Hi Daniel. There's another bug which I've recently come across but it doesn't really affect gameplay. Often when you go into the firing range your account name completely changes to something random.
Another bug is legends will have a skin which you don't own in the lobby.
Yep, we're aware. Thank you!
Copying and pasting my earlier comment in hopes of getting a satisfactory reply:
if putting health into walls(talking about Rampart) seems unhealthy for the game, why is Gibby allowed to have a portable gun shield that can nullify a Kraber shot(or 2 sometimes)???? Add to that, his Dome shield deploys instantly. It's super frustrating whenever a Gibby pops his Q mid fight and my mag is emptied to no effect.
Why is Gibby, another defensive legend, treated so differently than Rampart. I'm genuinely in doubt
I don't think that comparison fully works and you're conflating having health with not having bleed through, but emotionally you're not wrong. Both defensive legends, one gets to have on demand blocking health, the other doesn't. I would point out that armshield is a reactive ability while amped wall is a proactive setup ability, but I don't think that'll lead us to a productive conversation.
Instead I want to say that I agree with this complaint and have added 45 health to Rampart walls while they're building. Should be in 8.0, but no guarantees. I believe there's still too much delay in the ability for her to use it purely reactively, but I also think that reactive vs setup isn't a black and white question but rather a spectrum, and she could do with a little power closer to the reactive side of that spectrum.
Walls while building will follow the ally player paradigm: they will stop bullets except for sniper bullets, which will pass through (like they do with pla...
Read moreI remember in a recent Dev Stream that someone mentioned that Wattson has a very low pick rate [in Pubs?], but despite that she is still a top 5 winner. Correct?
This is still correct! Had been lowest pick rate forever; recently Rampart dropped even lower than Wattson. Win rate has been consistently top 5 (right now she's in the 4th highest spot).
Also fixing his wall bounce to work like the other legends would be a nice touch
Yeah, I understand that's not very easy to do because of the way his higher climb works. I do want to spend some time investigating this at some point because I agree it's dumb that everyone but Revenant can wall bounce. I just wouldn't expect it to have a meaningful impact on pick and win rate; the amount of players who knows about wall bounces, nevermind can pull them off reliably, is so incredibly low.
So I was wondering if Cryptos EMP will be able to disable Lifelines Healing Drone while performing a revive or Horizons Ultimate, I think this changes would actually make sense because it would nerf Horizon and the EMP already disables Lifelines tactical. I would love to see your point of view for this changes!
That doesn't sound like a bad idea from a standpoint of clarity and consistency, but I would temper your hopes that it'll make a meaningful impact on win rate. Individual legend vs legend interactions never have a meaningful win rate impact. They make sense to us because we like to tell ourselves stories about the game, but the situations in which Horizon even faces a Crypto are so rare (even if Crypto had a higher pick rate), nevermind situations in which Crypto has his ult ready, is thinking about using it, can get the drone in position in time, etc.
But really if anything the Pathfinder changes have taught us that attacking the hitboxes to bring a character's win rate under control without making them less fun is a promising route to try.
Are you guys willing to try the reverse as well? Specifically for Revenant.
I feel like Revenant's in a good spot, ability-wise, and I know you guys are trying to avoid making him even more frustrating to play against than he already is.
Carlos Pineda explained that Revenant launched with Low Profile because he previously had a thin hitbox but it was increased at the last second, so it's not like Revenant with a thin hitbox is anything new.
Yeah that's a very good point! We've been struggling to find a good buff for Revenant, and I don't think we've properly discussed just shrinking his hitboxes to give him power without making him more frustrating. I'll bring it up this Wednesday in our balance round table.
Unfortunately it doesn’t u can only ping enemy pylon
Thank you! I'll look at that.
A small quality of life change for wattson: allow wattson to ping her pylon, that way teammates are aware of it (so they don't throw grenades and use it to recharge shields) additionally wattson and her teammates should be able to "feed" the pylon shields to increase the timer.
Pinging her pylon should work! I remember hooking this up last year! Are you sure you can't ping it?
Well thank you so much for the sick skins she has cos she does have quite a lot :)
And we're not done making sick skins for her :D
A lot of junior game designers do that too. You can tell someone's in that pattern if most of their suggestions start with "what if". I call this what if design.
I think Respawn had a bit of this internally before you joined.
I remember when Lifeline and Gibby seemingly had like 3-4 passives and perks each, as if a designer had gone "this character is underwhelming, so let's slap something else on them." You end up with a character that's just a grab bag of cool stuff, which doesn't address their flaws and muddles their identity.
Character design is hard and I suck at this too. Wait til you see the Legend I worked on (it's still gonna be a bit). We all do our best, and it's much easier to set goals for existing content than for new content.
I have a question i'd like to sneak in: How was the balancing process on her ultimate? Y'all managed to make it useful, but not annoying to play against. How did you make a CC ability in Apex work so well? It HAD to of taken a while.
It was really hard, absolutely! The team did an amazing job on making an AOE vacuum, the most dreaded type of CC ability, and not make it dominate the game over gunplay. In playtest the ability vacillated wildly between absolutely useless and way too strong. I think one of the great insights that helped it most was that the AOE doesn't need to hold you or continue to move you into the middle very strongly if there's one very strong initial pull, so the best case situation was nailing them with the initial implosion and after that, the black hole got to be a nuisance that slightly warped your pathing. It came in super hot too; we massively increased the initial pull in literally three days before the patch was made because we were worried it wasn't doing enough. We made the conscious decision to rather risk shipping something OP than risk shipping another underwhelming-at-release character. I'm very glad we did; we likely need to take a little power out of her now, but it's nothing ...
