literally three days before the patch was made because we were worried it wasn't doing enough. We made the conscious decision to rather risk shipping something OP than risk shipping another underwhelming-at-release character. I'm very glad we did; we likely need to take a little power out of her now, but it's nothing like the follow up work we had to do on the likes of Loba and Rampart, where we were way too conservative. Eventually we'll figure out how to do this live game thing!

Character design is hard and I suck at this too. Wait til you see the Legend I worked on (it's still gonna be a bit). We all do our best, and it's much easier to set goals for existing content than for new content.

And we're not done making sick skins for her :D

Pinging her pylon should work! I remember hooking this up last year! Are you sure you can't ping it?

Thank you! I'll look at that.

Yeah that's a very good point! We've been struggling to find a good buff for Revenant, and I don't think we've properly discussed just shrinking his hitboxes to give him power without making him more frustrating. I'll bring it up this Wednesday in our balance round table.

That doesn't sound like a bad idea from a standpoint of clarity and consistency, but I would temper your hopes that it'll make a meaningful impact on win rate. Individual legend vs legend interactions never have a meaningful win rate impact. They make sense to us because we like to tell ourselves stories about the game, but the situations in which Horizon even faces a Crypto are so rare (even if Crypto had a higher pick rate), nevermind situations in which Crypto has his ult ready, is thinking about using it, can get the drone in position in time, etc.

Yeah, I understand that's not very easy to do because of the way his higher climb works. I do want to spend some time investigating this at some point because I agree it's dumb that everyone but Revenant can wall bounce. I just wouldn't expect it to have a meaningful impact on pick and win rate; the amount of players who knows about wall bounces, nevermind can pull them off reliably, is so incredibly low.

This is still correct! Had been lowest pick rate forever; recently Rampart dropped even lower than Wattson. Win rate has been consistently top 5 (right now she's in the 4th highest spot).

I don't think that comparison fully works and you're conflating having health with not having bleed through, but emotionally you're not wrong. Both defensive legends, one gets to have on demand blocking health, the other doesn't. I would point out that armshield is a reactive ability while amped wall is a proactive setup ability, but I don't think that'll lead us to a productive conversation.

Instead I want to say that I agree with this complaint and have added 45 health to Rampart walls while they're building. Should be in 8.0, but no guarantees. I believe there's still too much delay in the ability for her to use it purely reactively, but I also think that reactive vs setup isn't a black and white question but rather a spectrum, and she could do with a little power closer to the reactive side of that spectrum.

Walls while building will follow the ally player paradigm: they will stop bullets except for sniper bullets, which will pass through (like they do with players). Once the wall is fully built it'll behave exactly like it does now. This is so that in case I am wrong and Rampart players do find they can reactively plop down a wall when someone with a Kraber is looking at them, the wall isn't a trump card. (To be absolutely clear: if you're behind a building wall and an enemy shoots you with a Kraber, the bullet will destroy the wall and then do FULL DAMAGE to you). Every other weapon you should be able to put out 45 damage fast enough to destroy the wall and then take the fight to Rampart. (Why 45 btw? So one Wingman shot can take it down; would suck to have it be 50 health where it would require a second wingman shot just to do the remaining 5 health)

Yep, we're aware. Thank you!

I don't think we have, but that's probably because it was a much shorter duration ability to begin with. This is a good suggestion! I'll bring it up to the team.

I think I talked about this before, but the reason we killed old Mirage ultimate was that we all agreed invisibility you can use offensively had no place in Apex Legends. Sorry, that aspect is not coming back!

Horizon's the most powerful Legend in the game now. I don't think we'll be talking about Horizon buffs for a while ;P

(We did try the attach to surfaces to push gadgets on a different prototype once! It was a big placeable that would do what you said: attach to any surface and push people away from it. You could reactivate it to switch to pulling in. It was... uh... chaos and not very promising in terms of doing good things for the game ;P If you ever got to use it near a map edge where you could push people off the map, it would win the game for you; everywhere else it just turned combats into chaos.)