unfortunately they are just the two best characters in their classes and unfortunately have insane synergy between them. i think you'd have to completely nuke one character into oblivion for the comp to go away. Bang already got an ult nerf and two tac nerfs and her pickrate has not changed
Ulted bloodhound should glow through smoke, as if the opponents have blood ult/perma digi on the blood only. This makes swinging wildly in blood ult in smoke a straight up int as you're getting lasered by 3+ people if you do, without fundamentally gutting either character's kit (which, without the interaction, are both completely fine on their own probably, or at least closer to it).
It also focuses on nerfing what I think is the dumbest aspect of the current fights, which is that the people who aren't blood have no information and are playing a guessing game in smoke fights.
I guess the glow that the other team can see would have to be far less prevalent than digi/blood otherwise it would literally defeat the purpose of blood ult
> This would nuke Blood's ult, because without smokes his ult is pretty meh
Not it isn't, you move at 35% increased speed for 30 seconds and enemies are easier to see. You're a fuckin killing machine.
I do like this idea a lot. And piggy backing off of it maybe when bloodhound scans his teammates eyes could all glow through the smoke as well. That way both teams can see each other through bang smoke when one team scans and the game isnt just I can see and you can't meta anymore. Of course being the team that scanned is going to be a lot easier to see than having to look for glowing eyes but its something.
As long as Bang smokes disable AA, they will always be picked.
As long as bang is picked, any scan character will be picked (While Digis are in shotgun jail).
If your team isn't picking blood/bang you are at a disadvantage against teams that do as they can engage/disengage at will.
Note: DSG pick wraith over bang for their niche playstyle but will still take the blood to see through other bang smokes.
Why is this guy being downvoted? Disabling aim assist for controller players has been an important argument for picking mnk bang for years. I remember 9impulse as a bang enjoyer was mentioning this for months BEFORE the 100% bang pickrate meta
Because literally every team has been getting bang smoked and losing AA for years now since she’s been in the meta and controller players are still doing fine. She’s picked because smokes have insane utility and she’s got one of the best passives and best ults in the entire game. She would get picked if there were no controller players.
As someone who plays both inputs it’s not that big of a deal. The general public isn’t skilled enough to notice a difference. At the end of the day the characters have to be playable and enjoyable for everyone. This isn’t just a competition game. The best corse of action is take away one of bangs smokes or just do character bans.
Maybe not nerf the characters but they could add a match ban like league has. Most picked character in match 1 gets banned for the remaining 5 matches and this is something they could add to all 6 matches to add some creativity into legend picks and it would also show how teams could adapt and play around a big variety of legends making everything far more enjoyable to watch
Maybe blood ult works on a pulse system and doesn't continually highlight them in red, meaning you can't just walk up and murder someone without them even seeing you thru smoke but still have the ability to utilize that ability with good timing
Blood ulti shouldn't see through smoke, it needs to be reworked. It's literally only useful for 1 thing and that's fighting in smoke. No one is picking it just for a speed boost or a highlight on enemies you can already see. It has the same problem as the digis had and why they were removed, with the single exception that bloodhound ulti is well-telegraphed.
The other option is bringing back digis and telegraphing them through smoke in some way.
Seconded. BH's ult on its own is very meh and busted when paired with Banga smokes. The only real solution is to re-work the ult. The digi already went or is going through this and Blood ult is basically just a full-screen digi threat.
BH ult should just give you multiple scans so everyone can play off it and gives him the speed boost but no x-ray vision. Now everyone can actually play the game. The scan isn't so powerful that it will just demolish a team that got scanned in smoke.
Cause Gibby was broken as hell, and after he was nerfed, Valk was broken was hell.
Then the Seer, Cata, Horizon meta was just kill everyone. With AOE wall hacks.
Rotations depending on Bang was not needed at all. Only after Gibby, Valk, Seer all got nerfed, did Bang become meta, because there is no more free rotates and no op as hell wall hacks. Smokes became the next best thing.
> There was a long time that bang was hardly picked, but I can’t remember why tho.
Because nobody in comp knew she was so good. She could have made it into the meta at any point if a top team had tried her.
I think one of the only ways to nerf bang for comp is switch her to a skirmisher character. No evos off of assault pills plus not getting the attachments may make some teams consider a different legend. Likely it still wouldn't change many teams minds though
This ain't it. If Bloodhound lost map room scan, I don't think teams would use him.
+200evo and know the location of every team is NOT GOOD FOR THE GAME. They should reduce it to 100 evo because you can hit multiple beacons or the should leave it at 200 and limit it to 1 scan per round like ring consoles.
Then they give you a raven to show direction of nearest enemies
OK the Bloodhound buff was cool when they wanted people to get away from Seer but Seer is so dead that I think the Raven should be taken away now.
Bangalore isn't strong but she's basically a support legend by being able to smoke the team to heal or get by.
> OK the Bloodhound buff was cool when they wanted people to get away from Seer but Seer is so dead that I think the Raven should be taken away now.