Read moreMaybe it's because only people that are good at her are playing after the nerf?
That may play a very small role. She went from second most picked to third most picked, from 15.4% to 13.5%. That's a small enough drop that I don't think this alone explains it.
I mean the shield recharge is a good idea. Lifeline can trivialise squad healing if used correctly, so giving Watson a somewhat more reliable way to regen shields is great, even if it is only her own shields.
Absolutely, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't eventually a legend with passive shield regen, but again: this is a pure power up with no implications on gameplay for Wattson or her enemies. Wattson is already very powerful, so just handing her more passive power isn't the answer.
Read moreCan I ask a question? When you say Horizon is the "strongest legend in the game" - do you mean it? Or do you simply mean she has the highest encounter win rate.
Because, not a single professional apex player would say horizon is the strongest player in the game. Not a single one.
However, good players gravitate towards Horizon for her mobility, since you turned pathfinder into a walking fridge. Do you not equate for this in terms of what legend is "strongest"? Pathfinder no doubt used to be the "strongest" or one of them, but you nerfed the grapple and hitbox so now better players are moving to other characters.
Wattson for example is evidently only played by a small amount of people. I would wager the majority of Wattson players are highly skilled players still playing Wattson from a time when she was firmly in the competitive meta (she is not anymore).
Therefore, your average Wattson player is probably of a much higher skill than your average Mirag...
Horizon has the highest trio win rate in the game (although not by much; her and Wraith and Gibby now make up the runaway grouping at the front of the field). Wraith still beats her in encounter win rate by 2%, but encounter win rate is still a very stark picture (Wraith is at 57%, Horizon at 55%, and the next highest legends are Octane and Wattson at 51%). We want to be more careful with encounter win rate because it is so open to interpretation. I think when we speak of the power of a legend, we speak of their trio win rate now.
And I've said this before, but I talk a lot about power here because a lot of the people posting here have wildly varying ideas of what is and isn't actually effective in the game, but we do not base our balance decisions exclusively on data. Data shows us where to look, but then we apply our own judgment.
What?!
That...that's..huh?
Oh I'm not too keen on seeing what that means for nerfs for her Tac'; I fear we may end up on a Pathfinder pattern for her. 😔
Really want to avoid doing that again. We've got some other ideas of where we can hit her power, and honestly her win rate bump after the nerf may just stem from the fact that her pick rate also decreased a bit (so casual Horizon players, who tend to be less good at her, may have abandoned her a bit, leaving us with more hardcore Horizon players). We've got to let that settle for a few weeks.
Our theory internally right now is that she's too safe with the tactical. She can use it in so many situations to get out of trouble, and most frustratingly, she can sit atop the tactical and use a battery while A/D strafing faster than she could on the ground. We're looking at move speed while on her tactical and acceleration while on her tactical to see if we can at least turn her into a bit more of a sitting duck if she chooses to sit on top of it. Not sure how that's going to turn out yet.
But really if anything the Pathfinder changes have taught us that attacking the hitbo...
Read moreWhat if the fences had an "Active" and "Passive" mode, whereas Active served as a visual deterrence and Passive served as an automated trap (akin to Caustic's gas) ?
Maybe make it so the Active trap causes actual damage, whereas the Passive trap only temporarily slows the player down.
I don't think this would do much, but I wanna jump on this comment to talk about how we think about updating/making a character. What a lot of people here do, understandably, is start from ideas they think might be cool. A lot of junior game designers do that too. You can tell someone's in that pattern if most of their suggestions start with "what if". I call this what if design.
In contrast, as you talk to more experienced designers, you start seeing a problem-first approach emerge. Before we even think about anything we could do, we try to diligently identify and quantify the problem: what exactly is wrong, and how bad is it. This is a problem-first approach and it tends to be somewhat underwhelming because very often once you look at the problem and its impact, the right conclusion to come to is "there's no need to do anything; the problem isn't actually that bad".
Where I'd like us all (including myself; I suck at this) to get is goals-first design. Before we ...
Read moreLogical, if u think Wraith gets nerfed almost every update and now ability based(and pick rate)she is too weak.
I never said Wraith is too weak! She's still number 2 in pretty much every respect, and there's still a wide gulf between her and the rest of the field in encounter win rate. If anything she's still too strong, but now there's two people that are too strong at the top, if that makes sense.
How about wattson taking reduced or no damage to other Wattson's fences? Probably not an original one.
One of her quips says, " I don't wear all of this gear for nothing."
Not a big fan of mirror picks countering each other. It's part of the game for caustic and probably too late to undo there, but I'd rather not introduce other mechanics like that.
Interesting horizon took top spot here, shes for sure got a powerful kit even with the tac nerf. I can't even count the amount of times she silently drops behind me.
Super fun to play though.
Fun fact: after we nerfed her tactical, her winrate went up even more.
And by fun fact I mean depressing fact that defies explanations.
I actually enjoy the gamemode, but maybe to quell some of the issues you should make it that it only goes up to purple, and then reverts to regular care packages after that round? I feel like early and mid game it is fine as is, but late game they shouldn't be dropping.
We really don't wanna mess with the loot game of the base BR to this degree permanently. Lots of issues that we're seeing now already (around high saturation of red guns deciding late game fights for instance) and just generally this being a case of novelty for novelty's sake (which is exactly what you want for a time limited takeover and not what you want for the long term).
The loot game is the beating heart of a BR. You better have a REALLY good reason to make a change of this magnitude, and I don't see one.
devtrackers.gg