DanielZKlein

This is something we've talked about and thought through during development and ultimately decided we were not going to do. Come with me on a magical journey as I talk you through just how much game designers overthink everything!

So first of all note that there are a limited number of buttons on a default controller, and we have in fact used all of them! There simply isn't a button left. Now we could use the binding we call "extra character action" (by default bound to d-pad down on controller / H on keyboard), but you'll notice that most of the existing uses of this (for instance, toggling Gibby's arm shield) are infrequent uses (like that toggle). If you've played Valk a bit you'll know by now that you're constantly engaging and disengaging her jetpack; either of those two buttons would be in really awkward spots for that use case.

Okay then how about if we make it purely optional? Surely we could just LET people opt into a binding even if we think it's awkward? ...

I'm kind of upset nobody (that I saw!) asked me this question because I'm getting it like 5 times a day on Twitter, so I'm going to ask myself:

Hey /u/DanielZKlein, any chance we can get the option to bind Valk's jetpack to a key other than jump?

Nah, she's fine.

Pretty straight forward! We identified that the passive hogging all the power was the big issue, discussed a few options to just slightly power down the passive (hitpoints on the shield, cooldown on the shield etc), rejected all of them as too complicated / confusing / unclear, and settled on "no revive shield but you can revive both of your allies at once". Then that freed us up to put a lot of extra power into the tactical and the ultimate and make them real abilities. It was one of the more straightforward updates we've made.

Yeah! Because hands-off revive is already crazy powerful. There was no need to put even more power into it. The kit suffered from the problem of too much power being concentrated in the passive, and we do not solve that by putting more power into the passive.

Can you please explain to me a little bit the impact that the Gas nerf caused on Caustic? How different was his win/loss ratio?

Caustic's win/loss ratio barely changed with the nerf. It went from 5.1% to 5.0%. His PICK rate however dropped a lot, so there's a lot of survivor bias here; the common explanation is that only Caustic mains stuck around after the nerf, so that kind of self selection undid a lot of the impact of the nerf. We're thinking about what to do with him--we could just up the damage again, maybe find an inbetween point where he's okay, but I want us to spend some time thinking of non-damage outputs we could use on the gas. The goal is that people should be terrified of your gas and try to leave ASAP. That's currently not the case, and we will fix it. No ETA, as always.

Haven't looked at Revenant's hitboxes in a while but if memory serves, he's very similar to Pathfinder: tall, but very skinny. We think of hitboxes as the total amount of shootable space exposed to you at one point in time. He clearly has more than Lifeline/Wraith, but not THAT much more.

We wanna avoid modifiers like Fortified and Low Profile going forward; it makes it so much easier to tune weapons when you don't have to take all these multipliers into account. It also feels bad to be reminded that you just take more damage every time you pick the character. I think the way forward is a combination of kit tuning and adjusting hit box sizes. We've got some stuff cooking for your edgelord murderbot (no ETA other than soon-ish) and once that's released if he's still struggling we'll take a look at his hitboxes.

Spideraxe! Buddy! Good to see you over here! It's been forever. For those who don't know: Spideraxe is League of Legends' Frozenfroh. He's everywhere and knows everything ;)

Fun story about Valkyrie: when I got hired at Respawn in December 2019, I immediately got terrified that I wouldn't know how to make characters in this game, so I sat down and sketched out like 9 paper kits for Legends before I knew anything about how this team makes characters and thinks about gameplay. Looking back at them now I'm like, oh boy, did I have a lot to learn. But! One of the characters I sketched out on paper was a jetpack user who could take to the sky to reposition her entire team. Then I came to the office for the first time in early January 2020, booted up the internal build, and saw Steven DeRose's prototype for Valk, and I immediately knew what I had to do.

There aren't many spells that got left on the cutting room floor; when I took her prototype over, she already had jetpac...

It's really early days and I'm probably jinxing myself right now, but she seems to have landed very well? Like she's clearly powerful at 5th in win rate rankings, but not overbearingly so; she came in as popular as most new legends but seems to be stabilizing now in the top pick slot. From playing a lot of Apex since Legacy came out it doesn't seem like she's particularly frustrating to fight either? I don't know, tell me if I'm wrong, but she seems... fine?

