It's possible! I don't know how that would be the case for LOBA; buffing Rampart's turret/wall will often require new anims (and that's one reason the buff for Rampart is so weak in 6.1; it's what I could make happen without anim work)

The L-Star is sorta a weird gun. It's in the LMG category but it isn't really a full LMG in terms of the stats, it's kinda "LMG-lite". We have future plans for the LSTAR, just nothing this patch.

It's total distance traveled, from the moment your grapple engages until the moment you drop back into normal sprint speed and are on the ground.

Yeah going up on a roof / 2nd floor balcony is definitely a use case where I reliably get around 10s CDs.

We have a change planned for red evo for 7.0, but it required a little networking work (don't ask; game dev is dumb) so we couldn't ship it in 6.1. The plan is to increase the damage required to go to red.

The teleport is very scary to me; if it ever becomes very powerful, it will immediately ruin the in-combat feel of Apex. Apex relies heavily on you having a good idea during combat where the enemy is relative to you and that they can't just suddenly disappear or worse, flank you with nothing you could have done about it. Between its slowness, the visible trail, and the loud sound Loba's tactical makes sure that doesn't happen, but take even one of those away and you're in danger town.

Yes, but height counts less than horizontal movement.

We got more buffs planned for her for 7.0, but they required animation changes so I couldn't put them into 6.1. Sorry!

If you're talking about the delay after you use EMP while not in drone, I fixed that but the fix didn't make it into 6.1. We'll either hotfix after 6.1 or at the very latest it'll be in 7.0.

So I'm not a legend designer, but we definitely hear this feedback a lot and I wanted to touch on it from my personal perspective (I do pew pews). WALL OF TEXT CAUSE I LIKE THIS STUFF SORRYYYYYY!

I personally think, when people hear "this character has a teleport", they get super excited and their brain goes straight to all the crazy powerful fun teleport shenanigans they can imagine pulling off. Then there's a natural, "oh.. it's like this?" when you play it, because it's toned down a lot from the crazy fantasy a lot of people have in their head. However, there are really good reasons we don't want a crazy teleport tactical on a character. Sometimes these reasons can be pretty subtle, so it's worth pointing them out in more detail.

First, I'm gonna define some shared vocabulary for this. When you are in a fight, there's multiple "layers" of combat your brain is engaging in. One of these layers is the "micro" layer, the second-to-second or fraction of a second type of stuff. This is things like AD strafing to avoid shots, or aiming and controlling recoil. This stuff tends to be mechanical and lives in the sort of "lizard brain" type of brain usage. You don't really consciously think about it much, it's so fast it's just muscle memory and instinct. Then, you get to a "macro" layer of combat. This is the space of combat decisions that are more conscious. Things like deciding to reposition and to where, should you should disengage, should you push, grenade usage and weapon choice, that sort of thinking. It's more of a gradient and you go between both layers constantly, but just bear with me for this abstraction. In the "micro" level of combat, you don't want someone who can easily teleport without much detriment to themselves. All the enemy has to do is press one button and then they drastically move, and as a player I have to figure out where they are now and re-acquire the target in my sights. This costs me precious time, and when players can kill each other in <1s, that fraction of a second can be a huge disadvantage. It's viscerally frustrating to be shooting at someone who just teleports away and there's nothing you can do about it, and it feels like one player has a huge advantage without needing a ton of skill to do it, which hurts competitive integrity. Everyone thinks of how fun it would be to teleport around and fight people, but people often fail to consider how much it sucks to fight against someone who is teleporting around you. Imagine being on controller and having someone teleport behind you with 1 button press, we've playtested stuff like this and it sucks. In my opinion, this is part of why it's important that Loba is so vulnerable when throwing and coming out of the teleport. It's meant to make it so you don't want to use it in the middle of that "micro" engagement like that. Onto "macro" level stuff. One of the really important aspects of Apex's macro level of combat encounters is predictability and readability. Example: When someone runs behind a corner, if it's been 5-8 seconds I know they can only have done a set number of things. They could have continued running to position A, they could have climbed on the roof to position B, they could have stopped and healed shields or reloaded, etc. The important things here are that 1) I can understand what options they have available, 2) I can make a prediction and react to it, and 3) when I round the corner and start checking things off, I can understand what they did. This is where teleporting (and hypermobility in general) can become really problematic. If Loba's teleport is hard to read or difficult to notice, then when Loba goes behind a wall she could be anywhere. I really cant reasonably predict where she could be, and if I round the corner and don't see her, I have mostly lost where she is. One of our previous legend designers called this loss of predictability and readability "brownian motion", which I like. It's subtle, but we really want to avoid that -- it makes combat feel muddy and unclear. You stop being able to reliably understand how the encounter is progressing; it feels like you're just reacting to things. It feels like there's no real room to improve or outplay on a macro level, and a lot of the combat depth just sort of breaks down. So, I think that's why we really really want Loba's teleport to be very clear and obvious. Players should be able to quickly and decisively identify that a Loba has teleported, and roughly from where to where, even in the heat of combat (psychology side note, if you want people to notice something while they are in "lizard brain" mode, you gotta REALLY REALLY BEAT EM OVER THE HEAD WITH IT. Our brains are very good at focusing on specific things and losing everything else).

