Breach Designer’s Notes

Welcome back to Designer’s Notes! We want to give you insight into our vision for each Legend or Weapon, what challenges we’ve identified, and what changes we are making in pursuit of those goals. 

Below, we will discuss:

• “Forced Metas”

• The state of Apex Legend’s Time to Kill (TTK)

• Changes to Fuse, Catalyst and Bloodhound

• Adjustments to Marksman Rifles and Shotguns

Welcome to Designer’s Notes for Season 28: Breach - we are excited to kick off our 7 year anniversary this season! We are bringing more changes to weapons and Legends this season in the hopes of addressing some meta pain points, providing a fresh coat of paint to various parts of the game, and evolving our combat experience to include Hardlight.

When making decisions that impact the meta, we rely on years of Apex design experience, player feedback, and the data from all the matches from the prior season. Our aim with this blog is to provide ongoing transparency and reasoning for why we are making the balancing decisions we are. We want you to head into your games with this knowledge, discuss how the changes are landing, and let us know what is working and what is not. We want your feedback, we’re always listening! Your continued feedback is critical in helping us tune Apex and make the best competitive Battle Royale it can be.

We want to talk about perceptions that the team is “forcing a meta” in Apex. When making changes, our intention is always to take what is languishing, and give players compelling reasons to engage and compete. We want players to be excited to leverage different parts of the game, and learn and develop new strategies to get you to the Champions screen more often. A major piece of this is tuning up and re-working Legends and weapons to make them more viable choices.

When making adjustments, it’s challenging to hit the nail exactly on the head. With that in mind, we have two potential outcomes to consider: under- or over-tuning. We have found that if we under-tune, players do not engage with those changes at all. Making changes that don’t move the needle and keeps the meta stale and unchanged is a worse outcome than if we were to over-tune and create a hot meta focused in one particular area. So we lean on impactful swings which can sometimes go further in the other direction.

Since we know hot metas can quickly become frustrating to play, we have developed processes to address these frustrations sooner rather than later. We learned valuable lessons with Ash being dominant for so long last year and a Peacekeeper meta that was frustrating to combat in Season 26. Using your feedback and game data, we have gotten better at making these adjustments in a timely manner. Sometimes making balance tweaks to particularly problematic pain points in the days following major updates.

With balance in Apex the aim is to have more pieces of the combat sandbox be viable for each split. Metas naturally emerge and coalesce around a subset of weapons and Legends. If anything has a slight advantage in the sandbox, it will rise to the top. Our goal is to have the entire meta pool of Legends and weapons that players coalesce around be dynamic and exciting to play. We are not there yet, we still occasionally experience metas that are too concentrated, but thanks to your feedback we are improving each and every split.

We know Time to Kill (TTK) is an important topic in our game. A year ago, in Season 24, we made the decision to bring TTK down a bit by buffing our weapons across the game and removing helmets. We want to share a little more about why we did this.

Over many seasons, Apex’s TTK drifted higher and higher as various weapons slowly got nerfed and we brought in more deterministic ways to get better armor. We felt the higher TTK resulted in players valuing mobility too much over tactical positioning. Mobility will always be core to Apex, but we do not want it to be the only measure of success and skill. The current state of TTK is more comparable to launch Apex Legends. We actively referenced those earlier seasons where the TTK was lower and made the choice to bring the current game more in line with that metric. 

It was a deliberate decision to bring the TTK down mainly through the weapons themselves instead of just armor and health. Adjusting each weapon allows us to dial in specific parts of the TTK and bring more nuance to the combat experience. Over the past year of monitoring community feedback, experimenting with small changes, playtesting and evaluating data, we think the TTK is in a good spot. We will continue to monitor, tweak and adjust.

2026-01-19 through 2026-01-25

Fuse has traditionally had a strong pick rate in unranked and lower Ranked tiers, but as you rise up the ranks his presence basically disappears. This indicates that people enjoy some elements of Fuse’s playstyle, but it’s too weak to compete at a high level. This trend also shows up in his match win rates, where he is consistently among the lowest:

2026-01-19 through 2026-01-25

The two main complaints we see the most are 

1. Fuse’s ultimate is too difficult to reliably impact the match, and 

2. Fuse’s abilities put himself at too big of a risk to follow up on

With that in mind, refreshed Fuse’s ultimate to give it more opportunities to affect the battlefield, and make sure he felt like he had the proper tools to follow up on the openings he (or his teammates) create. We wanted to maintain his core identity - he should still be fun to pick up and play with a barrage of explosives at his fingertips. But we also want characters to feel viable as you progress in skill and Ranked tier, and we’re hoping that with this set of changes we’ll see Fuse’s win rate increase across the board.

Fuse has a new version of his ultimate, The Motherlode. This fires off a mortar that damages enemies near where it lands, then creates waves of smaller explosives around it. It also has a breach mode, which pierces through cover and can damage enemies behind cover that would normally be safe from other barrages (like the ultimates of Gibraltar and Bangalore). We tightened up the tactical, letting you fire it off more quickly and accurately to reduce how long you have to be vulnerable when using it. To make it easier to follow up on enemies you tag, he is no longer slowed by explosive damage and his tactical’s duration has been halved.

