Respawn promise changes to Apex Legends ‘wall-hack meta’ with more Seer nerfs

Seer has opened Respawn’s eyes to how powerful scans can be in Apex Legends and it’s going to lead to future changes that will counter the ‘wall-hacks’ meta. This could also mean even more nerfs to Seer.

Respawn’s live balance designer, John ‘JayBiebs’ Larson, explained more about the studio’s reasoning as it pertained to the August 23 patch that brought down Seer’s abilities. Every part of the Season 10’s kit was touched, and there’s plenty of reasons why.

“The goal here (and for hotfixes in general) is to hit pain points and degenerate play patterns without preemptively gutting the unique parts of Seer’s kit,” JayBiebs said of the patch.

There’s plenty of scouting power in Seer’s passive but, in general, it showed the devs how scans killed ‘rat’ plays, and make “game sense” obsolete.

In a complicated battlefield like Apex Legends, neither of those things sit right with Respawn. That’s why JayBiebs and the team are going to revamp their approach to info-heavy characters like Bloodhound and Seer.

“Seer has opened our eyes to what sort of information can be communicated through scans,” JayBiebs explained. “A real-time silhouette for X seconds is different than tracking footsteps or the health bar or the heartbeat passive.

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The balance dev continued: “There are many axes we can explore, and I know Seer’s emergence has expedited the process of revisiting the oppressive parts of the reveal meta to introduce more options and counterplay.”

These problems won’t be fixed with a simple nerf to a Legend or buff to others. But there’s still plenty of avenues that Respawn wants to explore to lessen the impact of the “wallhack meta,” as he puts it.

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While the devs are monitoring Seer – and may nerf him again – we can expect bigger adaptations from Respawn to help the state of Apex Legends.