TL;DR
Below, we’ll provide insight into meta changes coming in our next season, Marked. We’ll discuss our goals and rationale for the changes for each of the following:
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Designer’s Notes for our next season - MARKED. We appreciate all the time you spent playing in the most recent season, and the feedback that you’ve provided. Using your feedback and our internal match data, we have been hard at work, tuning and adjusting to get ready for our next update.
This season we are excited to bring a much anticipated update to Bloodhound. We know there has been a lot of chatter about giving them a refresh and we are finally ready to reveal all the hard work that has gone into making Bloodhound a more competitively viable pick amongst the Legend roster. However, Bloodhound isn’t the only Legend getting updates. We have incoming buffs for Rampart and Loba to help make them more attractive picks, and changes to Valkyrie, Seer, and Axle to assuage some player frustrations.
We have significant changes coming to weapons and loot this season. We’ve refreshed our weapon and attachment UI to better help you understand the effects of each potential piece in your arsenal. Speaking of attachments, we are adding a new wave of attachments called “Corrupted Attachments.” These attachments have powerful buffs, but also noteworthy drawbacks. We are looking to create interesting risk-reward choices around the attachment meta and we’re excited to see how you leverage them in your in-game strategy.
In another big change: we are removing energy ammo from the loot pool. That’s right, energy weapons will now regenerate their ammo. This was done in an effort to create a unique way of playing with energy weapons and to give you more options for how you decide to manage your backpack. With this change, we are looking to provide more variety of choice and player expression, and want to see how you integrate this new system into your squad’s strategy.
Thank you for all the time you spend playing Apex. We appreciate all the feedback you give and look forward to hearing from you on what you think of our latest update. See you in the dropship!
LEGEND BUFFS
BLOODHOUND REWORK
Back in Season 28, we brought in a package of buffs to help Bloodhound’s pick rate while we worked on some bigger changes intended to make Bloodhound a more viable pick at all skill levels. Despite those changes, Bloodhound remains nearly invisible at middle-to-high tiers; they have the lowest pick rate once you get to Gold tier and above. It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve made substantial changes to each ability in their kit to help you truly live out the true hunter fantasy.
*Data from Plat+ Ranked gameplay from 11-1-2025 through 7-6-2026
Passive
Bloodhound’s passive creates lingering trails behind enemies that you can follow to track and eliminate your opponents. You can also activate your White Ravens more easily by glancing at them for a short time.
Tactical
Bloodhound’s Tactical now shows additional “snapshot” scans after the initial scan finishes, increasing the amount of time you can track enemy locations (without being a full wallhack).
Ultimate
Bloodhound is boasting a brand new Ultimate: Allfather’s Cloak. Activating their Ult will deploy a device that cloaks everyone — squadmates and enemies — who approaches it. The cloak persists for 12 seconds after leaving the Ult’s space and breaks after using your weapons or taking damage. While you aren’t fully invisible, you are much harder to see and track, allowing you to set ambushes for enemy squads or escape tricky situations.
New Upgrades
Hidden Sight: refreshes your Tactical when you use your Ultimate, and hides your scanning pulse from enemies while cloaked allowing you to survey the scene without notifying enemies to your whereabouts
Bird’s Eye: allows your White Ravens to split off and mark two different enemies at the same time, identifying your two nearest threats
True Predator: allows you to recloak after firing your weapon, enhancing your ability to hit-and-run after using your Ultimate.
LOBA
Loba’s loot-oriented kit has seen her popularity decline over time, particularly as amps and arsenals provide other ways to build healthy loadouts. While we expect Loba’s usefulness to rise with the loot changes coming in season 30 (more on that below), it still felt like she could use additional buffs to help keep her relevant.
*Data from Ranked and Trios gameplay from 10-1-2024 through 7-6-2026
Tactical
The main change we’re making to Loba is reducing how long it takes to deploy her Tactical. - We’re reducing the activation time from 0.6s to 0.4s, increasing the projectile speed by ~30% so it lands more quickly, and adding a 15% range increase.
Ultimate
To make Loba’s Ult a bit more alluring, we’re shaving some time off of its cooldown, bringing it down from 150s to 120s, to help your squad stay ahead of other squads in terms of resources as the game progresses.
