Apex Legends has plenty of great guns. This season, with the Flatline moved into the Replicator and being on the receiving end of a one damage nerf that hits all the wrong breakpoints, it’s R301 season.
Lots of players are calling for it to be nerfed now, as they did for the Flatline last season. But it’s not broken, it’s just good. And without any other decent assault rifle available as ground loot (I’m not using the Havoc unless the Turbocharger is in the Replicator, sorry not sorry), the 301 feels oppressive. However, the opposite is true in Control mode.
When I logged on to the game last night to check out how Caustic Treatment played - by the way, it’s about as good as I predicted - I was greeted with some devastating choices. P2020 and Charge Rifle? Seriously? Hemlok/Mastiff is usable I guess, but I’ve never really fancied burst fire weapons. I opted for the only reasonable loadout, R99 and EVA-8, and just about everyone else in the match did, too.
Maybe I’m being harsh and I just want my favourite weapons every time I play - that’s the case when I can loot to my heart’s content in battle royale, after all. There was a Loba griefing me with a Charge Rifle from her home base all game, after all. She never killed me, but she was annoying. But when I flanked to take her objective, she had nothing to match my R99.
I’m not asking for a Flatline or R301 every single match, let’s just balance the loadouts so that we don’t just have an R99-fest. What does a Havoc Rifle and Wingman combo do for you? They’re both good weapons, but do the same job. Rampage and Alternator might tickle someone’s pickle, but Bocek and Prowler seem plain old bad. Mastiff/Sentinel can work if you play a Legend who can take height, and CAR/Peacekeeper is great for close quarters encounters. But when there’s one standout loadout in a selection of five, everyone (barring the one token sniper weirdo) is picking the same thing.
That’s where skill and abilities come into play, I guess, but when every player is running the same loadout you can’t even change things up after grabbing a kill. Upgrade that EVA? No chance, your opponent was running the R99, too. Care Packages furnish us with Spitfires and Volts aplenty - and we can’t complain that these overpowered armaments are not included in loadouts - but until the final third of the match, you’re pretty much stuck. So what’s the answer?
Does Respawn allow us to make our own loadouts? That could run into the same issues; everyone using the R301, Flatline, or both. How do we balance custom loadouts? If it requires a points or materials system like Arenas, then that unnecessarily convolutes things and ruins the ‘drop in and play’ nature of the quicker, more action-packed mode. As much as I’d love to run Flatline/Peacekeeper or R301/CAR every match, it wouldn’t be much fun.
Part of Control is wrestling with weapons you don’t always use and making do when you’re down to your sidearm. When your Rampage needs reloading and the Alternator’s all you’ve got. When your sniper tower has been rushed and you missed your no-scope so the P2020 is your last hope. These are the memorable moments of Control matches, and with homebrewed overpowered loadouts, I fear they’d be lost.
I’d say around half of the current loadouts are fine to good. The other half aren’t worth looking twice at. So what we need are either the bad half to be improved, or the balance of good loadouts to bad improved in each match. However, we run into more problems: problems of taste.
I’ve spent this article complaining about Charge Rifles and Havocs, but some players love to use these weapons. Someone, somewhere, would actually list the Charge Rifle as their favourite weapon. That someone is TSM’s Jordan ‘reps’ Wolfe, as he told us in an interview. But there’s probably someone else, too. Custom loadouts would allow people to pick their faves, but most people’s top choices would be the same basic assault rifles. It’s me, I’m most people.
Maybe I’m overanalysing things, maybe the loadout choices are just fine as they are. Just don’t send me into another match with another Prowler, please.