Apex Legends dev explains the difficulty of balancing Caustic
Apex Legends fans have their fair share of issues with Caustic’s abilities and have been asking Respawn to nerf the Legend. Now, one dev has explained why it’s so tricky to balance the character.
Respawn Entertainment have a habit of tweaking character abilities after releasing a new Apex Legends update. Season 8 recently brought a new set of buffs and nerfs to the battle royale. However, they’ve always struggled to fix the issues with Caustic.
The Legend’s abilities make him extremely lethal, as he can drop gas canisters, which can then be tripped by anyone unfortunate enough to walk into the same room as him. This makes it almost impossible to escape small areas when he’s around.
One developer has come forth, and explained to fans why balancing Caustic is such a difficult process.
Apex Legends fans demand a Caustic nerf
Reddit user AadrianN_ posted a clip to the Apex Legends subreddit, in which they showed Caustic using his Ultimate ability in a ring, which left his opponent with no means to escape. One commenter asked if it’s even possible to counter such a play.
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This is a sentiment shared by many other fans about the Legend since he can absolutely annihilate any players that happen to cross his paths in small areas. This is why some want him to receive a nerf that will level the playing field.
Lead game designer Daniel Klein then broke down why balancing Caustic isn’t the easiest task to accomplish. While this kind of scenario can be very unfair to players, changing his abilities could make things even worse.
“We don’t exactly have a solution yet,” said Klein. “Creating a shootable central thing for the ult, like Horizon, would work but it’s such a heavy-handed fix (and would probably require us making barrels destructible post-trigger because otherwise, they’re just better than the ult).”
He then elaborated that Respawn also wants to avoid making him an unpickable character by nerfing him too much, since the Legend has his fair share of fans. “You may not like them, but Caustic mains exist and deserve to have fun too,” said Klein.
The dev made some compelling arguments, as reworking the Legend’s Tactical and Ultimate abilities would require a ton of effort and care so that they don’t nerf him to the point of being completely useless.
The overwhelming fan complaints guarantee that we’ll definitely see a Caustic nerf at some point in the future. We may have to wait a while before that happens, but at least the developers are keeping the players’ concerns in mind.
Image Credits: Respawn Entertainment