Did Apex Legends Shadow Nerf The Best Class Ability
The Class system introduced in Season 16 of Apex Legends has been very well received by the community. While there is still some debate about the overall strength and balance of the new class passive abilities, it’s pretty universally accepted that the Assault Class has the strongest one in the game. But it might not be as strong as it once was according to professional player NRG Sweet.
Assault Bins Shadow Nerfed
The Patch 2.21 that hit Apex Legends on April 10th came with a few small fixes, such as fixing Vantage’s tactical ability, correcting the iron sights on the Sun Squad Collection event Flatline skin, and a few others. What wasn’t mentioned, but was allegedly changed according to Sweet, was a shadow nerf to the assault bins.
“Fun fact! Assault bins just got nerfed over 600% in the patch yesterday and with nothing mentioned in the patch notes,” Sweet starts. “Without getting into hashtag Sven mined data, let's say arbitrarily that your chance of getting Digithreat in the thing was 50\50 if you had something on your gun. Now you get it 1 out of every 38 times.”
Sweet drops a few numbers in the discussion that don’t quite add up, but later in the stream confirms that the new chance of finding a Digithreat in an Assault Bin is now less than 1%. There’s been no official work from Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment on if this change is true or was intentional.
If it is, the Assault Bins are still an extremely powerful passive ability for the Assault Class Legends as it uses smart loot to help upgrade your squads attachments very quickly. Not getting as many Digithreats is of course disappointing to some players (except the Bangalores), but there are still a few options to find them depending on what map you’re playing.
The Real Issue
The bigger issue from a player perspective according to redditors is that they’d just like to know when these changes happen. Most people recognize that balance changes like this happen constantly, but when they’re not released to the player base in patch notes, it comes off as underhanded.
“I mean, yeah, itd be great to have that kind of stuff in the patch notes. And, they probably could have lowered the chance a little bit less. But, you still apparently (from the sound of this clip) get all the other attachments just as often, and that easy of access to digis is probably dumb anyway.” LongDongFuey.
“they were a bit OP but why is there always a lot of shadow nerfs not in patch notes” MasterZoidberg.
“I don't mind the change, but I mind it not being communicated.” AxelHarver.
“To be honest, I preferred everyone having digis rather than running into a bangalore team and figuring out the hard way if they found one or not. And obviously it should have been mentioned in the patch notes.” Wolokin22.
“I don't understand the point of shadow nerfing and not communicating it to players. It only promotes a lack of transparency.” Cidqueen.
