Thank you! I was scrolling through all of this just hoping to find someone who was excited about this. I built this! It's my very first shipped feature; I started at Respawn at the end of November. I saved the original thread where this was complained about (or at least the most prominent one) and posted a note in there too.

It was a pretty amazing feeling to see this called out in the patch notes.

What I really wanna add tho is a question mark ping

Ok!

I could not be trusted with a ? ping in Apex.

That's honestly not a bad direction, but in general I want us to move away from both low profile and fortified as much as we can (I don't think fortified will ever go away, but I will slay low profile one day)

I wrote up the task (I wanted to add it because I use ALC and am always fidgeting with my settings) and was just about to do it when we got another new hire. He ended up doing it as his first task.

You are allowed to call me that (it's not all that different from what I do). I'm actually super passionate about stats in general and would like to do a lot more with them. And I think this is a great idea (and something I've talked about in one way or another).

Always a little nervous to make a post that might be implied as a "yes, we'll do that" type of reply - especially because anything that requires new UI requires a lot of input and design work by a bunch of different folks. But I hope that my saying that this is also something I think would be great and would love to see implemented in some form counts for something.

This feature is not the only love that I gave the badge system.

It's a long-standing request. But it's not coming until Season 9.

The Heat Shield's intent was to give you and your team a second chance at survival when caught in the ring.

There were a number of situations we were seeing where players had to make a choice between leaving behind a downed teammate, a banner card or some hard earned loot. Abandoning a teammate like that in a team-focused game always felt bad, but it was always the best choice, because there was never an option.

The other scenario we were seeing revolved around gate-keeping. In most cases, the team rushing back had no rotation option but to push through another squad waiting in ambush at the edge of the ring.

The Heat Shield now gives you some of these options to make a more desirable rotation, collect on that hard earned loot, or, when the situation arises, give players the chance to be the hero for their team and save a fallen ally.

We wanted to give the team a chance to survive and have their fate decided by a fair fight, rather than dying to the environment.

The Heat Shield is definitely meant to allow new options to shake up the meta, and key elements of the design are in place to prevent it from being a major factor surviving the final ring in any way that feels cheap. We'll be watching closely to see what kinds of heroic and clever plays the community can pull off with the item in its excess through the Ring Fury Takeover, and then in its more natural state after the event!

Excited to see what everyone can do with it!

"Favoriting" of legends is definitely something we talk about a lot. Not just for a feature like that, but for a lot of things. Always very nervous to talk about upcoming features, but what i can say is that there are quite a few new hires - myself included - whose focus is on everything other than the core game loop. Basically, I don't think much (work-wise) about what you do from the dropship until you die (or win). I think - and work - on everything else. Sometimes there's overlap - like, I added the Knockdowns and Assists to the end of game summary screen, and as part of that, I also added assists into the HUD in game during pubs. But in almost every way, I'm focused on what you do and how you feel when you're not trying to kill people and they're not trying to kill you.

That's not what people fall in love with. Apex means so much to everyone here because it has incredible gameplay. I'm hoping that my work helps support the best part of Apex, which is, to quote our man Octane, "the looting, the scooting, and the shooting."

There are tons of great suggestions in this thread. Some of which I've also thought of. Others of which are new. I very much appreciate the feedback. It's really incredible to be a part of making a game that means so much to so many. So thank you. And sorry to folks to whom I did not reply directly. I promise I read every comment and have been taking down notes too.

As always, doing my best to give the typical caveats around expectations/etc, what I will say is that what you're proposing is hugely important to me. I've done a lot of projects in this area, both personal and professional. And quantitative assessment of skill and progress is personally the single defining principle in my life. What you're talking about is - to do it right - a massive project. But there is certainly no shortage of people within Respawn who love this type of data. That's the best part of working on this game, but also the hardest. It's not deciding what to do. It's deciding what not to do. Because the to do list of good ideas is essentially endless.

I like this!

Yeah, data. He started going up like crazy in December and never stopped. Combined with a rise in pick rates (which usually means a DECREASE in win rates, because new incoming players who haven't played the character much yet should be bad at him, but the OPPOSITE happened) that meant we had to do something. I'm almost certain this is TOO big a swing and we'll have to dial it back, but I'm not 100% certain, so this is a great chance for us to learn something about Caustic (how much of his power is in the damage of the gas vs in the non-damage effects such as vision blocking and slow)

My goal is to remove it from every character in the game eventually, but we gotta figure out how to nerf Lifeline before we can do that.

