Overclocked Designer’s Notes

Welcome back! Below, we will share insights into meta changes and new mechanics coming in 29.0. We’ll discuss the rationale for the implementations, including the opportunities we’ve identified, and our desired impact for each of the following:

• Apex’s NEWEST Legend: Axle

• The NEW Deathbox Respawn mechanic

• The NEW Chain Healing mechanic

• Giving Vantage some advantage

• Making Conduit a more appealing pick

• Settling down Alter’s dominance

Note: As the weapons team was laser-focused on introducing a new Elite Weapon in the 28.1 update, they were largely focused on maintenance for the start of Overclocked. We will return with more discussion around weapon balance in the next Designer’s Notes blog. 

Welcome to Designer’s Notes for Overclocked! We appreciate all the time you put into playing Breach, and the feedback you gave all season long. With your feedback and our internal match data, we have been tuning and adjusting to get ready for Overclocked.

We are excited to add Axle to the roster this season. She is going to bring new, compelling ways to play, and to contribute to interesting team comps. Axle is the star, but we are bringing some changes to the existing roster as well; we are tuning up Vantage and Conduit, and reining in Alter a bit to tamp down frustration. Changes are coming to the core combat sandbox as well. We are bringing a new way to respawn right at your ally’s Deathbox, and giving you the ability to chain your healing items.

Our aim with this blog is to provide ongoing transparency and reasoning for why we are making the balancing decisions and feature additions with each update. We want you to head into your matches with this knowledge, discuss how the changes are landing, and let us know what is working and what is not. Your continued feedback is important in helping us tune Apex and make the best competitive Battle Royale it can be!

Our newest Legend, Axle, was simply giving everyone else a head start. Players will have to keep their heads on a swivel with how she transforms the battlefield into a racetrack.

Axle was born after a big-picture assessment of the state of movement in Apex following Valkyrie’s two-year reign in the ALGS. Valk was a popular pick among competitors, and on the other side of the competitive spectrum, Octane was a perennial #1 pick rate. Other Legends with movement abilities have consistently been mainstays in the top five.

This comes as no surprise; fluid movement has always been a staple of Apex, a powerful tool in a BR where positioning is paramount. Our movement deep-dive preceding Axle’s development shone a light on our biggest learning: Characterizing “Movement” as a tool is far too reductive. Just look online: community-driven movement wikis and training videos are everywhere. Movement is the toolbox, and every jetpack boost, soft landing, and grapple is just one of many tools inside. 

Perhaps “cars in a garage” is a more apt metaphor. 

Axle is a powerful machine built around a “sliding” chassis. Her kit emphasizes lateral mobility and vertical enemy displacement, the antithesis to Horizon, fast like Octane, but much more refined. The passive is the moment-to-moment driving experience; the tires on the road, or vibrations through the steering wheel during a high-speed turn - the feedback that the driver gets from their car. The tactical is the engine, powering both team utility and creative solo playmaking (two early goals that appeal to different types of players). Axle’s upgrades are like some nice customization options to allow players to lean into whatever playstyle speaks to them. The ultimate is the sidecar of a motorcycle but if it was detachable and careened towards your enemies in traffic in an unrelenting pursuit (not a great car metaphor for that one).

PASSIVE: DRIFT

Increased speed and control while sliding.

TACTICAL: NITRO GATE

Deploy a speed gate that sends users into a boosted slide.

• Stepping into a Nitro Gate forces users into a speedy slide, where they have greatly increased velocity and lateral control.

• This effect lasts for up to five seconds as long as speed isn’t naturally slowed by an obstacle.

• Manually stopping the slide will end the effect (although it can be maintained through quick b-hops).

• The gate is team agnostic, meaning it has the same effect on friendlies and enemies.

ULTIMATE: KICKSTART

Deploy an enemy-seeking drone that displaces targets on impact.

• Axle fires a drone straight out in front of her, where it traverses close to the ground, in a straight line as it scans for enemies in a wide FoV.

• Once an enemy is spotted, the drone seeks towards the target, closing the gap to get within detonation range.

• If the target cannot outrun (good luck) or destroy the drone before detonation, it will knockback all targets in range up into the air.

• Victims are revealed while airborne, take explosive damage, and are briefly stunned.

LEVEL 2 UPGRADES:

Super Slider: Gain a second Tactical charge.

Automata: Gain a second Ultimate charge.

