The Apex Legends Devs Are Considering A Nerf for Octane

One of the favorite legends of the Apex Legends players is surely Octane. His mobility lets him flank enemies much quicker than other legends. Moreover, he can even save himself from unexpected attacks. And lately, we are considering the Octane and Revenant duo good, because of their compatible abilities.

The main reason for Octane’s mobility is his adrenaline-rushing abilities. With his tactical ability, he sticks an adrenaline shot to himself, and he gains movement speed. Of course, he has to pay for something as good as this, whenever he uses his stim, he lost some of his health points. But, thanks to his passive ability, he recovers one health point per second. His ultimate ability deploys a jump pad, so he can travel long distances in a short time. But Respawn is thinking about a nerf for the speed devil. We can see some changes in his tactical ability.

The game’s lead designer, Daniel Zenon Klein, announced that change in a post on Reddit. The topic was about the performance of Fuse, but, Klein loves talking about the other legends. So, he explained what does he think about Octane.

“He’s Become Extremely Dominant”

It’s still very hard to predict how strong a character will be unless they have meaningful mobility (Octane/Horizon). We’ve gotta be careful not to fall victim to mobility creep as well: the more general mobility there is, the less fun the game becomes for everyone because you just can’t hit people. This is why we’re removing some of that power from Horizon (we’re just reducing how quickly you can wriggle back and forth as you go up her gravity lift to make tracking her a little easier). Octane’s pretty trackable IMO, but we need to hit him a little bit. He’s become extremely dominant (to no one’s surprise) so we’ll need to shave a little power off. I think I found a reasonably fun-neutral way of doing so.

I’m currently thinking about increasing the health cost for his Stim but letting you stim again much sooner (there’s currently a 3-4 second delay between the old stim running out and you being able to stim again). This is kind of a buff if you look at just the speed at which you move, but taken together with the increased health cost it’ll allow you to drop your health real low real fast. I always thought stim’s health cost was a fun way to pay for power with life that was tuned too softly to matter.

Daniel Zenon Klein

Octane players might not like the announcement. But, it’s already hard to shoot the Octane when he uses his stim. With the new changes, it can be a little easier to kill him.

When The Changes Will Be Released?

There’s no information about when this Octane change will apply to Apex Legends. But, when you think about the past patch notes, we see that Respawn usually releases new patches at the start of a new season and in the mid-season. The mid-season patch notes were announced with the Chaos Theory event. So, it’s possible that we can see that Octane’s buff-looking-nerf change will be released with the launch of Season 9. We are also expecting lots of changes with Season 9.