I love the respectful ? ping when you pull off a Faker level outplay and your entire team spams ? on you like WHAT EVEN WAS THAT

Nothing to update yet. I know a whole bunch of people are working on it. You'll get updates on really important stuff like that not from a random dev on reddit but from official sources like the @PlayApex twitter account.

Sure! What do we give her in return? Because that will gut her.

We got a playlist in testing that's pretty promising (even though it is absolutely a nerf, because she needs a nerf) that does some smart things about the ultimate. It turns out all we had to do there was applied a minimum of smarts to picking what's in it and suddenly the skill was good. (Current implementation looks at the loot you and your teammates have and guarantees at least one upgrade).

I'm not gonna talk about it much more because the earliest it might ship is Season 9. But I'm hopeful, as someone who plays a lot of Lifeline and wished her tactical and ultimate weren't memes.

Big problem with the cooldown is how to properly communicate it. Also should it be a cooldown on Lifeline or a per-teammate cooldown? The latter seems more logical/more fair (I don't understand why my Lifeline can't drone res me because maybe I didn't realize she just drone res'd my ally not too long ago), but that makes communication even harder.

I think we should try a version without the shield and see how that goes.

I mean, if it completely dumpsters him I'm sure we can do something before Season 9. I don't expect that tho. One thing I've learned about this game is that changing kits doesn't actually move the needle too much. It's hitboxes and direct damage/healing (such as Octane passive) that does anything at all.

As for this Caustic nerf, this is the only way we can tease out how much the damage actually contributes to his power. We believe gas is still powerful, even with this much lower damage, due to its slow, vision denial, and vision highlighting for Caustic. Down the line I'd love to try other things on the gas that are a little spicier. Maybe people suffering from his gas take extra damage from all sources? Maybe it puts a lingering "can't use heal items" status on them? Maybe standing in the gas heals Caustic? I don't know, these are all pretty SPICY.

Your hypothesis makes sense to me! For further context on why we made Caustic barrels generally shootable while inflating: we'd seen a lot of Caustic players use barrels pretty much like grenades, giving him two grenade abilities and unparalleled pushing power--on a defensive character.

Maybe the fix is you no longer throw Caustic barrels but place them like Rampart walls?

The stacking damage thing is interesting but runs into an unclear optimization problem: how many barrels do I commit to any one area? By unclear optimization I mean, you can make one choice or another, then the combat plays out, and after you still don't know if you made the right choice. That pattern stops people from enjoying and learning to get better with abilities.

Another interesting idea to push him into defense territory is to let barrels "mature". The longer they're placed in the world, the more dangerous they become. This would require visual updates on the barrels to make their state clear (maybe simply a green/yellow/red scheme, where barrels reach yellow at 5s and red after 15s?)

I don't think it would solve the frustration case where Lifeline plays around the doc drone res shield and you can never knock her. I think by the time you've knocked Lifeline, you've won that fight anyway, so cancelling the res at that point is gilding the lily.

"Fallback ping here! Tells you to chill the f*ck out! 90% of war is waiting, soldier."

(Bang voice lines must be so much fun to write)

Yes. The spectator eye is permanently retired.

Sorry, no. The Heat Shield will not be on the ground in the firing range since there's no active ring in there and it doesn't do anything without one. We had talked about having a button or something you could press to turn the ring on, or summon a ring flare - but there were too many issues with that route.

As for how it works without a ring: Inside the circle, it will wait in its idle "stand-by" mode for 45s before shutting down - so you can preempt an incoming ring and throw it down early, but it won't actually do anything until the ring hits it.

As soon as the ring activates it, that idle duration is paused and the ring damage will determine its active lifetime from there-in.

Nope. Heat Shield only blocks Ring Damage.

No. But that does raise a valid topic for future tweaks. Display of that information is a bit more complex, since it's not really "progress" in the same numeric way. But certainly for those multi-legend badges some more data would be helpful.

We're investigating what happened here. There was a change to the underlying VFX that we made with optimization in mind. The goal was to have it look identical to what was there before, but apparently that's not what happened. We'll let you know when we know more.

We've settled on a plan to fix (hopefully without reintroducing the performance issues). No time scale though.

That's not how gamedev works I'm afraid. This stuff will take time. I don't know that we'll have a fix in Season 9 for instance. So no, no updates right now. Sorry!

