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The fact that he can use the survey beacons and the res beacons instantly (if I read the notes correctly), makes it even more insane.
The fact that he can use the survey beacons and the res beacons instantly (if I read the notes correctly), makes it even more insane.
That's correct!
If you don't mind my asking, why did y'all decide to re-enable the EMP's slow on teammates? Did your data show that it was too powerful of a pushing tool? Was it specifically to weaken the Rev-Crypto combo?
(I replied to you in the other thread already; sorry if that's too much heckling hahaha)
The Crypto/Wraith/Rev combo definitely made us take a look at this, but overall we're trying to come up with a better feel for when team slowing abilities are / aren't appropriate. I talked about this a bit more over here: https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/ibls99/season_6_patch_notes/g1wpufz/
F for Pathfinder, grapple CD is the same...
Trust me, if I could justify it at all I'd give the happy robot a much shorter grapple cooldown, I would. But I really, really can't. Here's some spaghetti for you:
Those are what we call the encounter win rates for different legends across all skill levels. The formula is:
(times a given legend knocks down any other legend) / (times a given legend is knocked down)
The purple line at the top is Wraith. The grey below her is Pathfinder. Do you see how far separated those two are from the rest of the field? We don't need everyone to be at 50%, but those two continue to be such gross outliers, we really can't put any combat power back into them right now. Sorry friend!
May I ask which one is Caustic? I'm just a Caustic main & wanna know where my favourite Gas Daddy is :3
I don't wanna give too much data away, sorry! I'm showing this mostly as a demonstration of just how much better than everyone else Wraith and PF are.
To what miserable git does the brown line at the bottom belong?
Bloodhound. Hence the buffs this patch.
I love the gun balances, sniper rifle ammo capacity really needed to be improved.
Im definitely running a triple take this season, the buffs it tell me that people are gonna hate it
Hemlock will become a mid-long range laser with these buffs. Im glad its finally getting some love
I would like a dmg or ammo buff to the sentinel, but it seems like the disruptor buff is all I got.
They removed the choke hop up! And gave the guns that used it an on/off switch for it.
It seems like gold armours are objectively better than red evo. Shame, I loved the dynamic between the two tiers.
Edit: as u/RocKiNRanen said, the dynamic between gold and evo armours still exist(all armours incl gold have been reduced equally)
I'm still looking at the Sentinel, but I wanted to see how sniper ammo adjustments, and more importantly the new evo only meta and lower armor, would change things. I'm expecting snipers in general to be more used since you actually get meaningful benefit from poking people even if you don't kill someone (e.g. the charge rifle has gotten more play since evos were introduced for damage farming purposes). It's high on my "next guns to potentially tough, watch closely" list, don't worry!
Also yes, Hemlok and Triple Take are gonna be extra spicy :)
Could you possibly tell us what the dev team thinks about Caustic in his current state? Whilst he's not that great in the early/mid game, the Gas Daddy is a MENACE in the final rings of ranked. There's been alot of community outcry regarding his power level, and so I'm wondering if he will get any changes.
The last time I heard a community outcry over Caustic was before we put the new functionality in that you can destroy his barrels by shooting them anywhere while they're inflating. My personal feeling was that addressed a lot of the "Caustic is throwing barrels at me like grenades" issues. Do you still feel he's frustrating to fight against?
24:18... can bloodhound see health bars???
That's an experimental feature I'm working on at the moment, wasn't supposed to be in this video! Sorry!
It's not had a lot of playtesting (I think half a test's worth so far), so there is absolutely no way of telling if this will ship or not. The hope would be to put it on BH and Crypto, if it turns out to be an acceptable feature. That's a big if. Most experimental stuff we work on doesn't ship.
(And to be extra-clear: this will NOT be in patch 6.0)
Is there going to be any re-work coming to Lifeline, regarding her tactical revive? I was almost certain something was going to be done in this season. I think her tactical revive is great in theory, but almost everyone I've talked about it with seems to agree that there needs to be some sort of cooldown.
