Daniel, unrelated comment, but wont the nerf to crypto emp damage his teamplay a little too much?
I think he was already kinda lackluster in casual play (im a monkey, i dont even play ranked) and i was expecting buffs to his usefulness outside utility.
Cheers and thanks for your work and answer
If you look around the thread, that's literally the number one thing that everyone's bringing up ;) I've replied to it a bunch in some of the other comments, forgive me for not repeating myself again.
It’s because his head is to big lol
He has the identical head hit box that all other mid sized legends have!
Ah haha, very cool. I suspected it was a dev build feature.
For what it's worth, there have been times where I've scanned and been unable to locate my target (just like my eyes being unable to lock onto a scanned target due to visual clutter or whatever reason) and I was thinking something big and obvious like that would help with immediate target identification.
I could see the health bars causing too much visual clutter on it's own though, as in the video with like 10 dudes being scanned at once... but that seems a bit edge case eh?
Cool feature to play test though. Imagine the possibilities on target prioritization or being able to weigh the odds of your push.
Yeah it's definitely SPICY.
Would be a lot better if you would just release such data. Also how do you correct that in your data? I hope you don't use the rank as indication of skill because there are bots in silver and there are people who smurf or dont play ranked much
I think if you read through this thread you get a pretty good idea of why it's not always smart to release data like this. People get the impression that you make all your decisions based solely on this data, and it's very easy to read whatever you want to read out of data, even with no malice whatsoever.
The TLDR is data is a great way for us to know where to look first; before we put any changes into the game, we need to have a really good internal theory of why the change is necessary, have playtested the change, and have beaten it up in both theory and practice. It's hard to communicate that level of nuance in a reddit reply.
Is Bangalore going to have a slight buff in the future? I mean she isn't bad but I feel like she needs a little something so she becomes the perfect legend. All the buff given to others just make her underwhelming.. :(
She has a buff in 6.0! I don't know how much of a difference it will make of course.
I would ideally like to do more work on her, but she's not the most pressing legend to work on. Her biggest problem is that her ultimate is kind of underwhelming, but she has very loyal players, a very healthy pick rate, and very balanced win rates no matter how you slice it. I'd want to be careful not to break a legend that's in a really good spot right now.
Read moreOn the off chance that you reply, I've had a question about win rate statistics for a while now.
Do encounter win rates take into account the possibility that players of lower or higher skill are likely to pick different characters? Just for example let's say that bangalore vs pathfinder. Bangalores kit is designed as a rather simple to use kit while pathfinders kit is designed for high level positioning choices and his grapple is imo one of the hardest tactical to adapt to using well.
I often see devs using encounter win rates or general game win rates as a reasoning behind changes or lack of changes and wonder what level of multivaried analysis is used and by extension are the stats being used correctly.
Given that sbmm is far from perfect i dont think that it's safe to assume players are on equal footing in fights in terms of raw skill.
I hope you respond and I do appreciate everything that you guys do for this game. I'm a massive fan and Im not ...
Yeah, coming back to this again: data does not dictate what we do. We look at lots and lots of different data points, play the game, watch pros and streamers, use our design sense etc. I always put it like this: data will inform what legends I look at FIRST, but that's about it.
Honestly I wish EMP didn't slow anyone, friend or foe... it just isn't a fun mechanic to use or have used against you, since being a sitting duck sucks. I'd much rather see something like a static'd minimap or even some kind of disruption to sound/pings. Losing your sense of sound would be huge for getting the drop, without the enemy team feeling like they had no real option other than to not be hit by the ult.
Trust me, we're constantly trying to find effects that aren't slow / aim slow. But because Apex is a gun game first and foremost, we really can't just have abilities do a bunch of damage either.
I like the idea of messing with players' minimap / sound, but I'm doubtful how effective this would be. A lot of players play without sound / with loud music / while talking to their friends on voice chat; additionally, how much do people look at their minimap in the heat of battle? (Actual question! I never do, but maybe I'm just bad)
We're creeping up on "...and also blind them!" territory, which is very dangerous. I would absolutely like to give EMP something that isn't slow though.
