A targeted weapon patch is now live for Apex Legends Season 26, and it has mostly been centered around some critical changes to weapons and adjustments on three pivotal Legends. The October 7 patch shores up the competitive environment with emphasis on the close-quarter combat meta that had previously been tilted in favor of an overperforming Peacekeeper shotgun. Players are also glad to see the return of the Sentinel sniper rifle in the loot rotation after being removed for a long duration due to an in-game bug adversely affecting the weapon’s operational efficacy.
At the heart of the weapon adjustments sits the Peacekeeper. Developers have assessed the shotgun to be by far outperforming any other CQC weapon, thus requiring anything they could to bring down its burst potential. To this end, Respawn has increased the rechamber time between shots and decreased the base magazine capacity from six rounds to five. These changes are bent to preserve the weapon’s high damage ceiling while something is broken on the time frame to deliver that sustained damage so that the user is much more calculated in his timing and reloads and thus lies together with the believability level with other shotguns in the rotation.
Continued focus is being given on the Legend balance, with the latest patch introducing some new restrictions to newly released Alter and reworked Seer. Global utility from Alter has been greatly constrained: players can only have one Void Nexus active on the map at any given time instead of two. More importantly, knocked teammates cannot interact or use the Void Nexus to escape being finished (however, these teammates can at any time be brought into the fight by standing teammates). Seer now sees his Exhibit Ultimate no longer supporting ADS hover, while his Lasting Beats Ultimate upgrade now provides a full-body enemy scan immediately upon exiting the area of effect.
Beyond the just-mentioned core balance changes, developers have undertaken several much-required quality-of-life improvements and fixes in the technical sense. Respawn states that server performance is also improved, which ought to decrease the occurrence of slow-motion gameplay occasionally afflicting matches. Other fixes include one that “reversed” an influence on Mad Maggie’s sprinting speed while wielding a shotgun, a true issue for her aggressive playstyle, and putting back the Trident’s brake input keybinding. These consequential changes to the Season 26 meta show that the developers are trying to maintain basic game health while enabling a fair competitive ground.
