Respawn has just geeked out over Octane again, as the developer looks to rein in its power in Season 28 of the Apex Legends. The latest season was only released on February 10, but Respawn has already rolled out several patches to improve the character's meta in Apex Legends.
Season 28, known as Breach, brought some upheavals to the characters and weapons of Battle Royale. Specifically, the seasonal update reworked Fuse and made improvements to the Catalyst and Bloodhound kits. Despite these changes, Octane has remained the game's most picked character at 17.4%, according to the Apex Legends Status database. While High-Speed Daredevil has always been a fan-favorite, his popularity skyrocketed after a reworking of his abilities in a major Season 27 update for Apex Legends. Not only did Respawn improve Octane's JumpPad by incorporating upgrades into the base ability, but it also added a new Tactical in Stim Surge, which gave the character Fortified to take less damage in a fight.
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Apex Legends Nerfs Octane's Stim Surge
Unfortunately, this rework for Octane proved too powerful according to many players, leading to Swift Mend being nerfed on January 23rd. While this appeared to curb the legend's effectiveness, Respawn was not done, as a new update on February 23rd included more nerfs to his abilities. Notably, Fortified has been removed from Stim Surge, making the character less tanky. Also, the speed boost Octane gets from using Stim has been reduced. However, the ability still allows the character to move faster than before his rework in Season 27.
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When Respawn announced the update on social media, Respawn gave some context behind the decision to drop Octane in Apex Legends. According to the developer, the character's pick rate and fight win percentage were still “unhealthy”. Interestingly, Respawn had waited to make this nerf because it wanted to see how the Fuse rework would affect the meta. However, this did not create a significant change in Octane's pick rate as had been hoped. As a result, the development team has tackled the “pointiest” parts of the Legends kit. While the goal is to “preserve” the benefit of the Season 27 rework, it remains to be seen how much more will need to be done to bring the pick rate back to an acceptable level.
This February 23 update has been met with mostly positive feedback from Apex Legends community. Even though Stim Surge is less effective after this update, players pointed out that it still has utility. Specifically, Tactical allows players to continue to regenerate health when taking damage. In theory, Octane should still have increased repositioning survivability, but the removal of Fortified should make him less overpowered in 1v1s.
Ultimately, players will have to wait and see how this latest nerf affects pick rates Apex Legends. With 27 legends in Battle Royale, some will inevitably rise to the top. However, the developer has had problems trying to balance the meta Apex Legends earlier, with a notable example being Ash.
It will be interesting to see what further changes are made to the Legend pool in the coming weeks. It's worth mentioning that Respawn has another character planned for release in Season 29 of the game. This news was revealed as part of a roadmap for Apex Legendswhich gave a look at the development team's plans for the rest of 2026 into early 2027. Time will tell if this upcoming Legend will be able to fit well into the meta or if Respawn will need to release patches to adjust its power, as it has for Octane.
Apex Legends Update February 23 – Patch Notes
We've just released a patch that includes the following octane changes:
ADJUSTED
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Removed “Fortified” from Stim Surge
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Reduced the speed boost from Stim (still a boost from pre-27.0)
Dev notes: We held back an Octane nerf from 28.0 because we wanted to “wait and see” how Fuse's rework launch would affect Octane's recent spike. Recently, when we looked at Valkyrie, we saw that Octane's rework naturally brought her back down to earth, with some Valkyrie nerfing required.
In the first week of the season, Octane is still getting picked off and winning games at a rate we consider unhealthy. That's the data we needed to act to nerf what we consider to be the “pointiest” parts of Octane's latest update, while preserving most of the new tooling his rework brings.
- Released
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February 4, 2019
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Blood, Violence
- Publisher
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Electronic Arts