Is there any objective way of gauging this? Obviously our comments are just anecdotes. I was just surprised to see no mention of it.
Oh really? I didn't get that impression at all, and I've not heard it brought up anywhere before. I'm pretty sure Lifeline's revive passive is in a great spot. As always, I can be wrong, but I'd love to see a better case for why it's problematic. The very fact that it requires one of your teammates to be down limits how powerful it can be.
The overlay they added when Bloodhound scans at 24:17 is brutal. Maybe that's just because they added in so many dummies to show it off, but holy hell you can't see a damn thing.
That's an experimental feature that wasn't supposed to be in the video :x My bad, sorry!
I understand the desire to ensure a balanced legend pool and can easily empathize with his frequent repositioning mid-fight being too powerful, But grappling was the mechanic I loved most about this game. Just trying fun grapples or aerials was a huge draw, and with the current cooldown I'm reluctant to ever waste a grapple out of fear I'll be shot in the open with no escape options. Have you considered a cooldown that's not fixed? For example:
- A shorter grapple has a slower cooldown (to mitigate mistakes where you barely travel or get caught on something immediately)
- A shorter cooldown if you're not being shot at or shooting? I guess I'm trying to think of ways to ensure he can't constantly reposition during a fight, but would allow players to enjoy him during the non-combat portions of the game
Personally I've basically dropped him from my rotation (which I guess was the goal?) but especially when I'm just trying to mess around with friends, being able to play him again without feeling guilty or self indulgent would be a lot of fun. I'm personally not experiencing unparalleled success with him recently, I've basically just playing Octane and Caustic
Thanks for a fun game!
To be clear: the goal wasn't for PF mains to drop him.
I joined Respawn in January, and pretty much the most discussed thing around Legends at the time was what to do about Pathfinder's grapple. All your arguments were brought up: he's clearly iconic for the game, and using the grapple is one of the most enjoyable and cool things to do. It provides a long, deep learning curve and creates incredible highlight reels.
But it was also really, really busted. (It shipped with, what, an 8s cooldown?)
One of the biggest things Respawn addressed when making Apex was what they call the Brownian motion problem in TF2. Think of it like this: when you lose sight of an enemy, there's a blob of physical space they could possibly be in that grows every second. That uncertainty makes the game unpredictable and favors in-the-moment reflexes over careful tactical play. Particularly in a 3 player squad mode where holding and pushing frontlines is core to the fun, this is really harmful. If you have no idea where the enemy could be, you can't meaningfully set up front lines.
Additionally, sudden rapid movement, particularly movement with a strong vertical component, makes tracking and shooting an enemy much harder. No other Legend can suddenly go airborne, accelerate massively, and swing around a building. Apex is most fun when you have a good chance to hit an enemy, particularly if you catch them out in the open. That's why PF's grappling hook CD had to change, and that's also why we had to give Wraith's tactical such a long windup. (It's still not long enough, but we can't push that any further without having the ability feel awful).
As for your other suggestions:
Changing the range of grapple is a lot more painful than changing the CD. The current range is in the muscle memory of Pathfinder players; they've also memorized where they can swing from, and a lot of skill expression on the side of Pathfinder mains is learning maps. I would really not like to mess with that.
As for your second suggestion, I do like that. In League we would have called this out of combat / in combat CDs. I will say that this would necessitate calling out "in combat" as a status in Apex, which we don't have rules for quite yet. This also assumes that grapple out of combat is mostly harmless, which I'm not convinced. One of the big issues is players separating from their team due to excessive strategic movement.
There's a few things we could look at for shortening the cooldown, but my personal view is that they're all cures that are worse than the disease. For instance, we could make it so that incoming fire cancels grappling. That would definitely allow us to drop the CD a bit again, but it would feel AWFUL.
I wanna see how PF does in 6.0 for a little before I suggest any other changes for him. I absolutely hear you on having taken something away that you really loved, and that absolutely sucks. We still need to make sure the game is healthy as a whole though. I hope you understand.
