Today’s Apex Legends update brought a slew of improvements to Respawn’s battle royale. The community has been asking for a fully stocked gun range, duos mode, and something to do with Legend Tokens for months. We got all of that, plus some minor but impactful balance changes and bug fixes. Notably, the patch also served the Wingman with possibly its biggest nerf to date. The baseline headshot multiplier is down from 2.15 to 2.1.
Some of you may be confused. A 5 percent nerf doesn’t seem like a lot, right? The issue isn’t really the overall damage reduction, but what it does to the Wingman’s damage breakpoints. To be more specific, this nerf makes the gun a lot less useful against Low Profile legends like Pathfinder and Wraith.
Pre-nerf, Wingman dealt 96 headshot damage, or 101 against Low Profile legends. Depending on their armor, the Wingman could drop them with two shots in almost all situations. If they were unfortunate enough to have zero protection, it only took a single headshot. Today’s nerf pushes up the damage breakpoints across the board. Now it takes a minimum of two shots against Low Profile legends with no armor and no helmet. More importantly, across all other outfit combinations, it now generally takes one more shot than before.
The Wingman fires pretty quickly, so it’s not a big deal if it takes one more shot against some legends, is it? Well, it actually is. First off, a single shot is often the difference between certain death and reaching cover to heal. Second, the Wingman’s magazine is on the small size. One extra shot could lead to one extra reload, and these things can snowball.
And while the damage change doesn’t impact regular and Fortified legends much, those are not the legends you face in the arena most of the time. Pathfinder, Wraith, and Wattson are Apex Legends‘ most popular legends and default tournament picks. All three of them are Low Profile. In effect, today’s patch nerfed one of the game’s most popular weapons against the three most popular legends. The effects of this change may be subtle for now, but they will certainly be felt in the long run.
Published: Nov 5, 2019 07:34 pm