New Upgrades

• Pyro Techniques creates fire patches from the explosions during The Motherlode, which is especially helpful at denying space in chokepoints or small rooms.

• Knuckle Jumper lets Fuse get an explosive boost off of his own Knuckle Clusters, helping him close the distance on damaged enemies or create distance from more mobile attackers.

• Reignition recharges your ultimate as you deal explosive damage, turning you into a true artillery master.

Catalyst has occasionally seen good usage since her release, but for a while has been at or near the bottom of the pick rate charts no matter what rank you look at. With recent improvements to Wattson, Rampart, Caustic, and Newcastle, Catalyst’s ability to control space has fallen well behind the curve. Her problems are often seen as the opposite of Fuse’s - while people find good value with her ultimate, the tactical is not very impactful.

We plan on making bigger changes to her kit in the future, but for now we wanted to make her more competitive now instead of waiting to release everything at once. In particular, we wanted to leverage her unique ability as a Controller to use her tactical both offensively and defensively.

Catalyst’s tactical is now roughly 50% bigger, has less delay before it activates, and lets you place one more trap than before. It also has a farther throw range with less of an arc, making it easier to place close to you or harass enemies by throwing it at them. Her ultimate now has a few quality-of-life buffs, including the ability to deploy it horizontally. This is especially useful for proactively setting up a barrier that your allies can easily retreat through but enemies will struggle to follow.

New Upgrades

• Hidden Spikes lets her tactical act more like a trap by hiding the spike pool until enemies get nearby.

• Sole Piercer sits opposite Hidden Spikes at level 2, adding 5 damage per hit to the tactical and reducing the activation delay even more for those times when you want to harass enemies more aggressively.

Bloodhound has also fallen behind in their role following the release of Sparrow and buffs to Valk, Crypto, Vantage, and Seer. With short scans and a long ultimate cooldown, it’s difficult for them to compete in the Apex stage, as evidenced by an ever-dwindling pick rate. It was often felt like all of the upgrades were “must haves” to make the character feel viable.

2026-01-19 through 2026-01-25

This is only the start; let us know how these changes feel to help inform future work for Bloodhound. But we have room to add some power back into their kit and make Bloodhound feel like the frightening hunter they should be.

The ultimate has the biggest changes - the cooldown is reduced by 90 seconds, the activation time is reduced, and knocks within the ultimate add to the duration. Also, after activating your ultimate, the increased FOV will shift back to your normal FOV after a few seconds instead of persisting for the whole duration. Additionally, the tactical’s scan is 1 second longer and Flock is now in the base kit.

New Upgrades

• Taste of Blood is back, regenerating 50 health when knocking enemies while your ultimate is active to let you chain kills more frequently.

• Raven’s Flight is a new Level 2 upgrade that doubles the distance your ravens can ping enemies.

• Hunter’s Agility at level 3 makes activating your tactical much quicker, especially good for those looking to use the tactical in closer quarters.

This season there are two major trends we’re focusing on when it comes to the weapon sandbox. Overall we’re looking to reduce Marksman’s ability to fully lock down long ranges and sightlines, essentially trapping teams from trying to make plays, while simultaneously turning up the heat in CQC with some exciting shotgun changes. This is only a taste of what’s in store in Breach!

We’ve made various changes to marksman weapons over the last few patches to try and curb their upward momentum but their strengths are hard to deny in the current meta.

2026-01-19 through 2026-01-25

We’ll be taking a much bigger swing at each marksman weapon individually to try and smooth out their unique power spikes. These changes should start to take the edge off some of our longer range weapons and create more breathing room for rotations on the battlefield and player loadout expression. Here are a few examples: 

Bocek Bow

• Reduced draw time

• Damage reduced to 60 (was 65)

30-30 Repeater

• Slightly reduced charge time

• Reduced charged damage

• Decreased base damage

G7 Scout

• Enters the Care Package

Another area that needs attention is shotguns. We’ve had some interesting shotgun metas in recent seasons where individuals like the Peacekeeper were running the town while the rest of the shotguns collected dust.

2026-01-19 through 2026-01-25

This time around most of our shotguns are getting a suite of updates to improve their consistency and viability, here are a couple examples:

EVA-8

• Increased fire rate

• Tighter blast pattern

• Hopup: Double Tap - Adds burst fire mode

Mastiff

• Removed a pellet from the blast pattern

• Increased damage per pellet to 19 (was 16)

• Hopup: Dual Shell - Reload 2 shells at a time

We hope this blog has been helpful in continuing your understanding of the dev team’s decision making processes behind seasonal meta changes for Apex Legends. For a comprehensive guide to all changes for 28.0 be sure to check the Patch Notes, dropping on February 9th, 2026!