her strafe speed will be the most important thing imo. if she can strafe super fast and fly around in the air, she's going to have the same problems that Horizon has. but if she can't strafe fast, she's going to be food in the air.
it's also worth noting that her flight doesnt seem to cause a lot of visual clutter like Horizon's tactical, nor does it have the immediate height, so hopefully they've learned a few lessons going into Valk.
Her in-air strafe speed with jetpack is very low for that exact reason. She can disengage jetpack and re-engage it for a quick burst of movement, which makes you a little harder to hit, but this maneuver eats a good chunk of jet fuel.
Is there a reason the team decided against allowing Valk to fire her weapons in the air when using her VTOL jets? She already moves slowly enough in air from what I’ve heard for her to not be a huge nuisance. I feel like this decision doesn’t do justice to such an integral part of Valk’s kit by not allowing her to counter fire in the air unless she’s free-falling.
Absolutely, yes. This was a line in the sand we drew super early on.
Our theory is that one of the greatest things about Apex combat is that it *can be* (isn't always, but can be) proactive rather than reactive. What I mean by that is that in many other games, particularly games with a low TTK, combat comes down to how quickly you react to what the enemy does. Apex creates 3v3 engagements where you can predict to some degree what the enemy will do and get ready for it. This feels a lot more satisfying in the long run than just having amazing reflexes (and those reflexes of course still matter). A core element to enable proactive combat is what we call well defined front lines: you know where the enemy is relative to you and crossing the front line is a definite moment of escalation. We achieve this by, ironically enough, slowing movement down a lot. Titanfall 2 definitely never had well defined frontlines: everyone was just grappling, double jumping, and wall running all over the place.
So, what does this mean for Valkyrie? Well it means that her flying, which breaks a lot of our movement rules, cannot in and of itself be an aggressive moment. She can't fly out over a building you considered safe and start shooting you; she cannot just negate the cover you're behind by shooting at you from the air. That would break a lot of what makes Apex combat good. So instead we made her jetpack really loud and noticeable and required her to land and bring her gun up before she could reengage you. This allows her to reposition aggressively, yes, but also gives you time to get ready for her; make a plan what you'll do once her gun comes back up.
Can you comment on the Bangalore smoke canister no longer doing damage? What was the rationale there.
EDIT: This has been officially debunked by the Dev! Apologies if I contributed to a panic.
That's the first I hear of this! Where did you get this from?
Currently it still does damage. I just saw on Twitter that with Season 9 they will be nerfing Bangalore’s smoke so that it won’t damage enemies at all. This is a huge bummer because I frequently use it to test enemy shields and force them to hit cells, not to mention the occasional knockdown. There is even a tracker for hitting enemies with the smoke that I paid for… if this rumor is true then I’m actually pretty gutted. (And yes I know that it currently barely does any damage but it’s mostly about the intel gathering rather than agg)
This is definitely not true. If smoke canisters stopped doing damage that would be a bug we'd fix.
Did a reputable leaker say this? It sounds strange they'd nerf Bangalore like this.
Edit: nvm just saw Shiv comment on this. rip.
Pro-tip: there are no reputable leakers. They're all inconsiderate assholes who spoil the hard works of game dev teams for a little bit of clout.
Hi. Loba main here just slightly concerned why fixing the worst tactical in the game warrants a nerf to her only decent ability.
We're not just fixing it (bug fixing that is; there's still the occasional bug with it, but anecdotally from my testing it went from maybe 3-4 out of every 10 attempts failing currently to maybe 1 in a 100) but we're also buffing it: full movement speed while it's in the air, no slow down when you arrive. Honestly patch notes can't do it justice; you gotta feel it. I'm a Loba main on live and playtests are night and day.
Very excited!!! Can teammates opt in or out of the redeploy? And does she have 100% mid flight accuracy?
Yup! Teammates have to walk up to her and press use to hook into the ultimate (good luck herding cats ;P) and once you hit the Apex of the jump it transitions to a plane skydive with Valk as the jump master, meaning you can hold use to unhook and make your own way down.
Pretty sure no firing and it’s option flight, though she may just take off without you if you slow her down
Correct. No shooting while using jetpack; you can disengage and if you were high enough in the air, your gun can come out while you're dropping down, but you get the full in-air accuracy debuff; aka maybe you'll hit a stray bullet if you're spraying at the enemy, but don't count on it.
Great read. Please apply this philosophy to Horizon.
Wait for the patch notes ;)
Oh man, this is exactly what I was hoping for, she's got a lot of space for skill expression it sounds like. Not just lateral but vertical strafing, with the option to cut going up at any time. There's a ton of space for mix ups there as well as taking crazy flanking routes. Out if curiosity do we know what the volume of her engines is like?
LOUD
Great to know, one news site is spreading fake news
Never believe anything Titanfallblog says.
Wait so what's the point of the jetpack then? If it's too slow to manouvre to avoid enemy fire, and you can't accurately fight even while it's disengaged, the only use is for repositioning while not in combat? But since the br maps are so horizontal with very little vertically in most places, and it doesn't give you much horizontal movement inline most other movement abilities, it's just to enter a few buildings and get over a few ledges? So basically like the revenant passive? I'm not saying that's bad, it would probably be too overpowered otherwise, and it seems like this is a very well balanced legend from what I've heard so far, I'm just making sure I understand it right.
Play her on May 4th and let me know ;)
Daniel,
I really appreciate your engagement and I love what you guys do. Your comments below are my frustrations with Horizon at the moment:
“...she cannot just negate the cover you're behind by shooting at you from the air. That would break a lot of what makes Apex combat good.”
Personally I think removing strafe in the gravity lift, increasing the volume slightly, and maybe even going as far as removing the ability to heal while using the lift is in order. Maybe a phased approach would be best in that oder to monitor impact of each change to see if the next is necessary.
Thanks again and keep it up!
Yup, that's getting fixed.
I tend to avoid leaks in general because I dislike learning about stuff outside of official information, but during the hype of an upcoming season there is a lot of information that comes out at once. It's hard to discern what is true from what is not.
We (mod team) are pretty strict on allowing spoilers to respect the wishes of both the community that doesn't want to see them, and the team at Respawn. Apart from the stuff here, we aren't exactly sure what is allowed to be said and what was leaked under NDA (e.g., the incident with a streamer this week, which you undoubtedly know about).
This Bangalore rumor came from Twitter, and I was quite confused at to the motivation behind that - but I'm glad it's false.
Yeah unless it comes from a reputable news source or directly from one of us, I'd assume it's sus.
When does patch notes usually release?
Usually the day before the patch goes live or so.
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