Apex Legends Season 6 Patch Notes: Update Buffs Entire Recon Class

By Abhinav Sharma Published 08/18/20 EDT

Apex Legends Season 6 is now live on all platforms. The new season, called Boosted, added tons of new content to the game. The new legend Rampart is introduced, several places on the World's Edge map are reworked, and some major loot changes are made. However, here we won’t be discussing these. The update also brought tons of Legend balancing changes that weren’t revealed earlier.

Almost all of the Apex Legends characters have been tweaked in the hopes to make the game more balanced. All three of the legends in the Recon Class (Pathfinder, Crypto, and Bloodhound) can now use Survey Beacon to find the next ring location. Pathfinder received a major buff, as his Zipline Gun cooldown will reduce by ten seconds every time he uses a survey beacon. A total of six survey beacons can be scanned in a game, so you can reduce the Zipline Gun cooldown to 60s from 120s.

Both Bloodhound and Crypto also received some buffs. You can now extend Bloodhound’s Beast of the Hunt duration when you kill or down an enemy. Bloodhound's ‘Eye of The Allfather’ ability cooldown has also reduced to six seconds when used during Beast of the Hunt ability. Crypto’s drone can now take more punishment as the drone’s HP has been doubled, however, it will be easier to shoot at as its hitbox is increased.

Several other Legends were also tweaked. You can read all the changes made to the Legends below. You can also check out the complete patch notes of the Season 6 – Boosted update on the official site.

APEX LEGENDS SEASON 6 LEGEND CHANGES

RECON CLASS:

All Recon legends (Bloodhound, Crypto, and Pathfinder) can now use Survey Beacons to get the next ring location. Crypto can use his drone to instantly get this information.

Pathfinder:

Context: Giving all Recon legends access to survey beacons makes Pathfinder less unique, and obviously we don’t love that. For now, we’re giving our friendly robot a small buff to his ultimate cooldown when he uses a survey beacon, but in the future we will take another look at Pathfinder to see what else we could do to make him feel more unique.
Passive: Each time Pathfinder scans a survey beacon, the total cooldown of Zipline Gun is reduced.
Numbers: Zipline Gun cooldown reduced by 10s each time Pathfinder scans a beacon. Up to 6 rings per game means the total cooldown of Zipline Gun can go from 120s to 60s.

Bloodhound:

Context: Bloodhound fulfills a very clear role in Apex Legends: they’re the information gatherer and tracker, but currently their performance leaves a lot to be desired. In this patch, we wanted to double down on their ultimate being their big moment of becoming a god-like tracker. Bloodhound already gives up some information to the enemy when they scan or use the ultimate (it makes a noticeable sound), so we think there is room for a lot more power during the ultimate.
Beast of the Hunt: Now gains even more duration when Bloodhound scores a knockdown or kill with the ultimate about to run out.
Eye of the Allfather: During Beast of the Hunt, Eye of the Allfather now comes out twice as fast and has a much shorter cooldown.
Numbers:
- Beast of the Hunt duration extension 5s → [5s - 15s] based on remaining duration
- Eye of the Allfather CD during Beast of the Hunt: 25s → 6s
- Eye of the Allfather total use time during Beast of the Hunt: 1.8s → 0.9s

Crypto:

Context: Crypto is a particularly interesting recon character: the amount of information he can gather for his team with the drone is very high, but the fact that he has to switch over to his drone leaves him vulnerable and often at a great distance from his team. Because he has no abilities without his drone, we figure there’s room for even more power when he’s in his drone.
Surveillance drone:
- Crypto can now activate respawn and survey beacons from his drone. Doing so is instant instead of requiring a prolonged use.
- Made the surveillance drone slightly more consistent to hit but also doubled its hitpoints.
Drone EMP:
- EMP will now slow teammates caught in the blast, even if they had no shields. This means that players who have used Revenant’s Death Totem will also be slowed.
Numbers:
- Surveillance Drone 30HP → 60HP
- Surveillance Drone hitbox size: cube of edge length 16 → cube of edge length 24

OTHER LEGENDS:

Revenant:

Context: We’re happy to see that dropping the range restriction on Death Totem brought a lot more Revenants into play, but we’ve been watching a particularly frustrating combo play out in professional level play involving a squad of Revenant, Wraith, and Crypto, where using the three ultimates together resulted in two back to back runs at the enemy team that they could do very little about. We’ve attacked part of that in the Crypto EMP change, but here’s the other part aimed at making this play less overwhelming.
Death Totem:
- For 2s after being recalled by the Death Totem, players cannot use Wraith’s Dimensional Rift.

Octane:

Stim: Can now use Stim while healing, but stim will not remove the slow you incur from healing.

Loba:

Context: While Loba was initially very popular, she’s been struggling to keep up more recently, so we’re tossing her a little buff. If you’re curious why we’ve chosen to buff her ultimate rather than her tactical: we’re seeing that she has decent combat success but that teams with her on them don’t win as much as, say, teams with Lifeline or Wattson. This suggests to us that her out of combat utility (that is to say, how she funnels loot to her team) isn’t doing enough.
Black Market:
- Lowered cooldown from 3min to 90s

Gibraltar: