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DanielZKlein

DanielZKlein



17 Feb

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by Cynnthetic

Literally any legend in the game could have thrown a grenade there for the exact same result. Or Fuse shooting his tac. Or a Gibby ult. Or Horizon throwing hers to suck them into the red. That would have gotten a pat on the head though.

Not that it even matters because this is the old style final circle so it’s impossible to replicate today. That Caustic would be guaranteed dead in any game played after that change.

Any discussion on nerfs based on extremely rare or as in the case here, impossible situations for today is dumb. This is a cute but irrelevant clip.

It's a fair point, but I took this clip to be a stand in for the very real frustration people feel when Caustic gets a perfect ult off even in the new slowly closing circle. This PRECISE thing isn't a problem anymore, but Caustic ult in final circle still is. It's got a larger AOE than any grenade, it lingers longer than any grenade, and it blocks vision on top of everything else. The specific example here is invalid but the sentiment is totally valid.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by Mo0KiEBoY

But i thought you said he was one of the weaker legends? What happened within these couple of months?

He was weak in November/early December, and then he became strong! That's the reality of a live game. Even if we made no more changes to the game at all, the meta would constantly be shifting with characters becoming weaker and stronger as players find new ways to play them / play against them.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by ViridianZeal

Wouldn't the obvious fix be to never have the ring end up in an impossible position like this?

The way rings pick their final locations is there's certain areas of the map marked off limits for final rings; all locations with more than one floor are included, but if you notice in this clip the building is barely in the circle. The final location is out there. We could always try to increase the exclusion area so circles won't even close near buildings, but I don't know the amount of work or other complications involved with that.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by AvatarSozin

Is there talk about length of the ult being shortened a bit? Maybe higher skill gap in knowing when to throw the ult will lead to some interesting decision making

There's tons of things like that we could do. I just keep coming back to what's the experience as the Caustic player if we just nerf all aspects of his gas and give him nothing in return.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by Singularitymoksha_

see this for example sir disabling ult in endcircles will be a perfect fix for caustic as well as several other legends and it wont make apex end games unbearable to watch and play and also will stay true to the games ideology of being a gun game first

it will be the perfect fix for both comp and ranked and people wont say "abilities legend" then because honestly final circle ult spamming is so annoying , unskillful and unlike apex

eg--- https://twitter.com/Frexs/status/1361919205617111041

hope you consider this suggestion seriously a lot of pros and casuals as well will agree with this decision

u/DanielZKlein u/RSPN_JayBiebs

Sure it would fix it, but it's such a brutal heavy handed fix. Would rather we try something else first.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by sbmm_sucks

Disabling ultimates at the very end rounds will solve a lot of the ability spam in high level gameplay, as it becomes a coin flip who gets first in scrims/ranked sometimes.

Maybe also add a "ultimates disabled next ring close" text so people don't feel cheated out of their ability.

Yeah it would solve it for sure, but it's such a brute force heavy handed way of solving it. To be clear it's not off the table, but I'd much rather we try something else first.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by TheFlameKid

Honestly, I don't see this as a problem. The challenge is to get caustic to the end game. The slow ring closing is essentially a nerf to caustic already. If you know there is a caustic in play, and you still decide to wait untill the ring is THIS small, you actually agree to deliver the win to caustic. I want to emphasize that I am NOT a caustic main.

On average you are correct; if you take the bird's eye view over hundreds or thousands of games, a character who has trouble to get to the final circle but then gets to just win if he makes it there is "balanced", in that he wins the expected number of games or less.

But that's macro balance. Explaining that to a person who also made it to the final circle in that game only to die to Caustic gas with no counterplay doesn't help; that person is correct to feel rage and frustration in that moment, and so we need to find a fix.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by dadnothere

the final ring moves instead

so this is avoided without nerf a caustic

other games already make the storm move from place to avoid camp

Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things we could do to the final phase of the game; moving the circle around is one option. This would be quite a bit of work to make work properly and so few people ever get to this stage in the game that it's just not our top priority right now.

For what it's worth, I do think both the start and the end (if it ever gets there) of our game could do with improvements.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by JSjackal

I know I'm late to the party and there is plenty to discuss about whether gas daddy actually needs a rework, but here is an idea for a "sidegrade" like Lifeline got that might alleviate some issues you're talking about:

Make his Ult a soccer ball. An icosehedron that releases gas out of every face the same way his Gas Grenade does. Same radius, same damage. He rolls it/throws it ahead of him and it continually releases gas as it goes, but the gas only persists for 2-3 seconds if the ball rolls on. So if you roll it past an enemy, they take only 1 or 2 ticks of health damage. If you can pin it up against an obstacle or throw it in a room, it lingers and lasts the same amount of time as his grenade.

