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Probably will be situational. She’ll be a sniper magnet in busy areas sitting still like that. But during end game, on high ground, she could be very effective.
Grenades are truly the bane of Rampart's existence. If a Rampart's fortified with walls and her HMG, just throw a few nades her way and she's gonna have to go and rebuild somewhere else.
Now Rampart + Wattson, that might be a scary combo...
Sounds resonable enough to be true.
When have we ever been reasonable?
Kinda off topic, but how do I feel about Loba in the current end of S5? Anything happening for her in S6?
Also I got to plat 4 with her! Despite my teammates saying she's a throw pick I make it work
Loba's definitely weak. She started the season off strong and fell to the weakest spot by the end; that seems to be the way most of our new legends behave. We've got a little bit of a buff coming for her in 6.0, but it's not much. We're somewhat limited technically by what we can do; for instance, if we wanted to let you take 3 or 4 items out of her ult, that would require UI work, so that's not happening any time soon.
Can Rampart, in your opinion, be used aggressively (or at least favor proactive plays) by like, giving some cover in an open area and make more risky pushes possible?
I'm asking because of course the first thing anyone would think when looking at her is people camping like crazy with her + Wattson/Caustic and the likes... and while I don't think camping is prominent in Apex (at least until you reach higher levels), the thing I like about the game is that despite being a BR (a genre that usually bores me to death) it still felt hectic and fast-paced. Now, a good part of that is thanks to the movement, high TTK and good gunplay, but another component are movement abilities and stull like portals to relocate and make normally unpushable locations more accessible. I wouldn't want the "camp-y" legends to reach a critical mass and take all this away so I felt like asking... do you think this apparently very passive kit can be used the opposite way too?
NGL, I got kinda scared when you named her along with Wattson lol.
Honestly, Apex is so much about the guns that any legend can be used any way you like, as long as your aim's good. I've absolutely seen Ramparts in playtest go ham and push all the time, only throwing down walls when they need to heal (after a while when you see the orange glow of Rampart's shield wall that's aimed toward the enemy, you know to back off). I have no idea how she's going to be used at the pro level tho. I think there might be too much setup for her HMG to be truly effective, but f*ck if I know. We'll see!
Will Crypto’s drone destroy A-Walls/HMG?
I didn't work on Rampart myself, but I'm pretty sure it either destroys or disables them. I'd have to boot up my work desktop to check, and it's Saturday and I'm too lazy ;)
So does that mean the amped wall can only take a certain amount of damage?
Or that she'll be under too much fire and needs to relocate to a better vantage point?
You'll get more detail soon, but yeah, the wall has health! The amped shield part has a separate health bar from the base of the wall; the shield goes away pretty quickly under fire, but you'd need to sink a lot of bullets into the base of the wall to destroy that. The most important thing to internalize right now though is this: while it's building (there's a short animation where it goes from compact to fully built) a single bullet will destroy the wall, just like Caustic barrels as of 5.1; this means she can't just throw it down for instant cover in a firefight. She was crazy busted when she was able to do that.
Hold on.
You work at Respawn now?!
Welp, good to see you again even if its on a different industry.
Im still salty for the Kayn treatment tho.
I'm pretty sure I'm still in the same industry? I think we make video games? ;P
And thank you! <3
Ahh I see. Well I and others will continue the battle to improve her stats. She's fun to play with, and the jump drive is fun. I'm betting the buff in S6 is increased Black market radius
I wanted to do that originally, but there were surprising technical challenges to it, so I had to icebox that change for now.
Because her ultimate and passive ranges are linked (if you can see a purple with her passive, you can pick it up with her ultimate) we need to spawn loot in her passive's radius. We're very careful about spawning any loot we don't need to normally for performance reasons, so just giving her a little more radius could actually have pretty bad effects on game stability and performance, especially if there's a lot of Lobas in a given game. We're investigating how much we can do there, but for the time being her ult radius won't change; it may never do if it turns out that fixing the performance implications would be too difficult.
So speaking hypothetically here, if this covid situation ever calms down or comes to an end, is a 3 or 4 item boutique buff much more possible? Also as a Loba main, I'll be kinda sad her season 6 buff will be tiny :(
Working from home isn't stopping us from making specific types of changes; it just slows down how quickly we can get to them. I do want to take another look at how her boutique is gated. I haven't thought this through yet, but 3-4 items is the baseline I'd experiment with. I've also considered things like letting you take any amount of a given ammo type or heal type out of it (like if you pick up any heavy ammo, you can grab all of it that's in range). Important to note that we haven't even played around with any of this yet, so please don't expect it in the near future. I'll see how she does in 6.0 and we'll decide what to do based on that.
I thought loot was spawned at the beginning of the game? Or is it just the loot is decided?
It's complicated! Video games trick you a lot into believing stuff is always there when it's really only there when you look at it. We very carefully spawn loot only where we need to. I think it may or may not be decided in the beginning of the game (I never did a deep dive into the system; way before my time) but we're definitely only spawning the actual in-game entities when we absolutely need to.
What about emp?
;)
EMP will strip the amped shields off her walls and disable SHEILA for a good long time.
I dont want to be insulting but that sounds like a bit of a mistake. I think the industry term is technical debt? When you're designing a champ shouldn't it be a priority to ensure you have as many levers to tune for balance?
Oh of course! In an ideal world, everything is always tunable. We don't live in an ideal world now (see: the news ;P). One thing people learn real quick when they go into game dev is that everything is tradeoffs, all the time. Of course we would have preferred a solution that we can freely tune, but that wasn't possible with how the game is set up. Do we delay Loba for I don't know half a year so we can redo how loot is spawned, not knowing what other knock-on effects this will have, just so we have a freely tunable lever? Personally that's not the tradeoff I would have taken.
I meant the UI part specifically, but I totally understand the sentiment
Yeah, UI work is hard too. Ideally we would have created a UI that smoothly scales with however many slots we want. FWIW we are working on some stuff internally that should unlock us in future and let us build UI much faster. Compared to my previous gig at League of Legends I can tell you it's amazing that designers can build UI at all (Kayn's passive meter was a nightmare to get in game), but it's still really hard.