Please consider, that Pathfinder now is mostly played by og pathfinder Mains, because of all the nerfs, no one else wants to play him. So these people are skilled with his grapple AND often better than average players as the good players tended to use him in the past. So even if u nerf him more, this chart is most likely to go even higher
This isn't true at all! We saw a quick dip in pick rate after the 35s change, but after 3-4 weeks it was back to where it was before. Anecdotally I'm sure there's a few PF mains who stopped playing him, but as a whole they're still the exception.
I appreciate the transparency but this data is useless and I believe your ability to see the bigger picture is clouded by staring too closely at specific data points. In your view, would the game be perfectly balanced if every legend had the same rate for everything?
Pathfinder's rate of friendly revives is likely significantly lower than Lifeline's or Gibraltars. We need to nerf them so they fall in line with other legends!
That is definitely a risk when looking at data, you're right! I'm going to have to ask you to trust me that I'm not just looking at the one data point here. I brought this up as a way of showing just how much separation there is between the two top performers and the rest of the pack. We look at all kinds of data, sliced in all kinds of ways, and on top of that we of course play the game a lot, watch a lot of professional play, watch a lot of streams, and discuss among designers what we think the state of the game is.
And I think I said somewhere further up thread that of course we don't need everyone to be 50%. That'd be silly. It's not about "what number is or isn't okay", it's about broad patterns; and the broad pattern is "everyone's pretty much grouped up in one field except for two very clear outliers". This holds up across all skill levels.
Wow that's actually very interesting data. I would never have guessed PF still having such a high encounter win rate. Although objectively you can state with this data that you cant buff pathfinder because of this, it still just doesn't ''''feel'''' that great (this is subjective) to have such a high cool down for his grapple. I wish there was a way to go back to the earlier Path seasons without it being massively OP because he was just so fun to use.
Yeah one of the reason I was scared about posting this data is because I don't want to give the impression that data rule us. That's not the case at all. I showed this just because it's such a clear outlier that aligns with what other datapoints and anecdotal information point toward as well.
Question about the crafting system? Sorry I know it’s likely not your area but you’re responding here.
If I’m understanding correctly, say the Wingman is in the crafting system for a given day/week. Does that mean the only place to find one is the crafting system or the body of somebody who crafted one? Also, do Materials get their own separate space (kinda like treasure packs?) or do they take up backpack space?
Yeah that's correct. If a weapon is on rotation you can only get it from a Replicator or from the deathbox of someone who crafted one. That said, we generally have high tier attachments matched with the weapon on rotation so even though something like the Prowler is crafting-exclusive when on rotation, it should be easier to get a Selectfire.
Mats don't take up inventory space. We treat them like a resource and not like loot, which means that they also can't be looted from your deathbox, and you keep them when you respawn.
On the off chance that you reply, I've had a question about win rate statistics for a while now.
Do encounter win rates take into account the possibility that players of lower or higher skill are likely to pick different characters? Just for example let's say that bangalore vs pathfinder. Bangalores kit is designed as a rather simple to use kit while pathfinders kit is designed for high level positioning choices and his grapple is imo one of the hardest tactical to adapt to using well.
I often see devs using encounter win rates or general game win rates as a reasoning behind changes or lack of changes and wonder what level of multivaried analysis is used and by extension are the stats being used correctly.
Given that sbmm is far from perfect i dont think that it's safe to assume players are on equal footing in fights in terms of raw skill.
I hope you respond and I do appreciate everything that you guys do for this game. I'm a massive fan and Im not asking to be an arse, I understand that balancing must be a horrible undertaking that leaves no one happy. I'm just very curious because 100% of people who drink water die and all that statistical fun.
Yeah, coming back to this again: data does not dictate what we do. We look at lots and lots of different data points, play the game, watch pros and streamers, use our design sense etc. I always put it like this: data will inform what legends I look at FIRST, but that's about it.
I kinda like the craft weapon being off the floor because it’ll change the meta a tiny bit each day/week/however often the weapons rotate.
This is exactly what we're hoping for, and it's a way for those changes to happen in an automated way rather than us sending a hotfix every time we want to do it (which would be a very BAD idea lol).
