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"You're better off dead, but I could use the cover."
Turns out Revenant leaked the Lifeline buffs ;P
"You're better off dead, but I could use the cover."
Turns out Revenant leaked the Lifeline buffs ;P
Lol!!
You know... as a Lifeline/Bang main... I was so angry at the change to fast heal. Then... after using Lifeline a ton of matches in my Diamond games, I realized how much better this is as far as the direction for her. I've successfully countered late third parties.
It is interesting because you essentially turn a 0v2 back into a 1v2 by simply not having to res + using shield as cover. Has clutched me many times. It does suck that her value comes when teammates are knocked, which really messes up her 1v1 scenarios with the low profile change.
If i had a suggestion that other reddiors have thought of too, it was FAST HEAL during drone attachment + no more heath limit to drone for the team.
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.
Might be OP, but lifeline's shield should stay up for 1 second after the rezz. Cuz right now everyone who is rezzed gets insta knocked and this new ability isn't helping too much.
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.
If you don’t mind me asking, how’s Revenant doing in win/pick rate? I’ve seen a lot of conflicting opinions on him since the range buff, but I’d take data over that any day. I personally don’t have anything for or against him, but it seems the main opinions are “he’s everywhere” among the higher bracket players and “he’s B-tier” amongst the lower bracket.
It all went up, up, up. Here's his win rate:
(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.
Hi, I have a really important question: Do you guys account for skill bias in character pick rate/win rate? For example, if good players are more prone to picking wraith it will provide her a much higher win rate regardless of the characters true power. I'd love to hear more about that.
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.
Brilliant assessment of fast heal. And to think people were saying this was a nerf...
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.
With the current drop rate of shield cells and meds, she's a mandatory pick for winning armed and dangerous evolved. Does that skew the data at all?
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
With the current drop rate of shield cells and meds, she's a mandatory pick for winning armed and dangerous evolved. Does that skew the data at all?
Nah, we separate data from LTMs. When I'm making statements about character's pick / win rates I'm talking only about Trios / Ranked.
Hmm nice to know about this data, i take it that lifeline's low profile will not be going away anytime soon then?
Does not look like there's any room for a buff, sorry!
This probably won't get answered but... the Loba changes, where they meant to be quality of life or something small to push her stats up?
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.
Uhh I have a question if you don't mind. So how do you guys decide on nerfs and buffs? Like what makes you think "we should buff mirage" or "we should nerf pathy". And who thinks of the actual nerf/buff?
(also tell the people that design heirlooms that their ideas are epic lol)
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.
Bro whatever you do don’t stop talking to the community we f**king love this!
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
Hey I appreciate the new buffs, and its good to see lifeline getting better, I personally really like the octane buff, but did it really help his issue according to the data?
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.
Posts like this is why I think it's sad you no longer have a community manager on reddit. These civil in depth explanations are great!
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.
You guys talking with us and being transparent with us is honestly one of the best things about this subreddit. People can voice their opinion and actually get heard by the people working on this game we all love. Keep doing what you're doing, we appreciate it!
We'll never be able to get to all comments, but we're trying! Thanks! <3
Hahah you don’t gotta reply to all of them, but it’s amazing to have you guys actually discuss the actual game with us.
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.
I was referring to a adjustment made to her and ultimate accelerants. It says 20% for Loba and 35% for other legends
Also I'm trying to raise her win rates, trust me I am trying I just gotta git gudder
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.
I see, is there a chance that he could get a full rework like mirage amy time soon? Maybe that could solve his problem?
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.
If I may make a suggestion? Ok so one of the reasons I really like Loba is for her scouting capabilities like Bloodhound but it's with loot instead of other legends.
I feel like whenever I'm not Loba I don't really see others use her passive to let the team know where all the good loot is. When I play her I try to use a sniper scope to scan as much as possible .
Maybe there's a way to incentives players pinging out loot and make it easier? (Idk tho, it's really easy enough as it and now that I'm typing it's more of a player issue than a design issue?) I will say pinging 2 items next to each other is impossible with her(while scoped with a sniper at range) as the pings will overlap each other.
Pings having more precision... Maybe a small bonus to CD for every item pinged?
Alternatively you could always just buff her teleport however I don't think that'll be the best move for the overall health of the game or herself.
Her passive remain the same distance but able to ping long distance items without need of long range optics and ping them with more precision.(Maybe a CD reduction for every item purple pinged or x amount pinged but idk that might be too much)
I'm just brainstorming here lol
Edit: Maybe have a thing where Loba can ask or see what her teams preference of loot is.
This is very cool btw thank you and the rest of Respawn for the hard work.
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.
This was an interesting comment - thanks for the "if you can, you must" idea.
We've seen this exact pattern occur several times through Apex's life, particularly in high-end play where money is on the line.
- Unlimited zipline jumping
- Lifeline heal drone camping outside zone
- Super long Wraith portals that go around in circles to avoid late-game zone damage
- Caustic gas traps spammed like grenades
- Abuse of golden res shields to avoid elimination while knocked
- Dropping your armor to avoid damage from Crypto's EMP
All of these were "glitch in the matrix" type things, not intended design. They would have been fine as occasional tactics, but because they conferred an advantage, they swiftly became the dominant meta until they were patched out of the game.
Pro players can't not do stuff, even if it's cheesy or abusive. That's leaving money on the table.
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.
Wow that's a eye opener. It's kinda like how Wraith for awhile was the must pick due to her hurtbox and tactical. At a high level of play you was really pressured to go Wraith or lose. (My highest is plat so I don't think it ever applied to me but I get the concept. Also great job on the Wraith changes she feels so much more fun to play now!
I see now why the intent is too strengthen current tools rather than introduce new ones into the mix. Hearing the thought process behind game development is fascinating especially on the never ending battle of balance.
Also out of curiosity in World's Edge I think Loba can teleport anywhere that was added in S4 but S3 surfaces are a no go, does that sound about right?
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.