Overclocked Midseason Designer’s Notes

Below, 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 Details

• Ballistic Refresh

• Pathfinder Buff

• Seer Buff

• Mad Maggie Nerf

• Valkyrie Nerf

• Conduit Nerf

• A New Shotgun Hop-Up, and A Hop Up Shuffle

• Regional Differences in Play

Welcome 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!

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 get definitive data on her usage. After that period, we made some quick decisions to rein in her power a bit by releasing small, mid-split nerfs to her Tactical. With this mid-season update we are going to take another pass with more impactful changes, as we still feel she is not where she needs to be, from a balance perspective, and to assuage some of the frustration.

In the end, we appreciate you working with us to help tune the meta. The match data you contribute by playing and the feedback you give is instrumental in our decision making.

With all that context in mind, what are we doing with Axle? We have been incredibly happy with how much fun players have been having with Axle on launch. We saw her played a ton through her 2-week temporary unlock period, and she’s remained popular beyond that as a great addition to many different squads. But we need to address community concerns and an incredibly high pick rate.

With so many Axles zipping around, we’ve identified a couple of key themes within community frustrations. One, her ability to generate so many Nitro Gates in quick succession makes her mobility too free and can clutter up the battlefield. Two, her Kickstart Ultimate launches its victims in a very predictable trajectory, which is often a death sentence against skilled shooters.

We aren’t racing to nerf Axle into the ground, but these two frustrations are consistent enough that we need to address them directly, and are therefore making changes to Axle in the mid-season split. First, we are replacing her Level 2 upgrade, Super Slider, with a new Upgrade that reduces her Tactical’s cooldown and increases the number of Nitro Gates you can have active back up to the amount she had on release (3 instead of 2). You can see in the following chart that Super Slider was far and away the favourite throughout the release split, even when the competing level 2 Upgrade is also very strong - a key indicator of unhealthy balance.

*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay. 2026-05-27 through 2026-06-02

To address the frustrations with Kickstart, especially in anticipation of more players picking the Upgrade that grants you two charges, we are changing how its ‘boop’ works. Starting in 29.1, when hit by a Kickstart, you will no longer be thrown straight up to freefall back down. Instead, you will be launched in an arc that inherits some of your velocity at the moment you are hit. This gives the Kickstart victim more agency in how they’re moved by the Ultimate, because they now have influence over where they are tossed.

We are approaching tuning Axle from the Upgrade side to keep her core kit fun to use, while at the same time reducing her access to resources when fully upgraded.

In the past, Ballistic had a moment in the sun where he was quite strong but was often frustrating to fight against, a combo that resulted in a set of nerfs. While the nerfs lessened frustrations, they also dramatically lowered his pick rate. With this update we are looking to bring back some of his power while providing important, new counterplay options for players hit by his Overheat. We also want to bring back some of the team utility his Ultimate offered, but in a healthier state. With all of these changes, we’re hoping to scoop his pick rate up off the floor.

*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay. 2025-01-01 through 2026-05-28

We’ve tweaked the Sling weapon so it respawns when Ballistic does, in every game mode. 

The overheat mechanic tied to Ballistic’s Tactical has created a frustrating play pattern. When your gun overheats, your only options become: run away and wait, or just eat the damage. So we’re changing overheat so that it only applies to your currently active weapon or, if you’re unarmed, it will apply to the weapon in your first inventory slot. This will allow you to swap off the weapon that is overheating and use your second weapon freely. By establishing this counter play, it allows us to bring back the power that overheat previously had. 

Ballistic will start with two Tactical charges, overheat damage is back to 50, and there has been some improvements to the delay between firing and activating projectile homing. The overheat will not degrade if you stop shooting or swap weapons but the debuff can no longer be re-applied. We’ve also increased the time from 12 seconds to 15. 

Looking at Ballistic's Ultimate, pre-nerf, the speed given to the team was very strong and made fighting a team buffed by Ballistic very difficult. We wanted to bring some of the speed back to help enable pushing as a team but not make players speedy during the fight. To accomplish this we’ve opted for a sprint boost instead of an overall speed boost.

Extra Bullet: Grants Ballistic one more Tactical charge, allowing for three total. 

Trap Mode: Grants a modified version of Lasting Bullet. This will still have the longer duration of the in-world Whistler and now also deals 35 damage when in its trap state. 

Quiet Time: Has been modified to apply silence on hit instead of on overheat. With this upgrade it will no longer apply the overheat debuff. The silence effect will also have a short slow on impact.

