Season 6 Evo Armor Updates

Hi everyone, this is Jason McCord, Design Director on Apex Legends.

In Season 6, we made a few big changes to the way our armor works.
First, all armor became Evo Armor. 
Second, all armor values were reduced by 25 HP.

After letting the change simmer for a few weeks, we’ve analyzed some data and collected player feedback enough to make a decision. We are going to revert the armor values to pre-Season 6 values. This change is happening today across all platforms.
We are keeping the all Evo Armor change.

I’d like to take this opportunity to explain why we made that change, and why we are reverting it.

From the start of Apex Legends development, one of our core pillars was that getting the drop on someone should give those players a significant advantage. We aimed to promote strategy in battlefield positioning and map control. When these tactics were executed well, but a team still outplayed you because of mechanical skill - this felt bad. In Seasons 1 - 5, we felt this balance was achieved pretty well. 

However, with the introduction of the Evo Armor change, we saw (in our internal playtests) that players were achieving Red Armor (125 shields) more often, and more players were fighting at 225 total health. This started to swing the battles more than we liked, and good players were able to outplay teams more consistently, even if the enemy had worked for a much better position. By lowering the armor values, we felt we had adjusted for the Red Armor availability more than anything else.

Now, it’s important to note that we playtested this for months internally. From those playtests, feedback was positive. But, we are a small group of people compared to the millions that play Apex Legends every day. The skill levels in our team are varied, and big balance changes are really only going to be vetted when we get feedback from all of you.

We are always striving to improve the experience in Apex Legends. Experimentation is an essential part of that. We won't always get things right, but it's important for us to listen and correct things when we don't.

We will keep changing the game in order to keep it fresh and interesting as the years go on. I hope that this patch proves that we are thinking deeply about our decisions, but most importantly listening to our players.

Besides the armor changes, we have addressed a number of issues that we are listing below.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you out there!
Jason McCord
Design Director

General

• Fixed several server crashes.
• Made adjustments to the appearance of several holosprays.
• Removed an inappropriate Caustic voice line.

Audio

• Fixed an issue with audio not playing when shooting the Devotion and Volt. 
• Fixed an issue where Crypto’s drone in Caustic gas would play to the whole server
• Fixed marking crafting replicators from the ship playing a “Let’s go here” VO ping.

Replicators

• Fixed an issue with Evo Shields that require exactly 100 damage not evolving when crafting the 100 points.
• Fixed an issue with Ninja controller configuration not being able to use Replicators.
• Fixed an issue with not being able to revive a teammate when they are downed while using a replicator.

Gibraltar

• Fixed an issue with Dome Shield on a Sheila allowing a player to shoot through the Dome Shield.

Rampart

• Fixed an issue with the "No Mercy" finisher spamming "Boom" to the entire server.
• Fixed an issue with amped cover walls requiring more hits from heirlooms than from normal melee to be destroyed. 
• Fixed a server crash when Sheila is destroyed while someone is using it.

Crypto

• Fixed an issue with Hack not detecting players on Sheila.

Wraith

• Fixed an issue with the portal disappearing upon Wraith's death.
• Fixed a crash with Wraith’s portal interacting with World’s Edge geysers. 
• Fixed an error when Wraith’s portal is too close to a replicator and the player interacts with the replicator.

Loba

• Fixed an issue that caused Loba’s teleport to fail in certain areas.

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