Anyway, none of this is perfect, and we don't nail these concepts every time, but there's some of the reasoning for why things are the way they are. Pls no "BUT WHAT ABOUT X OR Y!? CANT YOU JUST Z, YOU DINGUS!?". I'd love to have design conversations with folks but trying to debate/converse with the innumerable faceless void of the internet is just impossible. Thanks for reading!

Mannnnn, way to sneak this in while I was writing my reddit thesis over there!

You're not flying all the way out of a fight; at a 10s grapple you're generally still within sprint and fire range. The issue with the 15s grapple was you could swing two zip codes over, heal up real quick, and come back. This is all theoretical though and you could be right, in which case we'll adjust.

I am once again about to talk about stuff that I'm not a designer for, because I feel like it you're not my mom. (u/DanielZKlein is a better source of truth).

This is complicated by a number of factors.

We are intentionally a gun game with characters, not the other way around. We try to avoid making legends with in combat "just press Q and do damage" abilities for a number of reasons. We want to use legends to explore other aspects of battle royale, so that they can be differentiated and have a unique playspace. Think about Loba, we want a loot focused character, that seems like an interesting axis to touch!

However, it has just turned out that almost all of these interesting axes of power are just not nearly as powerful as things like hitbox size, mobility, and combat utility. In my opinion, the game has sort of resisted new play patterns in a way that I wouldn't have personally predicted. Note that legends take a long time to make -- if I remember correctly we were playtesting Rampart before the game even shipped, or very close to it. We see how the game is playing out and are making adjustments, but reacting to it properly takes time.

That being said, I would actually personally contend that it's ok to have legends in these playspaces, even if those playspaces aren't super competitively viable. Sure, Loba probably isn't gonna be in ALGS anytime soon, but there is a very real and important group of players who really like Loba. They love doing the loot thing, it really helps them with the way they wanna play the game, etc. It's not like no one plays her in general, just not at the tip top of Pred lobbies. Now, of course you don't want to feel like you're making a bad decision and hurting yourself for choosing the legend you like the most, so we are always working to improve these areas. But, sometimes it's worth improving legends in the way that best benefits the people who actually connect with that character and really want to play them, instead of shoehorning them into the spaces we know are useful at the competitive level so they'll be picked cause they're strong. Imo, it's important to keep character identity, even if that identity is naturally weaker. (To a degree).