The big difference: anybody can move it. Melee it and it goes pretty far, shoot it continually and it moves a bit. This would completely alleviate the situation shown in this clip since the team could have gotten it out of the circle, but it would still do some damage ...

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That's also pretty cool! We'd need to make sure this doesn't look too derpy because Caustic is sort of a serious character. We don't want people to play beachball with evil gas daddy's murder ult. That might not quite be on brand.

I do like that your pitch is better than just making it destructible because Caustic would also get to move it around. I like this one and I like the pitch where the gas comes from his body.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by History_of_Robots

What if his ult wasn't throwable but an aoe around caustic himself? Killing him will stop the ult and he'd have to be close to the enemy to damage them.

He could set off gas grenades that are still attached to his jacket.

That's a cool idea! I'll have to think about that a little more. Right now his barrel gas only does damage to people that are in direct sightline of the barrel; I'd have to check how the ult handles this and how that would translate to having the gas emanate from his person. I'll dig into the code and think about it.

Octane buff idea - Rig your jumppad to blow up!

Comment

Originally posted by SomeTicci

I feel that each character has a place in the game now.
I have a question though, how is Rampart performing after the buff?

Surprisingly well. She's not quite in the healthy range yet (especially not in pick rate, and history has taught us that when pick rate goes up, win rate does down) and we're talking about more stuff to do for her, but the combination of kit buffs and Spitfire buffs / gold mags helped her so much.

Social distancing with my man Caustic

Comment

Originally posted by Banuner

Real talk. What is the counter to that?

Once you get to this exact situation, there isn't one, and that f*cking sucks. It's something we're talking about, but we don't exactly have a solution yet. Creating a shootable central thing for the ult, like Horizon, would work but it's such a heavy handed fix (and would probably require us making barrels destructible post-trigger because otherwise they're just better than the ult).

The problem with all that is what do we give him in return? Because we can't just make him an unpickable character either. You may not like them, but Caustic mains exist and deserve to have fun too.

EDITING my comment to answer the most common questions because you all certainly don't check if your question's been asked fourteen times before before you post ;P

This happens very rarely and therefore it's okay.

Yeah it happens rarely and while that may make it okay in the aggregate, when looking at charts and stats and all that, it does NOT make it ok...

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12 Feb

Octane buff idea - Rig your jumppad to blow up!

Comment

Why would you think he needs a buff right now?


07 Feb

The explosion from opening an Explosive Hold doesn’t deal damage, since I see people backing away all the time

Comment

My excuse is, it used to in playtesting, and you learn that the hard way.


05 Feb

Respawn here. We just shipped Season 8 - Mayhem. Ask us anything!

Comment

Originally posted by LumpyChicken

If anything I think that part of revenant's kit is overpowered. His tactical is extremely frustrating to fight against, not only because of the silence effect, but because of the ridiculous visual clutter on your screen and from the orb itself. Not only that, but the silence effect persists after full wiping a revenant team. That part should be removed just like the caustic ult change this season.

Don't get me wrong, rev needs some help, but his tactical is not the area to buff

That's what makes buffing him so hard; it's clear he needs buffs, but it's also equally clear that tac and ult shouldn't be straight up buffed

Respawn here. We just shipped Season 8 - Mayhem. Ask us anything!

Comment

Originally posted by whatisabaggins55

giant bomb

after a short warning, it would just f**king kill you.

Not for the other people tho. So we didn't ship it.

Never stopped the Overwatch devs when they designed DVA's ultimate.

Very different type of game; for one, you have more than one life.

Respawn here. We just shipped Season 8 - Mayhem. Ask us anything!

Comment

Originally posted by theol9

How is wraith doing after the nerf?

It's very early but it seems like the nerf has worked. For now she dropped from 2nd to 4th place in trios winrate.

Respawn here. We just shipped Season 8 - Mayhem. Ask us anything!

Comment

Originally posted by AmazingSpacePelican

I think I can speak for a good number of people who play Loba when I say that I'd happily take a longer cooldown on the tactical in exchange for it feeling less restrictive when I do use it.

We don't even need to increase your CD I think. Like I said, we've started playtesting something.

Respawn here. We just shipped Season 8 - Mayhem. Ask us anything!

Comment

Originally posted by frankster

If you put things in over-powered you have to be careful that they don't become Flavour of the Month, and then everybody just plays the latest thing.

One hundred percent, yes. That's the thing that makes this job so hard: make meaningful changes without breaking the meta in a bad way.

Respawn here. We just shipped Season 8 - Mayhem. Ask us anything!

Comment

Originally posted by Sig_TV

How about giving him a double jump while he's grappling, akin to how it worked in Titanfall 2, where you could grapple > zoom somewhere > quickly change direction or height mid-grapple?

How about a second grapple mid-grapple? ;P

(I wanna be very careful about adding even more mobility to him)