LEVEL 3 UPGRADES:

Jump Gate: Upgrades the Nitro Gate to give a double-jump.

• Similar to how Octane’s Triple Jump upgrade works, this upgrades the Nitro Gate itself.

• Players can use one double-jump while the Nitro Gate effect is active.

Sliding Shooter: Bullets shot while sliding come straight from inventory instead of magazine.

• Functionally, this allows for longer continuous firing while sliding before having to reload.

• Bullets shot straight from inventory are capped at half the weapon’s max magazine size (i.e. if a purple mag capacity is 30 bullets, 15 bullets will get pulled from inventory before instantly transitioning to the active clip)

Axle is a fierce competitor, demanding the most from her teammates, while giving them the tools to hold pace. We’re very excited to see how players flex the full potential of her kit. She’s a strong addition to the movement toolbox, if you can handle her.

You can now respawn teammates directly from their Deathboxes with a long press-and-hold.

With this new mechanic, we wanted to introduce an alternative way to get your teammates back into the fight, faster than the classic Respawn Beacon process, that feels like a reward for teams that successfully clear and hold an area.

Deathbox Respawns are risky. The process is noisy, visible to nearby enemies and takes a minimum of 7 seconds. Warnings for active Deathbox respawns are similar to using a Respawn Beacon, so make sure the area is completely clear before you start.

Subsequent deaths cause an increasing Lockout Time penalty that temporarily disables Deathbox Respawning. Surviving for longer periods of time resets this Lockout Timer.

Deathbox Respawns create an urgency for would-be third parties, and pushes the pace of the game forward. If you can create uninterrupted time at your teammates Deathbox for a respawn, you’ve earned that right.

This mechanic rewards aggressive play and area control. If you can’t find the window to respawn at a Deathbox, the classic route remains: recover or craft the Banners and use a Respawn Beacon.

We have added Chain Healing options which give you the ability to, while healing, queue another healing item for use as soon as the current heal action completes.

This is a Quality of Life change at its core. Many factors contribute to when and how you heal. Limited resources and timing influence this choice: often meaning that you’re going to spam heal several shield cells rather than wasting the more valuable and limited shield batteries you have. This change is meant to make that existing pattern of spamming the heal button to rip 4 cells in a row smoother and less repetitive.

We’ve equipped you with the choice of how you engage with Chain Healing, there are 3 options in the settings: Off, Single, and Auto - Single being the default option.

Off disables the Chain Healing feature and maintains the current healing behavior and interactions with no difference from previous versions of Apex. 

Single lets you queue one additional heal action. With Single queuing, you must queue each additional heal manually. This will default to queuing the same heal type you are actively using; but you can use the healing menu or healing shortcuts to queue a different heal type than the active one. 

Auto allows you to queue another use of the active healing item, and if you have more of that healing resource and the need to use it, Auto will continuously queue that same item again. Auto will queue these items until you run out of that resource, or the related health pool is full.

Vantage is currently underperforming in fights and as a result is seeing less play overall. Looking over her kit we recognized that, as a sniper, her role becomes more and more difficult the later the game goes on (and playspace shrinks). We really wanted to find ways to keep her kit powerful at every stage of the game.

Data from 2026-04-08 through 2026-04-14

Additionally her passive is one of the best tracking abilities in the game but it is often underused. This signals that the ability is disconnected from the rest of her kit, so we wanted to find a way to help tie her passive into her core gameplay loop. 

PASSIVE

• Added: Tracking a team with Spotter’s Lens will generate 70% of an ultimate bullet

  • 10 second cooldown per team

By having her passive generate ult charge we’re aiming for two things: incentivizing players to use her passive in combat and give more reliable up time on her ultimate. With more reliable uptime on the ultimate, Vantage should have more flexibility with her primary and secondary weapon selection. 

TACTICAL

• Vantage is immune to hard landings exiting the tac

• Increased velocity from 20 meters per second to 21 meters per second

• Increased double jump range from 4m to 7m

• Reduced deceleration at final destination by ~25%

• Cooldown reduced from 20s to 17s

The goal of these buffs is to keep Vantage agile and fight-ready in closer engagements with her tactical.

ULTIMATE

• Press your toggle fire mode button to switch to your Canted sight: A 2x optic mounted on the side of the rifle

  • While canted, rechamber time is decreased from 1.2s to 1.1s

  • While canted, ADS time reduced from 0.5s to 0.4s

  • Bullet scaling is drastically reduced in Canted sights (so be accurate!)

