DanielZKlein

The last time I heard a community outcry over Caustic was before we put the new functionality in that you can destroy his barrels by shooting them anywhere while they're inflating. My personal feeling was that addressed a lot of the "Caustic is throwing barrels at me like grenades" issues. Do you still feel he's frustrating to fight against?

Sorry, not aware of those! I really just work on Legend design at the moment and I try not to talk about stuff that's outside my immediate area of expertise.

Hit me with that stream link! Especially if you're planning to be on for the new patch tonight.

Bloodhound. Hence the buffs this patch.

I don't wanna give too much data away, sorry! I'm showing this mostly as a demonstration of just how much better than everyone else Wraith and PF are.

We can correct for that in our data! And his winrate is still high even at the lowest skill. In fact, it's WORSE at low skill:

https://imgur.com/D3And22

This is the encounter effectiveness rate for Bronze & Silver only. It's still Wraith (purple) and PF (grey) on top, only there's now even MORE room between them and the rest of our Legends.

I just went in and double checked, but BH definitely does not have a larger head hitbox. They're absolutely identical to every other legend on the mid-size rig (that is to say, everyone who has neither low profile nor fortified). It may visually look a little bigger, but it's precisely the same size as everyone else of the mid sized legends group.

Here's BH's hitboxes: https://imgur.com/Uj1SxQD

Here's Bangalore's hitboxes: https://imgur.com/V6eVaWK

(note Bangalore's head hitbox looks a little bigger but that's just because she's turned her head to the side while...

Yeah it's all we had ready for this patch. She's gonna get a slightly more meaningful buff to her ultimate soon, and I do wanna look at her tactical too, but I can't promise you anything there yet. The tactical is quite tricky: readable, predictable front lines are what keeps Apex fun and competitive. All the visuals and sounds on her tactical that make it clear where she's going and where she's coming from are there to maintain this.

Trust me, if I could justify it at all I'd give the happy robot a much shorter grapple cooldown, I would. But I really, really can't. Here's some spaghetti for you:

https://imgur.com/wKrWhzV

Those are what we call the encounter win rates for different legends across all skill levels. The formula is:

(times a given legend knocks down any other legend) / (times a given legend is knocked down)

The purple line at the top is Wraith. The grey below her is Pathfinder. Do you see how far separated those two are from the rest of the field? We don't need everyone to be at 50%, but those two continue to be such gross outliers, we really can't put any combat power back into them right now. Sorry friend!

Yeah it was globally visible. Those little green puffs of smoke? Most of the time they lied to you.

Trust me, I'll be on twitch tonight at 10pm pouncing on the first BH stream I see. Can't wait to see what a GOOD BH player can do with it. I've had a few amazing ults in playtests, and I'm not very good.

Oh that absolutely is. I replied to it in a bunch of other places; here's one: https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/ibls99/season_6_patch_notes/g1wpufz/

TLDR: if on balance this turns out to push Crypto's winrate down, we will absolutely follow up and buff him. He's currently at one of the lowest winrates and effectiveness rates, so my intention here was 100% to buff him. Hearing from all of you it seems quite likely that the EMP change may overpower the other changes. As always, we'll keep an eye on that and react if necessary.

Right, I hear you. I'm definitely going to be playing a lot of Crypto in 6.0 and watching streamers play him (if you know any Crypto mains that stream, please let me know!). It's absolutely possible that we're wrong about this, and if we are, we'll fix it.

This is absolutely true, and we do take it into account. We do see very similar EFFECTIVENESS between the two legends across all skill levels though.

What do you think is holding him back atm?

The Crypto/Wraith/Rev combo definitely made us take a look at this, but overall we're trying to come up with a better feel for when team slowing abilities are / aren't appropriate. I talked about this a bit more over here: https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/ibls99/season_6_patch_notes/g1wpufz/

Ah, good point! The EMP slowing teammates came from two places:

1) There's this specific Wraith/Crypto/Revenant team we've seen a bunch in pro play, particularly in Japan. It's just a gross hard push that you don't really have time to react to. Part of that was that you could EMP on top of your team and slow the enemy only.

2) Secondly, we looked at where team effects do and do not make sense. We recently removed the team slowdown from Caustic gas; in that case our thinking was the INTENDED use for this is to be defensive. Your team should feel good about hanging out near your allied Caustic's barrels and feel like they're save. For the EMP though, the skill should be in when and where you use it. If you can just fly the drone in alongside your team and fire off your EMP that becomes the obvious best choice.

It's possible that this will hit Crypto too hard and that he really needs this obvious simple best case. As always, we'll look at data and we'll play th...

Absolutely, and that'll get even stronger, but every legend can shine in the hands of a sufficiently strong shield. When making balance changes you've got to look at the full picture, which includes many many BHs failing to do much at all. I speak from experience ;P

I personally don't like that; I want to keep abilities focused on what their strength profile is. I'm sure this would buff BH massively, but the identity of BH ult is "find and hunt down enemies"; if we gave them an incoming damage reduction they would just straight up win more battles with it no matter how they use it. Right now, there's right and wrong times to use it, and I think that's important.

That's correct!