Killing Time: Remains the same but has been moved to level three.

Pathfinder has been a bit outclassed by other Skirmishers and is the lowest it’s been since the beginning of the year.. He’s still very fun to play and can be powerful, but we found that the uptime for his abilities is longer than for other Legends. Changing his hitbox isn’t something we want to explore but we have given him a little something to make him safer on horizontal ziplines.

*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay. 2025-02-03 through 2026-05-28

Pathfinder's new Passive sees him lift his legs up when riding horizontal ziplines. Just kidding, this isn’t a new Passive but it is a small improvement we wanted to add to make him feel safer on ziplines. He does have a large hitbox so this should help him utilize his Ultimate more effectively.

We’re giving Pathfinder’s Tactical two charges and a flat cooldown of 20 seconds. This should help establish more reliable grapple availability. 

We’re speeding up the delivery speed of the zipline. This should speed up the process of setting up and hopping onto the zipline. We’re also reducing the cooldown, which should make you feel more comfortable using your Ultimate more often.

Field Research: Will grant all the Recon class perks instead of just access to the survey beacons. This will now give him the added bonus of seeing threats while ADS.

Ringmaster: Will grant all the Controller class perks instead of just access to the ring console. This will provide the added bonus of overshield while in the ring and the Evac Tower that spawns upon use of the ring console. He will also be able to reinforce Hardlight. 

New Upgrade: We are replacing Grapple God with Landing Gear. This will give Pathfinder better air control and the Soft Landings Passive, allowing for quick recoveries when landing from high heights. 

Seer’s pick rate is still fairly low but he is seeing success when played in higher Ranked lobbies. For his balancing pass, we mainly wanted to provide some quality of life updates by speeding up some of his abilities and adding some initial information when he deploys his Ultimate. We also wanted to give him the ability to slow down enemies hit by his Tactical as a way to impede all those zippy Octanes and Axles.

*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay. 2025-02-03 through 2026-05-28

We’re speeding up the activation time on the heartbeat sensor, increasing heartbeat intervals and increasing unarmed ADS speed. This means you’ll experience a shorter delay before the monitor starts pulsing, more frequent heartbeats, and more consistency whether unarmed or weapon equipped. We’re also making changes to establish more consistency in the timing before the heartbeat sensor appears between weapon-equipped and unarmed. 

We’re reducing the delay between launch and hit of the Tactical, which should make it easier to land hits . We’re also strengthening the slow on hit to be more impactful on players' momentum while using high speed abilities, like Axle’s slide and Ash’s dash for example.

For Seer’s Ultimate, we’re adding a short scan that will occur when the zone is created. This will help inform you who’s in the zone before you need to start looking for footsteps. This quick scan will also show any new enemies that enter the zone after it’s been activated. Additionally, cloaked enemies in the zone will now leave tracked footsteps.

Maggie has been a top performer for a while and, with the rise of Gibby, she’s seeing even more play. She is doing a lot and her Tactical is completely controlling the battlefield. Her Ultimate creates an issue similar to previous-era-Ballistic, where the added speed boost is making players very difficult to lock down. In this case, we’re introducing a series of nerfs to bring her pick rate down to a healthier space.

*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay. 2025-02-03 through 2026-05-28

We’re increasing the cooldown of Maggie’s Tactical to help mitigate how many are being placed in the world. Hopefully this will make players a little more deliberate when choosing the right circumstances to use their Tactical. 

For the Ultimate, we’re swapping the speed boost from the pucks for a sprint boost. Similar to the changes to Ballistic, we still want players to have the pushing potential and the ability to get to enemies fast, but we don’t want to boost the overall speed, making them difficult to pin down in combat. 

Valkyrie is becoming one of the top picked Legends and has been performing really well over the last few seasons. We are making a minor adjustment to help assuage frustrations and manage her climbing pick rate. We understand this doesn’t address other aspects of her kit that are strong, but we are continuing to monitor her match data and will make additional changes if necessary.

*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay. 2025-11-01 through 2026-05-31

When Valkyrie received her last round of buffs she got improvements to her landing from Skydive, allowing her to land much faster than other Legends. Players have been leveraging this quick recovery by scanning from the air and quickly dropping on teams, giving them little time to react. Therefore, we are removing the landing improvements to help establish consistency across all Legends. 