• Increased aiming responsiveness with normal sight

  • Reduced ADS time from 0.6s to 0.5s

• Increased weapon handling in both modes

  • Reduced Holster and Lower time from 0.5s to 0.4s

  • Reduced Deploy and Raise time from 1.5s to 1.3s

• Default normal scope magnification increased from 3x to 4x

It’s time to live out your Vantage quick scope fantasies! Having optics for 2x, 4x and 8x gives her an optic for all ranges of combat. With the increased handling her ultimate is now on par with the Sentinel in CQC. 

UPGRADES

• Tactical Cooldown replaced with Herd Tracker: Pinging an enemy will track the entire team

We wanted to give Vantage an upgrade that highlighted her recon role and saw an opportunity in replacing a more generic upgrade. This should provide a more interesting choice for level 3 upgrades.

As a Legend with a low pick rate that performs quite well relative to other Support Legends, Conduit presents an intriguing design conundrum: why aren’t more players picking her if her match result stats are great?

Data from 2026-04-08 through 2026-04-14

The feedback we’ve gathered points toward a few key reasons, including a lack of individual agency, being overdependent on purple upgrades to feel powerful, and an ultimate that doesn’t keep up with the increased pace of the action. As such, our primary goals are to keep Conduit feeling challenging but rewarding, to increase her playmaking potential, and also to provide her with more opportunities to have successful supportive interactions with her team.

The majority of Conduit’s changes focus on her tactical, including its upgrades, but rest assured, we are aware of the community’s calls to give her ultimate more love. We will take additional time to cook on further changes for her ultimate at a later date.

TACTICAL

Firstly, we’re incorporating Split Charge into Conduit’s base kit with a couple of slight balance tweaks. We want to be cautious about how powerful it can be to have the potential to tac both of your squadmates from the start of the game, but we also believe that having two charges presents players with more chances to have impactful shielding.

NEW UPGRADES

Beyond Split Charge, we’re also saying goodbye to Radiant Transfer (the upgrade, not the ability) in order to make room for two new level 3 upgrades:

• Instant Barrier grants Conduit and her ally an immediate burst of temp shields on using her tac. This should help to bolster that visceral feeling of actually seeing how you’re helping just as much as you’re feeling it.

• Enduring Barrier allows the tac’s regen to persist through damage, highlighting Conduit’s unique style of aggressive support.

PASSIVE

Conduit’s passive is a great tool to keep pace with her squad, but we hear your feedback on its redundancy with the Skirmisher class passive. We want to ensure that, no matter who’s on her team, Conduit feels like she’s getting an effect:

• Savior’s Speed now grants bonus movement speed (in addition to the base effect) when sprinting toward Skirmishers

At the highest levels of play, Alter has been a consistent performer who shakes up fights by being extremely evasive, standing above many of the other legends in her class thanks to the team utility and safety she provides.

Data from 2026-04-08 through 2026-04-14

Data from 2025-04-15 through 2026-04-14

Though we feel like her playstyle drives a fun player fantasy, we want to incorporate a bit more risk into her gameplay formula, making her cunning escapes not quite as “free” as they have felt before.

ULTIMATE

Void Nexus is Alter’s main tool that she and her team use to safely escape sticky situations. To tone down its strength, we’re decreasing its range, increasing the time it takes to recall, and decreasing the delay before the portal to follow her opens.

Altogether, Alter and her teammates will need to be more considerate of how and where they return to the Nexus, while opposing squads will have greater potential for counterplay.

TACTICAL

We’re also increasing the cooldown of Void Passage. While we want to maintain the super on-brand mind games and overall slipperiness provided by her ability to double tac, she’ll need to make a more concerted effort to save those charges up in order to make that happen.

UPGRADES

We wanted to add one final nerf to Void Breacher, the significantly more popular of her level 3 upgrades, which contributes heavily to her late game power and mobility.

None of these aforementioned aspects are nerfed substantially individually, but combined, we expect them to bring her performance and efficacy more in line with healthy standards without altering her playstyle too drastically.

We hope this blog has been helpful in deepening your understanding of the dev team’s decision making processes behind implementing new systems and making balancing changes. For a comprehensive log of all changes coming in Overclocked, be sure to check out the full Patch Notes, dropping on May 4th, 2026!