​Overclocked Midseason Designer’s Notes     ​

TL;DRBelow, we will share insights into meta changes coming in 29.1. We’ll discuss the rationale for the implementations, including the opportunities we’ve identified, and our goals for each of the following:“Why wait to tweak Axle?”Axle Nerf DetailsBallistic RefreshPathfinder BuffSeer BuffMad Maggie NerfValkyrie NerfConduit NerfA New Shotgun Hop-Up, and A Hop Up ShuffleRegional Differences in PlayINTRODUCTIONWelcome to Designer’s Notes for Split 2 of Overclocked. We appreciate all the time you spent playing last split, and the feedback you have been giving all season long. With your feedback and our internal match data, we have been tuning and adjusting to get ready for our next update.This split, we are excited to bring impactful updates to Ballistic, Pathfinder, and Seer that create new ways to play. We also have plans to shake-up the hop-ups rotation and reinvigorate the weapon meta.Our aim with this blog is to provide ongoing transparency and reasoning for why we are making balancing choices and feature additions in each update. We want you to head into your matches with this knowledge, discuss how the changes are landing, and let us know what’s working and what isn’t. Your continued feedback is important in helping us tune Apex and make it the best competitive Battle Royale it can be!“WHY WAIT TO TWEAK AXLE?”We had a great start to Season 29 and it was awesome seeing all the different ways Axle impacted the meta. That said, we know Axle has the perception of being a bit too disruptive and we wanted to have an open discussion about it.Ultimately, we aim to tune our new Legends strong; it is an intentional choice. When we release a new Legend, the goal is to drive meaningful impact on the game and encourage players to evolve their strategies and tactics to remain competitive. In the past, we have found that if we ship a Legend – or any feature, for that matter – in a weak state, it has little to no impact; players are simply not incentivized to try something new if it does not shift the meta in a meaningful way and create new ways of play. We know this can be controversial, but we have found it better to tune down a spicy Legend and allow them to settle into their place in the meta, rather than try to tune up a low-impact Legend to make them a more appealing pick. First impressions matter, and if the first impression is lacking, it’s difficult to change minds.We have seen the question many times: why wait to adjust Axle? We saw frustration with Axle at launch, but we also saw a lot of positive reception. With any major additions, it’s important to allow time for the meta to settle and make well-informed decisions backed by match data. As such, we need to gather several weeks of data. There was also the added wrinkle that Axle didn’t require Legend Tokens to unlock for the first two weeks; this obviously meant that she would have a larger representation in match data, so we needed to clear the temporary unlock period to