She's been hit hard in terms of pick rate which is understandable: she just straight up got hit with a pretty big nerf and another high-mobility Legend was released. Winrate-wise she went from the strongest by far to like 6th? 7th? Out of 16, that's still in the upper half of power. It's super harsh in contrast to where she was before, but that's because she was a really strong outlier in terms of power before. I think if she released at this current state, she'd be just fine. She's roughly where Valk is now (ever so slightly below Valk). It's just that if you were used to her incredibly powerful state before, she'll probably feel like ass right now. Give it a few months for things to shake out and we'll see if she needs follow-up work.

Fences will be fixed soon! I think her shield regen is fine. It's a lot of power, and she's very powerful. I'd rather not keep pushing more power into her into until she becomes overbearing. Until we push her power, how do you say, beyond capacity.

How's Valk performing?

Well so far! She came in at around the 5th spot overall winrate-wise and has been sitting there steadily. Experientially, there's some cheese plays we're looking to fix (like you can ult to a high piece of the level in the last circle and then use the passive+tactical combo to hover out of range while the circle closes), but there's no numerical adjustments we're planning right now. She seems fine! It's fine. It's all fine.

Are you still planning on buffing Rampart and Fuse?

Yup.

Would you consider adding fortified to Revenant?

Nope.

How is Lifeline doing after her change?

Answered this elsewhere: ...

You can place Sheila on a Crypto drone and fly it around the map!

Just kidding. It's a bit too early to talk about her spicy buff because we don't yet know if it'll work and if so when we can ship it. Right now, IF EVERYTHING GOES WELL (which it never does), you can expect it halfway through Season 10. Game dev is hard and takes a long time!

Revenant's still weak and not particularly popular. We have a set of changes we're trying out internally at the moment and they feel fun and fine, but they'll probably not move the needle on power a lot. That may be fine! So long as people playing as him / against him have fun, numbers are fake anyway. And while I can't give you any details on the buffs we're trying out, I can tell you he'll certainly climb to the top.

A little too well? Not sure yet! Let's talk about numbers vs experiences!

Numerically, she's too strong. She wins too often, both across the game as a whole and in every single skill bucket we look at, and she's picked very often (particularly in Arenas). Does that mean we must nerf her right away? No.

Experientially, she's so much better. No longer having the res shield means it's feasible to thirst a downed enemy being revived; but that also gives Lifeline an option to engage you while you're otherwise occupied or when your gun's running dry. Good play on both sides.

Not sure what, if anything, we'll do to her, but I think the changes landed very well. It feels better, IMO, both to play as and against her. It's possible gold backpack is just too cheap in arenas as well, if you're playing that. Maybe we need to nerf her numerically a little bit (like drone heal speed / ult cooldown), maybe we can look at her hitboxes and see where they're too small, but rig...

Well, thank you, I guess, for that opening? Many people on our team also don't like going on Reddit. I wonder why that is!

As for your question, you've seen Starter Kits in Legacy, right? They massively reduced the spawn rate of white chests and removed white incap shields and helmets from ground loot altogether. There might be more work we can do here, but it's not as easy as just saying "hey let's just delete all white loot." Here's how I'd like you to think about it: why is white loot bad? Clearly because it's the worst in the game. Well, what happens if you remove white loot? Now blue loot is the worst in the game. Give it a few months for everything to settle and suddenly you'll see calls for blue loot to be removed.

Looting is an important pillar of the BR: it contributes to RNG, which when applied to the correct degree is very healthy to the game, it drives people to move to different POIs and contributes to overall movement across the map, and gives you part...

Why do you wanna buff Loba? Loba's CRAZY strong now.

Too early to tell; we have only limited data, and the first day or so was impacted by the bug where you could only run OG characters due to inventory server being down. Right now she looks fine, but it could go either way from here in the next week or two.

We started working on Arenas in October 2019; the mode was originally inspired by DotA autochess of all things--it had all these fights going on all over the map at the same time. We very quickly realized fighting the same squad over and over rather than a tournament structure was vastly better--you could actually adapt to what they were doing and react round to round.

I'm really not a level designer. You'd have to ask one of them. What answers I have are gleaned from conversations with the real experts. There's an AMA coming for Legacy at some point--that would be a good time to ask this.