I think crypto should be able to throw his drone into the air without going into it immediately. That way he's not out of the fight as long and can use the drone in fights
We've talked about that, but this would require a bit more work than just flipping a flag that allows the drone to use beacons. There's a few things we'd love to do in terms of a mini rework of how he uses his drone. I really love the idea of throwing it at a wall and having it stick there like a camera, and then you can switch into it and detach it and fly it around as usual. To be clear: no one's working on this yet, but it's something we've talked about.
Intresting, is there a way you can tie that data to time played in rank? Because i know players like me, can hold their own in predator filled pub lobbies but i ONLY play pubs i have maybe 20 games in ranked and 1.15k in pubs so playing silver feels extremely easy to me so i wonder if those are the players your data is showing.
anyways sorry if i came off as rude and thanks for the reply! i really love this game and appreciate you devs
I'm really not a data scientist, but we do have an entire team of data scientists that are doing just that! I trust that they are doing a good job identifying and correcting for biases in the data. (I'm mediocre at best at statistics, but have been doing this kind of work for a long time now and have learned to rely on colleagues who ARE good at it. No one dev can be good at everything, unless you're ConcernedApe)
Wow that's actually very interesting data. I would never have guessed PF still having such a high encounter win rate. Although objectively you can state with this data that you cant buff pathfinder because of this, it still just doesn't ''''feel'''' that great (this is subjective) to have such a high cool down for his grapple. I wish there was a way to go back to the earlier Path seasons without it being massively OP because he was just so fun to use.
Yeah one of the reason I was scared about posting this data is because I don't want to give the impression that data rule us. That's not the case at all. I showed this just because it's such a clear outlier that aligns with what other datapoints and anecdotal information point toward as well.
Thanks for taking your time reading replies.
Crypto is my favorite legend because he rewards good time management and positioning 2 parts of yourself simultaneously making him one of the hardest legends to master. The problem in casual in season 3 is that solo queue Cryptos hindered their teammates a little bit with the stun. In high competitive level teammates communicate more and can warn others that they are about to EMP, but some players will not expect their random Crypro teammate to stun them.
Maybe the EMP should stun teammates only if they recently used a portal or totem? Maybe? I don't know. But I thank you for reading this.
That seems really really hard to learn. I think that would just make the EMP team slow feel unpredictable.
Definitely the loudest feedback I've gotten so far is about this nerf. That doesn't mean this alone is going to make us go back about it, but it definitely means I'll be playing a bunch of Crypto tonight and watching a bunch of Crypto, and if it seems that bringing back the team slow really hurts Crypto, I'm totally down to revert the change.
Have you considered damage numbers on the drone, for more clarity on how much damage you do?
Those are in 6.0, unless I messed up! But yeah, absolutely, they should have always been there. The bug that made it so the drone had a misleading hitbox was the same bug that also suppressed damage numbers.
I appreciate the transparency but this data is useless and I believe your ability to see the bigger picture is clouded by staring too closely at specific data points. In your view, would the game be perfectly balanced if every legend had the same rate for everything?
Pathfinder's rate of friendly revives is likely significantly lower than Lifeline's or Gibraltars. We need to nerf them so they fall in line with other legends!
That is definitely a risk when looking at data, you're right! I'm going to have to ask you to trust me that I'm not just looking at the one data point here. I brought this up as a way of showing just how much separation there is between the two top performers and the rest of the pack. We look at all kinds of data, sliced in all kinds of ways, and on top of that we of course play the game a lot, watch a lot of professional play, watch a lot of streams, and discuss among designers what we think the state of the game is.
And I think I said somewhere further up thread that of course we don't need everyone to be 50%. That'd be silly. It's not about "what number is or isn't okay", it's about broad patterns; and the broad pattern is "everyone's pretty much grouped up in one field except for two very clear outliers". This holds up across all skill levels.
Hi! I really hope to see more Loba buffs in the future as I really love playing as her but she doesn't feel as impactful as the other legends or maybe just not as useful (since too situational). Have you considered giving Loba:
- Ability to open the additional section of blue bins.
- Ability to grab allies' banners through her Black Market.