Since her changes at the beginning of Season 29, Conduit spiked to the top of the pick rates and remained at that spot several weeks later. We’re so excited to see that players have really felt the improvements to Conduit’s supportive agency and playmaking potential. However, we recognize that she has been a key enabler of Legends that push the meta in an extremely aggressive way. Additionally, her dominance crowds out all other Support Legends, making her an obvious pick. Finally, she was present in 8 of the top 10 most popular team compositions. All of these indicators point to an unhealthy balance state and, as a result, we want to take steps to slow things down a bit.

*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay. 2026-05-03 through 2026-05-31

We are splitting Conduit’s nerfs into several small, calculated adjustments to keep an eye on how her performance and popularity shifts. Our goal is to ensure there are plenty of viable, powerful Legends to choose from without immediately grounding Conduit right after picking her up.

In an earlier hotfix, we shifted Conduit’s Tactical regeneration to take longer to provide a similar amount of shielding. This also inherently affects the imbalanced pick rate of her new level 3 Upgrades, making the burst of shielding Instant Barrier provides more attractive in comparison to the slow ‘n’ steady Enduring Barrier.

Now, we’re increasing the cooldown on Conduit’s Tactical. The double Tactical charge has been a huge win in making Conduit feel flexible in keeping her squad topped off, but we want to reduce how frequently it's used to demand skillful and measured usage of her supportive tools. Additionally, Enduring Barrier no longer regenerates through ring damage, slightly restricting the wide range of its use cases.

We’ve talked about it before in Patch Notes and Designer’s Notes, and we will say it again: shotguns are some of our more tempestuous weapons in the roster. They ride a fine line between feeling undertuned and undersatisfying vs. overpowered and frustrating to play against, and their current position in the meta leans toward the former.

*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay. 2026-05-26 through 2026-06-01

Particularly, we are seeing the sting the most in our finisher style shotguns: the Mastiff and the Peacekeeper. Looking deeper into the data, we see that on average shotguns are the weapons players die while holding most. Our hypothesis is: these weapons are securing knocks, but the close-range encounters where shotguns thrive lead to extremely low health, and result in a quick follow-up avenging from enemy teammates. How often have you gotten that quick swap to the Peacekeeper, secure the down, only to be killed a moment or two later?

Instead of doing raw damage buffs to this class of finisher shotguns, we have opted to give them a new survivability style hop-up, aptly called Executioner. Once the hop-up has been unlocked, securing a knock will begin a shield regeneration over a few seconds, similar to that of the Skirmisher Knock Expert perk, and yes, they will stack. Our goal is to provide shotguns with more utility and less raw fire power. The close range fights should feel the same, but this gives these weapons a little more juice to stay in the fire fight afterwards. Executioner will be available on the Peacekeeper and the Mastiff, replacing Disruptor Rounds and Dual Shell.

Mozambique and EVA-8 will also get a little bump to their base handling stats so they don’t feel left out of the party.

In addition to the introduction of the Executioner Hop-up, we’ll also be passing the Graffiti Mod to the Volt and Flatline to inject some freshness to the weapon meta.

In general, we have been pretty happy with how the weapon meta has been shaking out over the past few months. While we can acknowledge a few outliers, the majority of our roster has been sitting in an overall healthy spot. We wanted to take this time to quickly point out some weapon balance outliers and explain why you may not see as much shake-up on some of our more popular, high performing weapons, where you might expect them. Let’s look at the Alternator as an example.

*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay. 2026-05-26 through 2026-06-01

The Alternator has been making some steady upwards momentum since the addition of the Double Tap Hop-Up a few seasons ago, and even after some adjustments, continues to climb. Anecdotally, we weren’t hearing too much conversation about it over here in the western hemisphere, as most of the balance concerns from our community centered around the R-99, so we dug deeper.

Turns out, Alternator popularity in our metrics is being pretty heavily driven by our players over in Japan! It’s a super interesting statistic, and illustrates some of the less obvious factors contributing to weapon usage and efficiency data. Regional differences like this are something that our weapon meta team will be continuing to evaluate and reacting to moving forward.

As always, we will be keeping a close eye on how the weapon meta shakes out this season and will update you with any meta hotfixes throughout the season.

We hope this blog has been helpful in deepening your understanding of the processes and rationale informing the development team’s balancing changes. For a comprehensive log of all changes coming in Overclocked Split 2 be sure to check out the full Patch Notes dropping on June 22nd, 2026!