Rampart's the second lowest in our win rate data across all skill buckets. The only one below her is Fuse :x

We have some plans for him, but nothing's 100% yet. But yeah, he didn't come in super strong like we wanted. It's still very hard to predict how strong a character will be unless they have meaningful mobility (Octane/Horizon). We've gotta be careful not to fall victim to mobility creep as well: the more general mobility there is, the less fun the game becomes for everyone because you just can't hit people. This is why we're removing some of that power from Horizon (we're just reducing how quickly you can wriggle back and forth as you go up her gravity lift to make tracking her a little easier). Octane's pretty trackable IMO, but we need to hit him a little bit. He's become extremely dominant (to no one's surprise) so we'll need to shave a little power off. I think I found a reasonably fun-neutral way of doing so: I'm currently thinking about increasing the health cost for his Stim but letting you stim again much sooner (there's currently a 3-4 second delay between the old stim running out and you being able to stim again). This is kind of a buff if you look at just the speed at which you move, but taken together with the increased health cost it'll allow you to drop your health real low real fast. I always thought stim's health cost was a fun way to pay for power with life that was tuned too softly to matter.

It brought up her win rate even more, which was already very high! She's currently one of the strongest characters in the game--and yet no one plays her. So here's my pro tip: you wanna get some free wins? Learn Wattson.

(And yeah, we're taking low profile off her, but that's just because we're nuking low profile from orbit.)

Looks like the nerf barely touched his win rate. It's pretty much unchanged. No future work planned right now, but as always this can change when we get new data.

Wattson does fall off as you go up in MMR, but even at the 96th percentile she performs well; solid middle of the pack. Like she's at 11.6% win rate to say Revenant's 9.9%. The highest performer, Lifeline, is at 13.6%.

Her pick rate is absolute lowest tho. What that still tells me is there's value left on the table if all you care about is climbing. Each Fuse, Rampart, or Revenant pick in predator could have been a Wattson and had a much higher chance of winning the game.

I mean I'm looking at the data. You can argue with me if you want, and it's certainly valid that you have a different experience, but you've gotta remember that millions and millions of people play this game, and you only ever see a tiny slice.

We've got some spicy plans that are too early to talk about yet, but rest assured we're going to do something for her. Might be a while--earliest it COULD happen right now is halfway through Season 10.

Nah there's a reason there's no grenade cooking in this game; we want to always give the enemy the chance to react to what you're doing, and cooking a grenade takes that away.

I can't see the future, can I? It's also not as clear as looking at one stat; it's possible that his win rate didn't change because of movement elsewhere in the meta; and it's also possible that while the win rate didn't change, the frustration of playing against him very much did (anecdotally that's what I hear). So it's still a good change!

For Wattson, she's an extreme outlier in pick rate. It almost doesn't matter for the game what we do to her because she's so incredibly rarely picked. I'm talking way less than other legends. For every Wattson pick there's like three Caustic picks. If that ever changes and if playing against her is frustrating we'll obviously apply different standards.

Look, I know you're mad at me and you want to pick holes in the reasoning, but in the end of the day all these stats are only proxies for what we're actually balancing for: the average amount of fun a player of Apex has and the amount of time they feel like playing the game. If you're a Wattson player and you feel she's got no tools to compete, you're not going to have much fun and you're not going to play for very long. If I can give you one more tool (the shield regen) that makes you feel good about playing the character you want to play without making the experience worse for other players, that's a win. The Caustic nerfs absolutely made him less fun to play for Caustic players, but the problem was reversed in his case: his presence and dominance in the games had a massively negative impact on many other players. If we can point to a stat that tells us we didn't break the character (we clearly didn't) and get the feedback that the game is less frustrating now (which we also clearly get), then we've made a good change, as much as Caustic players hate us for it.

Ah I'm sorry, that in my mind isn't legend balance because I don't work on it directly ;P Yes, the visibility changes will get reversed. Crossed wires here at Respawn; someone improved the performance of the game by reducing VFX and didn't think it would impact gameplay. Clearly it did, so it'll get fixed.

Pickrate absolutely went down; from 10.2% to 5.6%. That's a massive decrease, no question, and that goes some way to explaining why his winrate stayed solid (only the best Caustic players continued playing him). But that was part of the goal; clearly having a 10% pick rate on Caustic was unhealthy for the game. Certain types of abilities cannot be that dominant, and action denying abilities like Caustic's gas are definitely in that category.

Nothing much, just killing low profile (I hope)

It's in Season 9.

Yes. Talked about this a bit in response to the update on badge tooltips that sort of veered off into discussion about stats more generally. If you look back at my post history you can see the discussion. Fundamentally, I'd say that stats are something that we - and I in particular - are interested in doing more with. What exactly that looks like though is very much in the air. I think there's a lot I'd do before a website, but fundamentally I think the idea of a richer experience around player stats is great.