[2020] This lifeline buff is wild haha

"You're better off dead, but I could use the cover."

Turns out Revenant leaked the Lifeline buffs ;P

My philosophy on fast heal is that it's not really something you OUTPLAY people with; it's just power. It's just there, and all you had to do was pick her. Whenever possible (and it's not always possible), I prefer putting power into active decisions. Like yeah Gibby gets fast res in dome, but he has to put down dome, which means he has to have been holding on to it for just that moment etc.

Right now Lifeline's climbing like crazy in win rate. I don't think there's room for another buff atm.

We talked about that before we even conceived of the drone rez, where it was just Lifeline's old rez but the shield lingers. I like this version better; if there's enemies looking at you when you finish the rez you SHOULD be downed. That's part of the strategy layer of the game.

Lifeline's the second most powerful character right now (after Wraith, catching up to her) and it's not been long since the patch; she's still climbing. I don't think we can give her anything else right now.

It all went up, up, up. Here's his win rate:

https://imgur.com/XELcNHg

(other legends obscured)

In pick rate he went from bottom 5 to top 4.

We'll keep our eyes on him, but from what I'm seeing his ult is finally doing what it should do, allowing teams to APE OUT.

This is a really, really, really complicated question. The best TLDR I can give is we look at pick rates and win rate broken down by skill buckets to see these trends; but every legend has meaningful pickrates in all skill buckets so in the end we do need to make sure they're balanced everywhere.

That's okay! Taking something away players are familiar with hurts immediately; giving them new power they have to learn to appreciate will only start to feel good gradually over time. This is pretty much precisely the feedback we expected.

I'm a little late to the party but all our data is broken out by game mode and skill buckets, so something like A&D or winter express would be filtered out

Nah, we separate data from LTMs. When I'm making statements about character's pick / win rates I'm talking only about Trios / Ranked.

Does not look like there's any room for a buff, sorry!

Which changes?

I do think Loba needs some love. We've seen pick/win rates fall off over time, with particularly her win rates on their way to the bottom. Not sure what we'll do yet. We have some thoughts.

There's no way to do this question in a quick answer, but I'll try! It's a bunch of us designers coming together and generally starting out by looking at the data to identify candidates for buffs/nerfs. We ALWAYS double-check the data with our own insight and analysis on how these characters actually affect the game. Then we think through what a good buff/nerf would be (which is a giant topic all on its own), pitch it to the group, and if no one has any good reasons not to do it, implement it and start playtesting it. Assuming nothing bad comes up during playtest, we ship it.

I'm trying but I'm getting so many messages and there's only so much time in the day when I also have to, you know, work work ;P

It uh did not? At least not really: his encounter win rate's much the same, his trios win rate went up a tiny bit but is almost back down to where it was before, and his pick rate is behaving exactly as before: insanely high at low ranks, pretty low at high ranks.

That said, it clearly made him more fun and gave up highlight reels without causing any real damage (that I can see at least; tell me if I'm wrong!), so that's still a win in my books.

Speaking as a former community manager myself, this isn't really something our colleagues in community can do; I'm a game designer and as such can answer (some) in-depth game design questions, but even I can only speak to a small fraction of game design (basically Legend design) and it's hard for me to keep up. I'm wary of setting expectations ("this guy will always reply!") that I can't live up to.

We'll never be able to get to all comments, but we're trying! Thanks! <3

I never had devs talk to me when I grew up playing games, and I wanted to ask them so many questions. Now that I'm on the other side of the looking glass it feels like the least I can do.

Hah! I wasn't aware of that change, my bad! That was definitely meant to raise her win rate. We've got another small buff for her in the works (hoping to lower the overall CD of her ult a bit) but honestly not sure it'll do much. What we'd really love to do is let people take more than 2 items out of her ult, but that will require some amount of UI work, which takes time (and the people who can do it are scheduled to work on other stuff). Not sure what and how much she'll get, but I definitely think she should have a Lifeline-like effect on her squad's chance of winning a game even if her encounter win rate isn't super high. Interestingly it's the other way around right now: her encounter win rate's pretty good but her overall squad winrate isn't.

It's funny what's considered a full rework in Apex! Coming from League where a full rework would pretty much reinvent the character I wouldn't have thought of the Mirage changes as a rework, but it makes sense: 2 out of 3 of his abilities were changed.

As for Octane, I'd say no rework: even if his squad win rate and high skill pick rate never come up, he's clearly a super fun character for casual play / highlight reels. That's a success in my books. Not every character has to be a sweaty tournament must-pick.

Ah, great, I'll use this comment to talk about one of my pet theories. I call it "if you can you must", and it's what we call a "degenerate pattern" in competitive multiplayer games. Here's how the pattern goes:

You put in a small incentive that gives the player meaningful power in a competitive environment, expecting them to use it sometimes / when it makes sense. The player discovers that doing X thing gives them power, and because they CAN use it all the time, they MUST use it all the time or they're not playing the character at their highest power level.

(Sidebar: this is actually one of the reasons why mana costs in League are such a liberating mechanic; I've never designed a character without them, and this is a big reason. By adding a resource cost to an activity you gate the payoff behind a cost; now it's no longer a no brainer to always do it whenever the game lets you, and you can design incentives without worrying about "if you can you must").

Let's apply "if you can you must" to your suggestion! Let's say every time you ping a purple item for your team we take 2s off your ultimate cooldown. Assuming (and just grant me this for this thought experiment) that we agree her ultimate has power, you're now introducing a situation where Loba is pinging every damn hammerpoint hopup and extended heavy mag even if no one in her team is running heavy; because "if you can, you must": not doing it is opting into a longer ult CD. The activity itself is a chore and not enjoyable, and what's worse it spams an important information channel (ping callouts) (and we've all played with that random who pings every white incap shield they come across), making that channel less useful.

You can absolutely design limiters into this ("every ping once every 10s does this") but now you're also asking the Loba player to track that cooldown.

Again, in your mind it was just "well if she sees a nice purple thing through a wall and pings it anyway, might as well give her something for it", but if you can, you must.

I think pings on items must have intrinsic value: that is to say, they must make your team more powerful by directing them to valuable gear. Something I could imagine would be having Loba automatically know what her teammates are running and what gear they currently have, and highlighting purple items that her team could use (as in, here's a purple extended heavy mag and your teammate is running a Wingman with no mag on it; highlight the purple mag as "valuable to your team"). There's other issues with this (the "game playing itself" problem is one of those), but if I made a change to her passive, it would probably be something like that.

But I think Loba already has all the right tools; it's just that the tools don't do enough yet. We've got nothing major planned for her for 6.0 (just an Ult CD adjustment), but if we need to do more work on her for 6.1 I'd look at ult range, number of items you can pick up through ult, or even crazier inventory stuff.

Those are all great examples, yes! I think the dropping armor on the ground thing got fixed before I started--IIRC EMP now also damages armor on the ground. I'm glad my design thought made sense! Whenever someone says "here's a nice thing that players can do" I immediately double check if it falls under this heading.

That does seem like a bug! I'm not working on this one, but I definitely heard chatter about it. My understanding is the design intent is that Loba can go anywhere, within reason: we might exclude "RETURN TO THE BATTLE" triggers and slip triggers (where you can't stand on a thing because it constantly pushes you off).

Thank you for the kind words! Do remember that game design is not a precise science; I've been doing it for nearly 8 years now, but I'm still constantly double-guessing myself: is this actually true or do I only think it's true because it would make a neat pattern if it was true.