Apex Legends Dev Tracker

You'll have to wait to see what each new season holds I'm afraid, but Support Legends are one of the more difficult roles to bring to Apex without over-indexing in healing and resets that make fights drag on and upset the already high TTK of the game.

That being said, we do want to bring a more balanced roster of class roles to the table in the future at some point.

The weapon-focused passives exist to encourage their use, and make them feel like an interesting choice while playing as a character with an affinity for them.

There's never a penalty for not picking one up - but the act of playing that character seeds that option for a minor gain so that when you come across that weapon type, you make a consideration you might not as a different Legend, and encourages the idea of playing more towards the style/identity of the Legend.

With Rampart, it can make spotting an LMGs a more attractive option to play into the spray.
With Maggie, the shotgun bonus encourages you to think up-close and personal.
With Vantage, the passive encourages the idea of long-range to gain the intel and bullet drop.

So, in short, the character's passive promotes the identity of that Legend, without shackling you to that choice.
They're meant to be a boon for players who like that playstyle. Will we alter how they work in the future...

We are actively looking into the frustration that can come from these abilities and finding ways to reduce it without crippling the identity of the Legends who wield them.

Rampart's identity is built around LMGs, and her passive was meant to reflect that synergy and provide incentive when opting into that style.

This topic has been discussed before, especially back when we were looking at ways to empower Rampart (when her effective pick and win rates were low).
But the passive was never the aspect holding her back so we opted to invest more in the core parts of her kit to bring meaningful change.

In the end, appending the passive to other weapon types meant that it took away meaningful choice from the player.
If you just get it on ALL the good weapons, it doesn't carry the same meaning - you're just always better, and you still always pick up your favourite R-301 like you do with other Legends.
If it's tied to LMGs... they are special. And you make an active decision to wield a Rampart-special - We felt that choice/feeling was important to maintain.
Could this passive be extended in other ways in the future to prov...

When we release a new Legend, the designer creates the unique trackers for that Legend, and "Bullets Fired" was chosen for Sheila.
It's possible we could add this tracker in the future, but it might not retro-actively count your Sheila kills to-date.
Glad you're enjoying her!

Early in Seer's development we actually prototyped giving enemies feedback when the heartbeat locked on - however, given that it was tied to Seer's camera movement and actions it became an irritation to have any notification propagate to other clients and clouded other audio/scan combat information that actively affected the player. It also angered Seer teammates to have enemies jump on them because the Seer was just "looking around" and proc'd the intel to the opponents.

We even had the heartbeat play in the enemy player's head at one point that told them they were being tracked - it was terrifying, and induced panic in players to feel constantly haunted by this presence, so we backed away from it.

Given that the information was limited to Seer himself and not shared intel with the team, we opted for more subtle feedback (audio cue, eye glow), which worked well and played into his fantasy of Ambush Artist - seeking out opponents for his team and then using his abi...

We understand the frustrations around Legend abilities that scan and their tactical dominance at higher levels of play.
Some of these abilities, however, are core to the play patterns and identities of the Legends themselves so it's not a simple task to address.
We are actively looking into it, and playtesting potential iterations, but we want to be comfortable with changes that reduce the frustration without reducing the value of these Legends in the squad before any release.

This sounds like a joke, but it's actually a good question and one that came up often in Vantage's development, and was discussed a number of times.
The short answer is, there's no gameplay need to.
Unlike a Crypto Drone, Echo provides no direct threat to the enemy player.
He doesn't deal damage, or scan or track opponents. If anything, he's a tell for opponents that Vantage is near and foreshadows her plan allowing for potential counterplay.
So the only value to shooting Echo, would be to deny the tactical movement altogether and grief the Vantage player.
We had considered at one point that players might be able to shoot AT Echo, disrupting the targeting as he played a brief dodging animation, but it only served to make the ability less reliable.
Flying to Echo to reposition for height is a core part of Vantage's identity as a character, and we wanted counterplay around reading and reacting to that action, rather than denying it outright.
That wa...

It definitely varies. We often start with a single weapon we want to add some flair or functionality to either because it's dipped in relevance and needs some help or it's been stale and unchanged for a long time. Sometimes though we look for shared mechanics and push on that like the Dual Loader on the Mastiff and 30-30.

We had originally designed the Kinetic Feeder to go on the Volt and Triple Take with only the ammo component but through playing and iteration we found an opportunity with the Triple Take's precision choke to make a fun mechanic that sped up the choke time. We really liked how it played but it didn't do anything on the Volt so we swapped it over to the Peacekeeper where it found a more fitting home.

We're very aware of this perception of Pathfinder, and we've heard numerous suggestions of new Passives from the team and the community.

