TSM pro Mac ‘Albralelie’ Kenzie Beckwith was baffled to see a perfectly placed shot in Apex Legends go awry after a bug deflected a Sentinel bullet back towards his own team.
The glitch has happened in the past in multiple scenarios, and at first glance it looks like the errant shot had something to do with the Knockdown Shield.
As the TSM star was tracking the downed opponent’s movement, his shot came just in time to be deflected by the shield or punched away by an enemy Wraith.
In either case, it’s not something that people are used to seeing in Apex, and it definitely wasn’t something Albralelie calculated for in his game.
“My bullet just ricocheted off,” he said. “What the f**k was that?! The bullet literally pinged off his Knockdown Shield and flew back towards us.”
Across the way, fellow Apex competitor Jan ‘Euriece’ Del Rosario can be seen knocked down and spamming his shield to throw off Albralelie. In that shuffle, the shot that bounced off came as two things happened around the same time: the Knockdown Shield activation and an ally Wraith punching Euriece to cover.
Euriece’s shield was taking damage from a few of Albralelie’s bullets that did manage to connect, dropping it down from 200 HP to 60. But the last shot in question didn’t affect the current value of the shield.
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As for Wraith, the bullet can be seen making its point of contact as she’s coming out of a slide animation into her melee punch.
We’ve seen Knockdown Shields deflect bullets before. At one point, the interaction would happen so seamlessly, it was hard for players to distinguish it as an intended feature or bug.
Even as an established pro player with countless hours poured into Apex Legends, Albralelie said while reviewing the clips that he’d “never seen a ricochet in [his] life.”
The same kind of occurrence happened with Care Packages before and even with Arc Stars bouncing off character models.
It’s unclear what causes these bugs, but so far Albralelie’s shot is one of the strangest examples to occur in Apex Legends.