The issue with the L-STAR's recoil pattern is that it's this squiggly S shape. That means it has constant horizontal recoil one way or another. If you are close enough, that doesn't matter, but if you're farther away it feels like you can't hit anything. Just tuning the multipliers on the recoil won't solve this, so it probably needs a new pattern. The havoc was the same way and we got a new pattern in for it in 6.0 if I remember correctly.

Yup, until you've slowed down to weapons lowered sprint speed

Yup, we're aware! No timeline for a fix but we're working on it. Wall climbing seems to clear it.

I used to play a lot more, but I still watch a lot of professional SC2!

You can't just give people free game design courses, Bocek. Whatever will Full Sail do?

Well said!

I am gonna push Loba's loot power some more next patch, I hope, but there's only so much you can do short of "press button to get full gold equip and a Kraber/R-99" to punch that power up.

But yes, the main reason we can't just bring everyone up to Lifeline/Wraith/Pathfinder's level (Gibby isn't anywhere near their level of power) is that we're then stepping away from making a gun game and approaching making a character game. Not that that's a bad thing by itself! I personally think Overwatch is a super fun game, and it's an FPS I've been returning to since it released (Moira main here btw if you needed another reason to dislike me ;P), but it's not the game we're making here with Apex.

You can do serious damage to the fun of a game by making changes that individually don't seem broken. Like say we made it so Caustic could shoot his own barrels while they're still in the air for an instant airburst that leaves a cloud of gas where they exploded. Cool! Only now he's pushing you with essentially three gas grenades, and his ability to use his tactical well trumps your ability to position and aim well. Say we give Loba the ability to teleport quickly and silently and suddenly you're losing fights not because the other team planned an ambush or executed better, but because they saw you and reacted to you by putting one of their members behind you. And of course you'll say cool we can counter that with OTHER abilities, but now we're talking about a game of ability vs ability rather than gun vs gun.

There's still a lot of cool sh*t we can do that only reinforces the supplemental role of abilities in the game, and yes, there's some power we can give to the worst performing legends without breaking the nature of Apex, but it's not enough power to bring them up to the likes of Wraith.

Wraith is uniquely useful in our game: all three of her abilities have clear in-combat uses ACROSS ALL SKILL BANDS. They're also all uniquely useful both for selfish and selfless use cases. It's so rare to have abilities like her passive that are useful to people who are entirely new at the game as well as pros in the ALGS. We can't change that without breaking the pattern of Wraith's abilities, and we really don't want to do that. I personally think Wraith deserves to be one of the strongest Legends in the game because she IS uniquely well designed and cool. My issue is more with "should she live at +8% avg win rate or +4%". (She's at the former; I'm trying to bring her closer to the latter)

That's a fun story, and one I don't have all the parts of yet (I'm not involved in the effort to fix the bug, and I don't wanna, heh, bug the people who are right now), but I'll give you what I know.

The first thing you need to realize is this never happened in our internal playtests. Not once.

My understanding is QA was aware of it, but only became aware of it at the last second and there wasn't time to fix it. Plus we didn't fully understand the frequency of the bug.

So my understanding of the bug right now is that it happens because we put a new animation in for an upcoming thingie that wasn't shipping in 7.0. So we have a process that allows us to keep testing the new thing and then strip it out for the patch that won't contain it. The system is called DFS, which I'm sure stands for something technical and professional, but we just call it "don't f*cking ship".

It turns out that in this one type of case, stripping an asset (the animation) out via DFS did NOT do the same thing as stripping it out manually. Somehow (and smarter people than me are figuring out how and making it so this won't happen again) stripping it out via DFS broke an animation transition, causing the bug.

This is not an excuse! We clearly should have been testing on a build that's identical to 6.1 sooner and caught this. It's just an attempt to explain "how could this make it through QA". They can only report what they see, so this is very much not their fault.

Ah sh*t, that's my bad for not tracking it. Yes, it is fixed. Sorry! (I gotta get better about writing jira tickets for everything I do, even if it's a relatively small fix; this one was a single number I had to adjust down, after half an hour of hunting for the right number)