IMO alot of what makes BRs unique as a mode are the extent to which they force you to adapt to the situation. Unfortunately this is usually done through RNG which can definitely make things feel bad sometimes. The hope is this introduces some degree of having you think on your feet in terms of the weapon meta without introducing any new randomness (since we tell you exactly whats on rotation in a bunch of places, even before you start playing, so you should never be thrown off by it in theory).
Ah haha, very cool. I suspected it was a dev build feature.
For what it's worth, there have been times where I've scanned and been unable to locate my target (just like my eyes being unable to lock onto a scanned target due to visual clutter or whatever reason) and I was thinking something big and obvious like that would help with immediate target identification.
I could see the health bars causing too much visual clutter on it's own though, as in the video with like 10 dudes being scanned at once... but that seems a bit edge case eh?
Cool feature to play test though. Imagine the possibilities on target prioritization or being able to weigh the odds of your push.
Yeah it's definitely SPICY.
Your "nerf" of wraith still has her right at the top, cooldown on her tactical really worked as you expected didnt it? But pathfinder is the bigger issue
Yeah, both Pathfinder and Wraith tactical nerfs had a 1-2% winrate impact which they bounced back from in the space of a month and a half. It's tough!
So wait, with the crafting thing, are all attachments and weapons on there unable to be found on the ground or only the weapons?
All attachments on rotation won't spawn either - that said it's specific to the rarity on rotation. If a purple tac stock is on rotation it won't spawn but the blue and white ones still will. Same goes for any gold variants of guns on rotation (gold Devo still spawns even if common one is on rotation).
I find it crazy how this shocks you, but then again you developers love having aspects of the game that are anti-fun.
This thread really switched from friendly to hostile real quick, huh
You think you guys are ever going to bite the bullet and adjust the hitbox/animations of Wraith?
I never thought you guys would go through with Armour change, so I praise your willingness to thoughtfully and fairly adjust balance issues.
You're absolutely right in how harsh a change that would be. It's something that's been discussed internally, passionately and loudly. I can't tell you what's going to happen there, but I do feel that Wraith's sprint anims particularly contribute to her winrate; she really tucks in her head.
I think you're misunderstanding their first suggestion. They're saying to keep the range the same, but to adjust the cooldown based on how far you move on the swing.
Aaaah thank you! Yes, someone else mentioned this as well. I played a bunch of TF2 but never realized that was the case :X
I'll bring this up with the rest of the design team. I can't immediately see any problems with this, but I'm also not sure how much it'll help with the core problem of "PF can grapple out of combat whenever he's caught out".
So if the change from under 15's to 35's still kept pathfinder on 2nd and changed nothing regarding him being a top legend, doesnt that show all it achieved was make him less fun to play?
Wraith is clearly top and gets more intricate changes yet pathfinder gets a lazy "just make it take longer to be anything but a walking tin man."
Feels like you dumbed him down for lower skilled players.
You're not wrong! I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around this. You're entirely right that the change from 15s to 35s made PF less fun to play, while the improvement reflected in the data dissipated throughout the season.
However, when you say that we should clearly just revert to 15s to let PF mains have fun again, you seem to imply that we'd go back to the effectiveness we saw when he last was at 15s, and I'm not sure that's true. Additionally, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, we shouldn't be driven entirely by data. Not all the frustration of fighting PF will be reflected in the data. We didn't make the change just because of data, but also because of things we saw in the game that were clearly not okay (such as PF grappling out of being mispositioned twice in a given firefight quite regularly); those haven't changed.
That said, I really do want to enable PF players to have more fun again. I've made a note to talk about this at our next design meeting.
Please do consider that second suggestion.
Could the “in combat” status could be built off of the mechanic used for Bangalore’s passive? Since her passive shows you guys are able to tell when bullets are being shot near you, “in combat” could constitute of shooting your own weapons or receiving incoming fire. And after a set # of seconds of neither of those things happening, the “in combat” status would go away.
Thanks for having this discussion with the community, it’s really great to see. Pathfinders grapple was what I loved most about this game, and it was what used to drive me to play everyday.