RAMPART
Despite significant changes in Season 27, Rampart remains near the bottom of pick rate graphs at every skill level. While she can be particularly powerful in late-game when set up in a great spot, her setup still feels slow and she’s too challenging to play throughout most of a match. As such, we have a handful of changes we’re making to hopefully pull up her pick rate a bit.
Passive
Rampart is gaining a new element to her Battle Modder passive: she progresses Locked Hop-Ups 50% faster to unlock more powerful weapons earlier in the match.
Tactical
We have increased the health of Rampart’s walls, particularly at earlier EVO levels.
Ultimate
Rampart is also getting a movement buff for her Ultimate: she now moves significantly faster while spinning up or shooting Sheila.
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LEGEND NERFS
VALKYRIE
Everyone’s favorite fighter pilot has remained in a strong position for a while now. As we work to manage power creep in our game, we felt Valk could use some slight nerfs to bring her in line.
*Data from Ranked gameplay from 8-1-2025 through 7-6-2026
Our first goal is to reduce her “artillery” potential - she can do significant poke damage from long range while having extra utility and mobility that others don’t.
Tactical
We’re reducing her missile damage, as well as adjusting the trajectory of her missiles so they can’t get over top of high cover as easily.
Ultimate
Additionally, we want to reduce her Ultimate’s ability to keep her and her squad far above the fight while also knowing exactly where everyone is. To accomplish this we’re lowering the height by 15% and nerfing two Upgrades.
Upgrades
AXLE
Axle’s pick rate has been trending in a healthier direction with each subsequent nerf following her race to the top on release. Her Kickstart drone is still too oppressive in too many contexts, and we’re continuing to evaluate how to increase counterplay opportunities. Now that she’ll be affected by her own ult, Axle players should think twice before deploying it in close-quarters skirmishes. She can no longer stack two Ult charges, and we’ve reined in the overall range that players can super slide with her Nitro Gates. Quantitative data isn’t everything; we’re still keeping a close eye on player sentiment when it comes to Nitro Gate and Kickstart usage and will continue to adjust if needed.
*Data from Ranked gameplay from 5-1-2026 through 7-6-2026
Tactical
To restrict the range that players can slide, we’re reducing the max slide boost time from 5 seconds to 3 seconds.
Ultimate
To force players to be more selective when choosing to use Axle’s Ult, it will now affect self & allies (similar to Mad Maggie, Bangalore, and Gibraltar ultimates)
Axle (self) gets damaged, stunned, and displaced (same as enemies)
Allies get stunned and displaced, but won’t take damage
Upgrades
Replace Automata with Long Haul, which brings the Tac max slide time back up to 5 seconds.
Shuffled order
Lvl 2: Sliding Shooter vs Long Haul
Lvl 3: Jump Gate vs Super Slider
SEER
Seer’s back in the spotlight after our most recent round of buffs, and he’s been hard to ignore! Seer is a tricky Legend to balance, frequently yo-yo-ing between the absolute bottom and top of pick rate charts. He’s on a knife’s edge where a buff will either do very little, or make him entirely OP.
The last time Seer hit the heights of the top 3 Legends in terms of pick rate, he dropped off on his own naturally after about a week. It seems our Artist-in-Residence has more staying power this time around, and not everyone is a fan.
We already took a swipe at Seer’s Tactical uptime by reworking his Upgrade tree as part of a quick hotfix after the mid-season split. His new Level 3 Upgrade choices are much more evenly split than they were before in terms of pick-rate.
However, it seems like Tactical uptime alone wasn’t the root of the problem, and we needed to roll back some of the new strength of the Tactical. Specifically, turn slow (slowing the rate at which you can rotate your Legend) was added to his ability at the mid-Season split, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of frustration. As a result, we will be making the turn slow much more subtle in Season 30.
Our intent with Seer, and other ‘counter-movement’ Legends was to give tools to players that can counter the more mobile Legends of the roster. However, it seems like in practice all Legends were getting caught in Seer’s net. We will revisit how we implement these kinds of slows in the future to try and be more targeted towards just the speediest Legends of our cast.
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WEAPONS & LOOT
UI STAT OVERHAUL
“What does a stock do?” This is the question the weapons team has been answering for the past 7 years. Sure, there is technically a block of text on each and every stock that reads out what it is actually doing to your weapon when you equip it, and let’s be honest, no one is reading that when a team has hot dropped next to you. It’s time to provide way more transparency around what each and every attachment actually does to your weapon when you go to equip it, and how the weapon itself measures up against every other weapon in the game, and we’re doing it in a few different ways.
