DanielZKlein

Hah! I wasn't aware of that change, my bad! That was definitely meant to raise her win rate. We've got another small buff for her in the works (hoping to lower the overall CD of her ult a bit) but honestly not sure it'll do much. What we'd really love to do is let people take more than 2 items out of her ult, but that will require some amount of UI work, which takes time (and the people who can do it are scheduled to work on other stuff). Not sure what and how much she'll get, but I definitely think she should have a Lifeline-like effect on her squad's chance of winning a game even if her encounter win rate isn't super high. Interestingly it's the other way around right now: her encounter win rate's pretty good but her overall squad winrate isn't.

I never had devs talk to me when I grew up playing games, and I wanted to ask them so many questions. Now that I'm on the other side of the looking glass it feels like the least I can do.

We'll never be able to get to all comments, but we're trying! Thanks! <3

Speaking as a former community manager myself, this isn't really something our colleagues in community can do; I'm a game designer and as such can answer (some) in-depth game design questions, but even I can only speak to a small fraction of game design (basically Legend design) and it's hard for me to keep up. I'm wary of setting expectations ("this guy will always reply!") that I can't live up to.

It uh did not? At least not really: his encounter win rate's much the same, his trios win rate went up a tiny bit but is almost back down to where it was before, and his pick rate is behaving exactly as before: insanely high at low ranks, pretty low at high ranks.

That said, it clearly made him more fun and gave up highlight reels without causing any real damage (that I can see at least; tell me if I'm wrong!), so that's still a win in my books.

I'm trying but I'm getting so many messages and there's only so much time in the day when I also have to, you know, work work ;P

That really goes against the pattern though, because he does hurt and slow himself with the EMP; that's meant to push you to make sure the drone isn't near you when you EMP.

Not sure what you mean? This was fixed on the same day this thread got made? Here's the announcement from the official twitter:

https://twitter.com/PlayApex/status/1275583503636168705?s=20

There's no way to do this question in a quick answer, but I'll try! It's a bunch of us designers coming together and generally starting out by looking at the data to identify candidates for buffs/nerfs. We ALWAYS double-check the data with our own insight and analysis on how these characters actually affect the game. Then we think through what a good buff/nerf would be (which is a giant topic all on its own), pitch it to the group, and if no one has any good reasons not to do it, implement it and start playtesting it. Assuming nothing bad comes up during playtest, we ship it.

Which changes?

I do think Loba needs some love. We've seen pick/win rates fall off over time, with particularly her win rates on their way to the bottom. Not sure what we'll do yet. We have some thoughts.

Does not look like there's any room for a buff, sorry!

Nah, we separate data from LTMs. When I'm making statements about character's pick / win rates I'm talking only about Trios / Ranked.

That's okay! Taking something away players are familiar with hurts immediately; giving them new power they have to learn to appreciate will only start to feel good gradually over time. This is pretty much precisely the feedback we expected.

This is a really, really, really complicated question. The best TLDR I can give is we look at pick rates and win rate broken down by skill buckets to see these trends; but every legend has meaningful pickrates in all skill buckets so in the end we do need to make sure they're balanced everywhere.

It all went up, up, up. Here's his win rate:

https://imgur.com/XELcNHg

(other legends obscured)

In pick rate he went from bottom 5 to top 4.

We'll keep our eyes on him, but from what I'm seeing his ult is finally doing what it should do, allowing teams to APE OUT.

We talked about that before we even conceived of the drone rez, where it was just Lifeline's old rez but the shield lingers. I like this version better; if there's enemies looking at you when you finish the rez you SHOULD be downed. That's part of the strategy layer of the game.

Lifeline's the second most powerful character right now (after Wraith, catching up to her) and it's not been long since the patch; she's still climbing. I don't think we can give her anything else right now.

Yeah I definitely want us to do more of that! Overwatch also has the Experimental mode, which I'm super jealous of. I don't know how effective it is at getting the feedback they need, but from the outside it looks very cool. There's definitely some appetite for this kind of thing at Respawn, but again, not my department.

Right now I wouldn't touch him. He dropped some after the nerf to 35s (but not as much as you would have expected), and he's been climbing steadily back. He dropped from 5.6% match winrate (as in, any given squad with a Pathfinder in it on average had a 5.6% chance to win a game) to 5.1% (that is a drop from 2nd place to 5th place), but he's back to 5.5% / 3rd place already. He's also 3rd highest in encounter win rate (chance that in any given fight involving Pathfinder the Path will die or kill the enemy).

I think PF is in a unique position where literally every part of his kit is perfect BOTH for casual and for competitive play; beacon scanning, grappling hook, and zipline all have great uses both selfishly and for the team. I think that's what makes him so resilient to nerfs: he's still really good even with Grappling Hook at 35s.

Man that was a long ass time ago! Yeah I'm at Respawn now, working on the design team. It'll be a while before you see the first Legend I'm working on, but can't wait to talk about it.

My philosophy on fast heal is that it's not really something you OUTPLAY people with; it's just power. It's just there, and all you had to do was pick her. Whenever possible (and it's not always possible), I prefer putting power into active decisions. Like yeah Gibby gets fast res in dome, but he has to put down dome, which means he has to have been holding on to it for just that moment etc.

Right now Lifeline's climbing like crazy in win rate. I don't think there's room for another buff atm.