Yeah, that's a very good point! I think the concept of "whiz-bys" from Bangalore's passive is definitely one of the inputs into "in combat". On top of that, it would be:
These are all solvable problems, but we'll need to book one designer's time to make those calls and then implement them in game. That said, this is a thing I've been wanting to do (I had an unused idea for a Crypto buff that would have required it)
Hey chief, when were those encounter win rates recorded? Because path needs like 28s cd on grapple. 35 is absolutely crippling to his gameplay
This screenshot was 2-3 days old, but they've been pretty much unchanged for the last couple of months. They took temporary hits with the nerfs to Wraith/PF we shipped but always came back up to around this level.
That can't simply be the only metric used to nerf / buff chars.....
Is weapon type considered? There's so many other variables. A lot of pathfinders probably just go up high and snipe. You could consider reducing the grapple range but decreasing timer.
It absolutely isn't! This is a big reason why we're so careful about sharing data; it creates the false impression that it's the only thing we look at. Data helps us prioritize what we look at first. The buzz phrase is "we're data informed, not data driven".
Is there a place to see what the daily/weekly crafting rotations are without queuing into a game?
Yeah we show them on the game mode selector before you queue for a match.
This is going to be long, and I apologize. But I hate this.
There are a multitude of weapons I just can't use. And it's specifically because of the button mapping in the game.
When I am in a battle, I instinctively push R3. It just happens. I tried and I tried to not do this but I can't.
So I've had to remap that button so I'm not melee'ing people in the middle of a gunfight.
I first remapped it to the DPad, but then you put the emote wheel into the DPad so instead of melee'ing, I was getting the wheel in the middle of fights.
So I finally had to remap it to the select fire button. This means there are certain weapons, like Hemlok, R-301, Havoc/Prowler w/Select Fire that I just don't use. I never pick them up so I'm not forced into that situation.
Now, just by sheer numbers, there's probably going to be a week where I -have- to craft to find my weapons.
PLEASE, tell your folks... let us unmap buttons in the game! This would solve ALL of my issues. I don't care about emoting at all. I have no need for it. But I've been playing the last two seasons with a depleted weapon pool because of it.
Thank you.
I can't promise anything atm because input handling is not my wheelhouse (and likely involves both Code and UX support in this case), but I hear you.
we really can't put any combat power back into them right now. Sorry friend!
That's definitely fair! I think a 35 second grapple cooldown is actually fair and balanced for combat scenarios, but I think it's just too harsh of a hit for pathfinder's overall fun and mobility outside of combat...
Which is why I'd love if you could take a look at this post I made about it:
Tl;dr: New passive: If Pathfinder hasn't dealt or received damage to or from players in 15 seconds while his grapple is on cooldown, Pathfinder's grapple hook is instantly made available again.
Yeah, I like both shorter CD out of combat and CD scaling with distance travelled. But do remember I'm just one designer, and we don't make decisions as individuals; we get together in a big group of designers and beat any ideas up. I'll definitely bring this into Wednesday's design chat and see how people feel about it.
You went down a rabbit hole of people somehow complaining about lifeline. I’m as taken back as you must be. Here I am happy just to finally have a helpful team based utility as a LL main and of course some lurkers in the subreddit are gonna find something arbitrary and asinine to bitch about. Keep up the good work ✊
Look we all have different contexts and different experiences that shape how we view the world; I fully believe the person who said all that stuff about LL fully believes they're raising a real problem. It definitely made me scratch my head, but I've learned not to dismiss this kind of stuff. Sometimes they're really on to something.
I remember near launch when it seemed the dev team got a bit fed up with the community (admitted, we deserved it lol) and I just hope that doesn't happen again. Every time me and my friends play this game a conversation come up about how much we love the devs of this game, and I really hope you know that most the community loves you back. The ballence in this game is AMAZING for how complex it is, and you all seem super respectful and care about the game as a whole. Like honestly I'm so thankful to have a game with such a kind, knowledgable dev team
I don't know much about my background, but let's say I'm used to much worse ;) In the end of the day when people are so passionate about your job that they just wanna talk to you about it, that's a pretty good problem to have. Sure sometimes people get rude and cross a line (and sometimes they make elaborate photoshops of physical violence being done to your body, you know, like normal, well-adjusted people do), but I've learned to ignore that and move on.
