ImperialHal, a top professional player for Apex Legends, is frustrated with the new meta and begrudge that a fast-paced and aggressive gameplay is no longer viable. Apex Legends, one of the popular Battle Royale games in 2019, has evolved so much with the addition of at least 8 new characters and new maps since Season 1.
Imperial Hal is currently in Team TSM and has won the ALGS Invitational held in 2019 together with Albralelie and Reps. Today, TSM is still one of the top teams in Apex Legends. He cited drastic changes to Legends meta and map changes which caused a very conservative gameplay of using traps as an integral part of the strategy. He is probably referring to leveraging to Legends that can lay traps such as Caustic. He also mentioned that loot distribution for King’s Canyon is uneven and Respawn took little effort to balance loots when they introduced new place of interests (POI). One of the new POIs is Crash Site which emerged in Season 8, where Slum Lake was destroyed by Fuse’s enemy, Maggie.
Credits: Zipp
Respawn has a habit of introducing a lot of content and along with the flow, they frequently pull out changes to the maps, weapons and Legends adjustment. Caustic was recently changed in the latest patch notes and this has substantially increased the pick rates for ranked and competitive play.
Caustic Changes
- Nox Gas Trap: Cooldown reduced from 25 seconds to 20. Gas damage also now starts at five and increases by one every other tick.
- Nox Gas Grenade: Cooldown reduced to three and a half minutes to three. The duration of the ultimate has also been reduced from 20 seconds to 15.
While ImperialHal is known for his aggressive gameplay, he was annoyed that encountering too many Caustic players have affected his playstyle. He laments that Respawn had reduced the reliance of skills and techniques to make the game much easier to play to close the gaps between pros and casual players. This was evident by Respawn’s recent announcement to remove Tap-strafing which made many pro players unhappy:
After much consideration and debate, we’ve decided to remove tap-strafing from @playapex in patch 10.1.
Our reasoning: It’s inaccessible, lacks readability/counterplay, and is exacerbated by movement abilities.
The next patch notes will include a more detailed note about this.
— Respawn (@Respawn) August 31, 2021
Especially when Respawn is still struggling to stabilising the game to fix outstanding bugs and teething server issues, they seemed adamant to shape the game that they want. It is not known if they have actually sought feedback from the ground carefully before making such decisions.