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The Apex Legends crossplay beta is now live and while that's great for those that want to play cross-platform, it's bad news for those that were oddly attached to Wraith's Naruto run.
The crossplay feature has been a long time coming, but it's important to remember that this move is currently still in beta status. That being said, PC and console players alike can team up together for that ultimate win. Or, they can choose to stay in their own platform's pool; dealer's choice.
While this is great news, especially for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 players, the downside is that the new update changed the way Wraith moves in-game. Is it a big deal? No, not really, but I'm not alone in feeling my little weeb heart die a little bit by the fact that the Naruto run is no longer available.
No Naruto run, no game. I don’t make the rules 🤷🏻♀️ https://t.co/Nd4TfFWx1S
— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) October 6, 2020
According to the devs, the reason behind the change to her sprinting animation was simple, but necessary:
Wraith is a very challenging Legend to nerf. We look at Legend performance across a number of axes: how often trios with this Legend on them win games / place highly, how often this Legend gets knock downs vs is knocked down, how often this Legend is picked. Across each and every single one of these axes, Wraith dominates.
And yet each time we hit her abilities (which we've done a lot) she bounces back within a few weeks without bleeding a lot of pick rate. Her kit is uniquely useful both in solo games and in highly coordinated games. Also she's just really cool. We get it.
We don't want to hit her abilities anymore. We think both she and Pathfinder have been pushed to the edge in terms of cooldown and utility nerfs where pushing them any further would make them a lot less fun to play. We don't want that!
So we started looking at other Legend specific things that could give her this power--and discovered that her sprinting animations are unique in how much they artificially shorten her (by hunching over), thus shrinking her shootable area from the perspective of the enemy. It doesn't sound like a lot, but taken together with her already small hitbox, it's a lot of power.
This patch, we're introducing a new set of sprint animations for Wraith. These are much more upright and expose a larger area of her body to gunfire. Now we know her old sprint was iconic and we hate to see it go as well, but we believe this is the best way by far of bringing her in line without having to hit her abilities again. Depending on what we see after these animations go live, we may even be able to put some power back into her abilities (no promises though).
A few other legends also saw some tweaks, including Crypto's drone being able to open loot vaults as long as he has a key, Loba's increased range of her ultimate and passives from 3100 units to 4500, Rampart's increase Sheila's bullet spread tightening timer, and Pathfinder's Grapple cooldown being directly tied to the distance this legend has traveled.
A few weapon changes are also going to be felt with the latest update:
Devotion
- Increasing hipfire spread at a base level and also increasing the spread added while firing.
Spitfire
- We try to keep hipfire numbers consistent with similar weapons of the same class. So, the hipfire spread increase on the Devotion is also being applied to the Spitfire. To compensate, we are reducing horizontal recoil on the Spitfire.
Triple Take
- Reduced fire rate from 1.4 to 1.3.
To see everything new with the new Aftermarket update, including active LTM, check out the full patch notes right here. You can also learn more about how crossplay works with this game, and how to toggle it off, with our previous coverage.
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