<3
Sorry I missed the discussion; I was AFK soon after commenting and am super surprised/appreciative for the thoughtful response!
It's super interesting to hear you guys refer to error bounds of enemy positions via Brownian motion! I'm a computer vision engineer with a pure math background instead of physics so personally I always thought of it in terms of generic probability distributions instead of particles bumping around. That little nugget of insight into how you guys think about these problems might be my favorite part of your response!
I think the 1st suggestion has already been clarified in below comments but I was referring to the distance traveled via grapple impacting the resulting CD as opposed to modifying the range of the grapple depending on how far into the CD you are.
My 2nd suggestion is what I naively think would be the best solution, though as you mention it assumes grapple out of combat is mostly harmless and that’s certainly not true. From my perspective the trade-off of solo players having the option to separate from their team is worth having fun grapples back, but I’m at least a little biased!
I completely agree incoming fire shouldn’t cancel grapples, that would be gross. Something like increased damage might work, but I don’t think I could emotionally handle another perceived nerf in the patch notes haha
This already feels like too long a response to expect you to read but I just want to re-iterate how grateful I am to the entire team. It’s really nice to see the thought process behind these decisions and hopefully none of this has felt like an attack on a great game. This is the only BR I’ve played and stuck with, it’s how I stay in touch with my closest friends as we’re all finally moving away from each other, and despite being almost 30 it makes us feel like we’re kids again (while in the middle of a pandemic). I could talk about random naïve suggestions from my sliver of the user base for hours, but I’m sure you get enough of that! So thanks for listening and responding to my comment at all! I’ll be playing PF a lot more this season so I can get murdered and empirically prove the need for a buff!
Thank you friend! And as you say, it's a team effort; I'm just the guy who likes posting on reddit, but most of the smart insight and hard work comes from other people on the team. That's what I love most about gamedev: how collaborative it is and how much you give each other cool ideas and new frameworks to look at the game with.
First, thank you for taking the time to communicate with us players.
The current range is in the muscle memory of Pathfinder players; they've also memorized where they can swing from, and a lot of skill expression on the side of Pathfinder mains is learning maps. I would really not like to mess with that.
Is this philosophy a more recent development at respawn? I mean I remember his grapple timing was changed several seasons ago.
October 01, 2019 Patch
Grappling Hook: Reduced the grapple projectile velocity by 33%, meaning it takes a fraction of a second longer to connect the grapple to the wall. The behavior once you are connected remains the same.
Just curious why this was agreed on then but a delay such as wraith's is undesirable from a dev standpoint now. I know I would much rather have a release delay than such a ridiculous cooldown.
I was talking about the range from which you can or cannot grapple to certain parts of the map. That change didn't affect grapple range but rather time to attach.
And as always, what I say here are my opinions. I don't speak for the entire design team. Disagreement and having different frameworks through which you view the game are both symptoms of a healthy game design team.
You provided amazing points to solidify the pathfinder nerf. One thing I don't understand is why does he still have low profile? He's much less mobile and has a huge hitbox
I spoke to some of the people who were here when his hitbox was changed. This is what I found out: originally, Pathfinder was on the big hitbox (Gibraltar, Caustic), but this made no sense for his skinny limbs. Bullets would clearly whiz by him and still do damage. So we gave him a hitbox that much more closely follows his actual model size. That bumped his winrate up like crazy, so going with the precedent that Legends who have an advantage due to their hitbox also have Low Profile to make up for this, we gave him low profile.
I can't not ask - did my original comment have any impact in the Pathfinder buff? I couldn't read "we considered a player suggestion (thanks Reddit)" in the patch notes and not ask. Cheers!
Did you suggest the grapple-CD-scales-with-distance-travelled? Because if so it absolutely did.