- Reduced cast time on Cat's Burglar.
- Reduced delay/momentum right after a successful Jump Drive landing.
- Additional utility to her passive.
- Additional utility to her Ultimate, maybe a secondary effect that might turn the black market into an offensive ultimate?
I agree Loba will need more buffs! Some of these are very niche and step on other legends' specialties (like Lifeline's blue bins). I'm not sure what to give her for her tactical; we could definitely accelerate the bracelets a little. We've got one more buff to her ult/passive that's currently in playtesting, so no guarantee it'll happen, but I'm hoping to have something else for her in 6.1.
Please consider, that Pathfinder now is mostly played by og pathfinder Mains, because of all the nerfs, no one else wants to play him. So these people are skilled with his grapple AND often better than average players as the good players tended to use him in the past. So even if u nerf him more, this chart is most likely to go even higher
This isn't true at all! We saw a quick dip in pick rate after the 35s change, but after 3-4 weeks it was back to where it was before. Anecdotally I'm sure there's a few PF mains who stopped playing him, but as a whole they're still the exception.
Do you think this has anything to do with his hitbox as well? his head specifically
Their head hitbox is identical to all other head hitboxes for mid sized legends.
Read moreI understand the desire to ensure a balanced legend pool and can easily empathize with his frequent repositioning mid-fight being too powerful, But grappling was the mechanic I loved most about this game. Just trying fun grapples or aerials was a huge draw, and with the current cooldown I'm reluctant to ever waste a grapple out of fear I'll be shot in the open with no escape options. Have you considered a cooldown that's not fixed? For example:
- A shorter grapple has a slower cooldown (to mitigate mistakes where you barely travel or get caught on something immediately)
- A shorter cooldown if you're not being shot at or shooting? I guess I'm trying to think of ways to ensure he can't constantly reposition during a fight, but would allow players to enjoy him during the non-combat portions of the game
Personally I've basically dropped him from my rotation (which I guess was the goal?) but especially when I'm just tr...
To be clear: the goal wasn't for PF mains to drop him.
I joined Respawn in January, and pretty much the most discussed thing around Legends at the time was what to do about Pathfinder's grapple. All your arguments were brought up: he's clearly iconic for the game, and using the grapple is one of the most enjoyable and cool things to do. It provides a long, deep learning curve and creates incredible highlight reels.
But it was also really, really busted. (It shipped with, what, an 8s cooldown?)
One of the biggest things Respawn addressed when making Apex was what they call the Brownian motion problem in TF2. Think of it like this: when you lose sight of an enemy, there's a blob of physical space they could possibly be in that grows every second. That uncertainty makes the game unpredictable and favors in-the-moment reflexes over careful tactical play. Particularly in a 3 player squad mode where holding and pushing frontlines is core to the fun, this is reall...
Read moreThe overlay they added when Bloodhound scans at 24:17 is brutal. Maybe that's just because they added in so many dummies to show it off, but holy hell you can't see a damn thing.
That's an experimental feature that wasn't supposed to be in the video :x My bad, sorry!
Is there going to be any re-work coming to Lifeline, regarding her tactical revive? I was almost certain something was going to be done in this season. I think her tactical revive is great in theory, but almost everyone I've talked about it with seems to agree that there needs to be some sort of cooldown.
Is there any objective way of gauging this? Obviously our comments are just anecdotes. I was just surprised to see no mention of it.
Oh really? I didn't get that impression at all, and I've not heard it brought up anywhere before. I'm pretty sure Lifeline's revive passive is in a great spot. As always, I can be wrong, but I'd love to see a better case for why it's problematic. The very fact that it requires one of your teammates to be down limits how powerful it can be.
24:18... can bloodhound see health bars???
That's an experimental feature I'm working on at the moment, wasn't supposed to be in this video! Sorry!
It's not had a lot of playtesting (I think half a test's worth so far), so there is absolutely no way of telling if this will ship or not. The hope would be to put it on BH and Crypto, if it turns out to be an acceptable feature. That's a big if. Most experimental stuff we work on doesn't ship.
(And to be extra-clear: this will NOT be in patch 6.0)
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