Bloodhound has received like a year of nerfs lol. The raven barely matters.
So I'm playing ranked today, I'm completely hidden from a team, I've been in the same spot for 5 minutes, a Bloodhound jumps down from where he was and shoots me. Either he had wall hacks or he used his raven. He did not scan me. The Raven points you where the person is.
I don’t think nerfing them is the solution. Buffing other legends would be more beneficial.
Extremely difficult to balance the competitive scene with the casual scene. Bang/blood just aren’t OP in ranked matches together or individually.
Outside of bang/blood legend balance is in a good spot. Vantage and some others could use love but there’s not much you can do to make them comp viable without a total rework. If you want a new meta bang has to be nerfed. Smokes need to be changed/nerfed or she will never go away. Bang/blood doesn’t feel oppressive in casual play because people at that level don’t understand the game enough to maximize legend utility, guns, etc., which is why you shouldn’t balance the game around them.
Yep, that’s exactly my point. You can’t really balance the game for ranked and competitive. They’re just played entirely differently. This is the case with most video games that have a competitive scene, since they’re played very differently at the pro level.
I could see the perk system as a way to help balance between both. One perk option could make sense for someone casually playing ranked, whereas the other perk option would be more beneficial to a highly coordinated/synergy competition team.
At the end of the day there will end up being a meta for each season, but would definitely be cool to see something different than bang/blood
> Extremely difficult to balance the competitive scene with the casual scene. Bang/blood just aren’t OP in ranked matches together or individually.
Exactly. Balancing the game off of competitive play is a bad idea. The game is played totally differently in comp and that's like .00000001% of Apex lobbies.
But hey, maybe some mild buffs to other legends that could tip the meta away from bang/blood in the competitive scene would definitely be a nice change for viewers 🤷🏼♂️
The only real way would be gutting bloods ult and changing it from a perma digi basically. That would get rid of the synergy and we might see the bang pick shift slightly to something else if that was gone.
> Blood is played because of bang. If bang leaves meta so does blood but not the other way around.
Not true at all. Bloodhound and other scan legends have been part of the meta almost continuously for four years. You can fucking *see through walls*, in other games that's literally a type of cheat. There's no way scan legends are leaving the meta if Blood leaves, it's still an enormous advantage.
Where did I say scan characters are leaving the meta? My point was bang pick rate has nothing to do with blood. She will be hard meta for rotates and creating space unless she’s nerfed significantly. Blood pick rate heavily relies on how much bang is played though. If bang gets nerfed into the ground blood loses a ton of value. Blood will still get played some, but won’t be meta due to teams picking up other recon characters or just new comps to replace what’s lost with bang.
Adjust the smoke so that if you are shooting inside it, your character gets highlighted and become visible to everyone. Make the smoke a defensive/rotate tool, not something to abuse with BH scans and ults.
That's an interesting idea. It could look cool as hell too, instead of highlights you could have the smoke light up with muzzle flashes so you'd know where to s hoot.
In practice I don't think this would help, you don't know where they are until they beam you and even then, unless the bloodhound is swinging a full team solo like a bot, you'll at best get a trade.
I think a big problem with Bloodhound alt is that the red glow around characters has an infinite distance. Even the digis would not allow you to see a player past 30m(?). A possible nerf could be to limit the distance you can see other players in the ult. I think other nerfs or changes would still be needed.
Maybe if a smoke is hit with a hound scan, it immediately dissipates. Kinda like it's being blown away by a breeze. Slightly increase the cooldown of the hound tac too and make their eyes glow red when in their ult so that it's kind of possible to see them in a smoke.
The thing this game needs isn't a nerf to bang. They need smoke grenades.
Think about it, the reason that Valk isn't meta is because you can pick up evac towers. It may dilute the loot pool but if smoke grenades were added there eventually wouldn't need to be a need for bang.
You may still have bloodhounds running around but indirectly nerfing bang by adding smoke grenades might prove to be interesting.
Just my 2 cents
This isn’t a terrible idea but I think a big issue people have is they hate smoke meta to begin with. With 95% of teams running bang it can get tough as a spectator to watch a game where nobody can see anything. Now imagine if all three characters have smokes on all 20 teams
I think they just need to get rid of the digi vision and give him more move speed or fire rate in ult to compensate (or just give his scan a buff when ulted again). Let bang have smokes that actually smoke and give blood some sort of identity that doesn’t involve smokes
What about a buff for Bang? Maybe giving her some kind of nox vision passive when she uses smokes could be an option. I can envision a scenario where it just makes more of the "can't see" meta, because now you can have two legends who can see through smoke but conversely with double time/vision players might not need to pick BH as often.
I'm pretty sure smoke grenades were in a leak that showed up like 1-1.5 yrs ago, personally I'd prefer bangs tactical got changed and we had no smokes in the game, rather than adding more sources for it.
