Character’s Hit Boxes In Apex Legends Are Getting Slight Changes

It has not been a long time since the official release of Apex Legends, yet there have been fans who complain about how the biggest characters in the game get hit much easier compared to the smallest ones. Respawn Entertainment - the game’s developer has been working on those complaints. The company has recently announced on Reddit that it is in the process of making changes and will rebalance some of the characters soon.

The Reddit post covered a new feature which has already been updated into the game, which changes the weapons. The studio explained that its approach to creating alterations is to be cautious and assured that they're tested carefully before going live.

This latest update added some slight changes. However, the ones that deal with the hitboxes of the Legends are still being postponed until sometime around the end of this month, when they will have been more carefully worked on as well as developed.

To those who are not familiar with the term, "hitbox" indicates an invisible area surrounding a character on video games which registers impacts; whenever an attack hits the interior of a character’s hitbox, this character will receive a certain amount of damage. On the contrary, if the attack lands on the outside of the hitbox, it will not be counted and the character will not be affected.

The issue here is that big Legends in Apex Legends own similarly big hitboxes. Among the Legends, Gibraltar possesses the biggest one, and then there are Pathfinder as well as Caustic. This makes them so much easier to get hit compared to the smaller characters. However, this situation partially stemmed from design. Respawn intentionally designed those characters with a bigger surface area in order to balance it with their abilities. They did that because they want all Legends in this game to have approximately the same viability, power and also win rate.

However, players have been arguing about the hitboxes for a long time about whether they are too big. Some people even tested found out that some hitboxes slightly wonky. For example, the hitbox surrounding Pathfinder is a little bit bigger than his character model. It extends down in-between the Legend’s legs a bit lower compared to the actual frame.

Respawn announced that it is working on some changes to the bigger Legends. Characters such as Gibraltar, Pathfinder, and Caustic will all have their hitboxes scaled down as well as better optimized in order to be suitable with the models.

The company also confirmed that it will make some further changes when necessary. However, those changes might include strengthen up the abilities of those character. After all, adjusting hitboxes is a major change which may take the players quite some time before they can be used to it.

A few other Legends are having some slight changes, too. Both Bangalore and Wraith will have a slight reduction in their escape abilities. Moreover, the passive skill of Bangalore, which allows her to increase her movement speed when she is under fire, will also get a reduction of 10%, instead of a 40% increase in speed, it is now 30%. Wraith also gets a tweak on her skill - Into The Void - particularly relating to the cooldown time. This ability which allowed her to become invulnerable will now have a cooldown of 25 seconds instead of 20.

We have enclosed the entire list of changes for character balance right below for you. The big question that is concerning everyone is the exact time when these adjustments will be applied to the game. There has not been any official announcement from Respawn Entertainment about the release of Season One for Apex Legends. Therefore, it is still unclear when these rebalancing updates (which go along with the Season One) will be activate.

Major Character Balance Adjustments

Reduced in size and optimized for the hit boxes of Gibraltar, Pathfinder, and Caustic
Rework on hitboxes’ size to fit the model & gear of each character.
As the major adjustments bring a HUGE impact on Apex Legends, Respawn Entertainment wants to ensure there won’t be any bugs, so they decided not to rush things out.
If further adjustments seem to be necessary, Respawn will think of additional adjustments later during Season One.

Manor Character Balance Adjustments
Caustic

Traps - Cooldown 25 seconds (Previously: 30 seconds)
Traps - Radius as well as proximity radius increased by approximately 10%
Traps - The duration of dealing damages to others of the smoke: delay time decreased by 1 second

Pathfinder