[2021] Valkyrie abilities

Fun fact: that'll do less damage than a punch. Because videogames.

An individual rocket does 25; additional rockets past the first barely increase damage. You could theoretically do more damage with a Valk tac if you hit like 3 or 4 rockets on them, but they'd have to help you by moving along with the impacts. Apex is a gun game first and foremost. You're not killing anyone with Missile Swarm.

It has an arcstar-like stun (less intensity, less duration) on it, so I think it's quite useful.

The trailers might be sliiiiightly overstating how effective that is. If you try this stunt in real life, you're probably gonna get killed on the way up. If you get hit by any damage in the first 2s (the boot up phase of your ult), it cancels out and sets it to 75% CD as well. It's more of an aggressive tool than a defensive one. But with some luck and maybe good cover you could theoretically use it to get your squad to safety. It's theoretically possible.

I think they're really different. Fuse's tac has a meaningful duration during which it denies an area, while Valk's tac lands once and is done. Valk is better for flushing people out of cover, Fuse is better for denying them a door or other chokepoint.

I rarely make predictions (because games are wild and unpredictable), but my only concern is she might come in TOO strong. I'm definitely not worried about her releasing under powered. The levers are there to make her balanced, but I definitely tuned her on the strong side.

She goes about 120% of the height of an average jump tower (fun fact: they all have different heights).

Double jump is the input you use to activate it, but then it absolutely feels like a jetpack. If you keep it on for the full duration you get about 8 seconds of flight time.

We have specific jetpack control schemes with a view to supporting controller. The default scheme, "hold", keeps the jetpack on as long as you hold down the jump key. That's great for keyboard and mouse, but not great for controller. For controller we recommend the "toggle" scheme where you can let go of jump once the jetpack's on, leaving your hands free to do other things. If you want to turn the jetpack off, you just press jump one more time.

And like the poster below me says, no shooting your guns during jetpack. You CAN shoot your tactical however.

25 for the first rocket, 3 for every additional rocket (or 2 if you're Fortified). Don't quote me on exact numbers, but the TLDR is it doesn't really matter if you hit them with one rocket or four, you'll roughly do the same damage.

I don't know that I ever mathed that out. For design like this, precise numbers are less important than playtest to playtest feedback. It sure feels like it takes a good long while, but of course you can start flying again before your fuel is completely full.

Nope; it'll just be refreshed, so it'll count from the LAST rocket impact.

But here's the thing: it turns out the Caustic nerf was fine. He's still performing solidly, still getting picked in the ALGS. It knocked a frustrating, overperforming character down to a healthy level where he's still usable and powerful in the right circumstances. We would not have gotten there had we taken small steps and found 2 or 3 times that we didn't nerf him enough. It's always best in game design to take big swings and adjust back down.

He is still absolutely one of the strongest characters in low level pubs. The less people know how to play around the gas, the stronger he is. At the highest level we have good data for last I checked he dropped from literally third place to.. 6th? 7th? Something like that. Still above average. He's fine.

You can fly straight up for 8s if you want. That'll get you quite a lot higher than Horizon Q. Not sure why you'd spend that time tho.

Bangalore ult serves you a written notice of where it is going to do damage three weeks in advance, so if you get killed by that, it's really on you.