In standard Apex Legends matches, the only Legend used less than Rampart right now is Newcastle. At the highest levels of ranked, in Master and Predator lobbies, the only thing that changes is that Rampart is used more than Revenant, and Newcastle overtakes her. For Twitch streamers, she’s rock bottom.
You can find all this information on the Apex Legends Status website, and it paints an interesting picture of how strong characters are in the current meta. Pathfinder, Wraith, and Horizon are the three most-used characters at the top of the ranked tree, so it’s safe to say they’re pretty good. However, it’s a different story in the ALGS, Apex Legends’ premier esports competition.
Apex’s current ranked system prioritises kills over placement, whereas the ALGS’ scoring system balances the two more evenly. Therefore, tactics and team compositions are different. In every region that ALS has data for (sorry APAC North), Seer, Catalyst, and Valkyrie are the three most-picked Legends. The closest one of the top three ranked Legends comes to reaching most-picked in the esport is Wraith, who is fifth most-used in NA and SA. But there’s one more surprise package in Split 2, and by this point you’ve probably guessed who it is.
It would be a push to say Rampart is dominating the ALGS, no matter how much I wanted to write that article, but she’s certainly the off-meta pick of the month, especially in EMEA. While LANimals’ Mac ‘Albralelie’ Beckwith hit the clip of the weekend by taking out a full team of three in a handful of seconds using Rampart’s Ultimate minigun Sheila, but EMEA took her more seriously.
Both BitFix and Alliance used Rampart extensively throughout the last weekend of Pro League, to great effect. In the hands of Oscar ‘Yuki’ Jiang (江铭亮), Rampart even won her first ever ALGS match. But why is the second-worst ranked Legend seeing such success in the esport? It all comes down to the meta.
As we established earlier, the current ALGS meta revolves around Catalyst and Seer. A team deploys Catalyst’s Ultimate, a giant wall of goo that blocks line of sight, and then Seer’s Ultimate, which allows them to see visual indicators of enemy positions, even through the wall. This one-way information advantage is often devastating, and has led to a meta of countering the Seer and Catalyst combo with your own Seer and Catalyst. However, Alliance and Bitfix thought about things differently, and countered the current meta with Rampart.
Seeing as Catalyst relies on obscuring your team with visual cover – teams can shoot through her wall but not see through it, even with scans – the best way to counter it is with physical cover. If an opposing team can see the diamonds that Seer’s Ultimate pings over your bodies, but all their shots are hitting Rampart’s walls, which they can’t see at all, you’ve completely negated their advantage. Add in Sheila, and you’ve got the perfect weapon for spraying and praying through the Cat wall in return. Rampart seems built to counter Catalyst, and after Alliance’s second place finish on matchday four, her popularity might be poised to skyrocket.
Alliance registered an impressive 33 kills in the six matches on Sunday, also notching that crucial win and another podium place. While Rampart didn’t work quite as well for Bitfix, it’s fair to say they’re not as experienced a team as Alliance. Their adoption of the Rampart countermeta shows that this isn’t just Alliance going out on a limb and showing that they can perform with any Legend. Rampart has been picked 1.81 percent of the time in EMEA Split 2, which is impressive considering that she hadn’t really been seen at all before this weekend. I expect those numbers to continue to rise over the coming weeks, so invest in Rampart stocks now.