We are looking at it, but we don't want to slap a new passive on a Legend who is already well-liked, powerful and performing well at the risk of adding to his already potent combat power or shifting development time that is needed to service other Legends or meta concerns, when there's no immediate need. But I'm hopeful the future is friendly in upcoming seasons.

Good question, we were actually talking about this just the other day in one of our balance syncs. We actually do like that the capacity increases on mags from gun to gun differ and aren't linear. There's some interesting micro decision making to be had when some weapons scale better with attachments than others. We like that players can discover things that might make them think about the loot differently. The Scout is a great call out as a weapon that scales very well with a white mag, whereas a 301 only gets 2 more rounds. If I wanted to get the best bang for my buck on white light mags I know which one I'll use until I get the blue mag. This gives weapons more personality, something that we're always looking to enhance and push on. Our line-up is unique and it's fun that players have strong opinions about each weapon on the roster. We don't want to lose that by normalizing something like mag size increases- as trivial as that may sound.

Now we're talking. We prototyped a shotgun where each of the pellets was basically a bouncy ball, you could shoot it into a room and it was pure chaos. Each bounce reduced the damage of the pellet and it was designed to be sort of like a flushing out tool, but ultimately taking bullet damage from enemies you cannot see yet felt... unfair. We ended up scrapping the idea but it was a pretty hectic couple of playtests.

One very early iteration of the Rampage lit people on fire and allowed you to "paint thermite" wherever you shot. It was actually pretty cool to tactically put thermite patches down but we found layering in shooting the ground people walked on to maximize their panic and your own area control was just too much—in a number of ways.

It's not always just the number of weapons within each ammo type. We look at many factors and one of the determining factors in this decision was the balance of medium to late game viable weapons within the ammo types. The early game light ammo offerings are plenty, but lack robustness towards the later stages of the game, whereas Heavy ammo had quite a fleshed out late game line up. Pulling the Spitfire into light ammo helps even out the spread and gives us more breathing room when we think about what weapons will be going into the crafter or care packages. A perfect example of this is when the 301 was in the crafter and Scout in the care package—it didn't feel like light had enough viable weapons in the late game which pushed us into a lopsided heavy meta.

There's a power curve in any given match of Apex and these weapons represent the beginning of that power journey. We're always looking for interesting ways to spice our early game weapons up and provide meaningful ways for their impact to remain relevant farther into the game but there must still be a natural progression. We have clear graduations of power like the Mozambique into the Peacekeeper and we've got ones that are fueled by preference like the Peacekeeper into the Eva. What each of these provide is a clear decision point in which players can choose what works for them. If everything were preference the game would lack depth throughout the phases of a match and if everything were a linear power progression the game would lack agency. Apex is about doing your best with the hand you were dealt, and sometimes that hand is a Mozambique and 2 sniper stocks.

Josh is my favorite because when he’s around you never know what to expect. Pure chaotic energy. You need an adventurous spirit to withstand long exposure to Medina.

Yes, I can confirm if we might see more new LTMs in the coming months or not

There aren’t any current plans to do events similar to War Games. Squeezing multiple modes into 1 event ends up multiplying the work more than it can seem for everyone involved. Lots of work going in close together and many things to test and verify stability. If we consider something like War Games again, it would probably need to rely more on established modes and add 1-2 new, lower scope modes to play

Hello r/ApexLegends! We’ve already done our first AMA alongside the Beast of Prey update (ICYMI: link here). Are you ready for round 2?!

...

We’re always prototyping new ideas and working on things at different stages of development. There is certainly a chance that we see more LTMs with the respawning mechanic in the future!

I tend to not really have favorites for anything in general. I will call out Vlaada Chvatil though as maybe my favorite board game designer? He’s got such a wide range of games and they are all great. Tons of respect for his work

I can sometimes get into and really love a heavy game like Twilight Imperium (Eclipse is good too). Through the Ages is another one of my top heavier games. I love the economic engine aspect and building up my civ. Lighter games will hit the table more and can end up being a favorite more consistent option. I always bring Love Letter with me to board game sessions, because it’s such a good game and so easy to fit into your game night. I’ll play anything with worker placement or deck building mechanics. Some of my other favorites in no particular order - RftG, Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Factory Manager, Terra Mystica, Suburbia, Agricola, Space Alert, Everdell

I think Gun Run could definitely exist in previous seasons! Gun balance can shift as updates are made from patch to patch, but it doesn’t influence choice of LTMs too strongly. For Gun Run specifically, it’s mostly considering what weapons are in or out of the air drop and how that affects the weapon track, if at all.