The lobby has received an update in the form of a new Playground tab under each weapon category. Players can quickly see at a glance a weapon’s stats, as well as how they change with a combination of all available attachment types.
In-game, players will see brand new weapon and attachment loot cards, as well as a new inventory hover state which shows a weapon’s stats and how each attachment affects them.
In implementing these changes, our main goals were to help with the onboarding of Apex’s weapon and attachment systems, to provide more clarity on how weapons work — their strengths and weaknesses — and how attachments affect their ability to perform in combat. Once a player has mastered the weapon and attachment system, they will always have the option to enable Compact UI mode and reduce the amount of information that is being displayed in-game.
Now, feel empowered to enter into a game knowing full well what a stock does.
CORRUPTED ATTACHMENTS
What better way to show off our new attachment UI than with some new attachments! Corrupted Attachments have entered the Apex Games.
Corrupted Attachments are powerful items that can be equipped onto your weapons, providing them with some serious stat buffs, at the cost of reducing another. Kiss-Curse, if you will. Only one Corrupted Attachment can be equipped to a weapon at a time.
Why Corrupted Attachments? We wanted to provide a new vector for choice and strategy when it came to picking and defining your weapon loadout. Since attachments were previously a linear upwards stat progression, the choice around your loadout often began and ended with the weapon itself. Now, you are poised with a strategic choice when you locate a Corrupted Attachment: Do I take this for a powerful upside at a cost? Or do I leave it for the next person to come along?
REVAMPED POWER JOURNEY
“Cool, Corrupted Attachments, where can I find them in the loot pool?” Short answer: high-tier loot locations. Long answer… Well, let’s talk about what a high-tier loot location really is.
Like we talked about before, Apex Legends is in its 7th year, and we have made many changes to our loot over that time. Loot has been our main carrot at the end of the stick for many of our systems, and thus loot creep has become a real issue. Your looting experience, your power journey, has become quite flat, often with large early game spikes of high tier loot into a pretty substantial flatline.
We want your power journey to feel more consistent over the course of a match, and for those moments when you find a purple mag off drop to feel powerful once again. To accomplish this, we are taking a huge swing at re-balancing our loot pools and loot delivery systems. Next season you will see an overall reduction in the quality of loot that is spawned. The quantity of loot is unchanged. What this means is that where once you could find a plethora of purple and gold tiered items in a normal POI, those have been replaced with white and blues, with the occasional chance at those top-tier purple items. Similarly, a lot of our readily accessible loot delivery systems like loot rollers and Arsenals are seeing a similar change.
“So where are those Corrupted Attachments you were talking about?” Similar to purple items, you will rarely find them in the standard loot pool, with a significantly higher chance of them spawning in our rarer or single use loot delivery systems. For example, hitting up Trials on World’s Edge will yield a much higher chance at getting those purple loot items or Corrupted Attachments. The idea is that while the quality of loot has been reduced across the map, those special loot locations like vaults, Icarus’s Bridge, and certainly care packages, will be your new vector for your best chances at those high tier loot rolls.
There are a ton of updates coming that are under the umbrella of this change, all of which will be covered in detail in the patch notes, but here are a few of the major ones to be on the lookout for:
ENERGY AMMO REWORK
Last but not least, we have upcoming changes to how Energy Weapons work!
Energy Weapons now come with a regenerating stockpile of ammo. Once players use this ammo, over time, and while the weapon is idle, the ammo will begin to regenerate its supply in the weapon, allowing you to continue the fight without needing to manually loot to replenish.
The goal of this change was to provide another way to think about your weapon loadout choice, and why you are picking one weapon over another. Are you grabbing a Volt because you dropped hot and don’t have time to worry about looting ammo? Or is it because you need those inventory slots to carry extra meds for your teammates?
This rework is not exclusive to the BR; all Energy Weapons across the BR, Mixtape and Wildcard will see this change in effect.
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CONCLUSION
We hope this blog has been helpful in deepening your understanding of the dev team’s decision making processes behind implementing new systems and making balancing changes. For a thorough change log of everything coming in Marked, be sure to check out the full Patch Notes, dropping on August 3rd, 2026!
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