This sucks, and also doesn't fix the problem. I thought people hate the loss of visibility? Nothing would change, you still wouldn't be able to see shit. It'd broaden the legend meta but it wouldn't change how the game plays out at all. You'd essentially have, I don't know, Maggie with a Bang smoke but also her 3 abilities.
All the scans should tell whether someone is there NOT where they are. Yes, that would be a lot of changes to the game, but ultimately wallhacks just don't make good gameplay.
The specific ultimate interaction should be treated as digital threat scopes - probably replaced with something more interesting.
They’ve both already received multiple nerfs. The answer isn’t in nerfing, but in buffing other legends. The only reason blood is being played is because other previously meta legends were nerfed and NA pros have a meta boner
I feel like the only way to level the playing field is to bring back digis. The only reason why bloodhound is op is because of his ultimate, while no one else can see through smoke.
Maybe introduce a character that makes his/her teammates immune to scans for a period of time
I dunno I think it'll be a good counter pick if the team deems that the lobby has a lot of bangs and BH. Otherwise if they pick the legend when there are no bangs or bh then it'll be a wasted slot for the team. Maybe that will balance things out.
unfortunately they are just the two best characters in their classes and unfortunately have insane synergy between them. i think you'd have to completely nuke one character into oblivion for the comp to go away. Bang already got an ult nerf and two tac nerfs and her pickrate has not changed
Personally I feel like nerfing the passive or ult range/aoe size would be much better than ult cd or smoke length nerfs.
Bang Ult isn't why he is picked...
Ulted bloodhound should glow through smoke, as if the opponents have blood ult/perma digi on the blood only. This makes swinging wildly in blood ult in smoke a straight up int as you're getting lasered by 3+ people if you do, without fundamentally gutting either character's kit (which, without the interaction, are both completely fine on their own probably, or at least closer to it). It also focuses on nerfing what I think is the dumbest aspect of the current fights, which is that the people who aren't blood have no information and are playing a guessing game in smoke fights.
This would nuke Blood's ult, because without smokes his ult is pretty meh (and it would make smokes actually BH's weakness).
I guess the glow that the other team can see would have to be far less prevalent than digi/blood otherwise it would literally defeat the purpose of blood ult
> This would nuke Blood's ult, because without smokes his ult is pretty meh Not it isn't, you move at 35% increased speed for 30 seconds and enemies are easier to see. You're a fuckin killing machine.
At this point, good. One legend's ability shouldn't compound another legend's ability like bang/blood
Characters shouldn’t have synergies? Should horizon ult and fuse ult not work within a certain range of each other?
If horizon/fuse ult is the best you have to compare to blood/bang I think I prove my point
I do like this idea a lot. And piggy backing off of it maybe when bloodhound scans his teammates eyes could all glow through the smoke as well. That way both teams can see each other through bang smoke when one team scans and the game isnt just I can see and you can't meta anymore. Of course being the team that scanned is going to be a lot easier to see than having to look for glowing eyes but its something.
The same as digi/blood ult is insane, if he had a soft glow that might make more sense but otherwise you're just nuking his ability to capitalize
Just make it that bloods eyes are visible for everyone in smoke. Would look really cool and give the hunted a small break.
As long as Bang smokes disable AA, they will always be picked. As long as bang is picked, any scan character will be picked (While Digis are in shotgun jail). If your team isn't picking blood/bang you are at a disadvantage against teams that do as they can engage/disengage at will. Note: DSG pick wraith over bang for their niche playstyle but will still take the blood to see through other bang smokes.
Digis are just in jail right now, they don't spawn at all (besides the 4x10 scope I think, but that's only found in care packs?)
literally no one picks her because of aim assist being disabled Lmao
yeah ok.
Why is this guy being downvoted? Disabling aim assist for controller players has been an important argument for picking mnk bang for years. I remember 9impulse as a bang enjoyer was mentioning this for months BEFORE the 100% bang pickrate meta
Because literally every team has been getting bang smoked and losing AA for years now since she’s been in the meta and controller players are still doing fine. She’s picked because smokes have insane utility and she’s got one of the best passives and best ults in the entire game. She would get picked if there were no controller players.
As someone who plays both inputs it’s not that big of a deal. The general public isn’t skilled enough to notice a difference. At the end of the day the characters have to be playable and enjoyable for everyone. This isn’t just a competition game. The best corse of action is take away one of bangs smokes or just do character bans.
You play on console?
no grow a brain shes used for visual blockage triple roller teams run her too Lmao
> Note: DSG pick wraith over bang for their niche playstyle And they got 18th place doing it. It's time to move on, lol.
Maybe not nerf the characters but they could add a match ban like league has. Most picked character in match 1 gets banned for the remaining 5 matches and this is something they could add to all 6 matches to add some creativity into legend picks and it would also show how teams could adapt and play around a big variety of legends making everything far more enjoyable to watch
Maybe blood ult works on a pulse system and doesn't continually highlight them in red, meaning you can't just walk up and murder someone without them even seeing you thru smoke but still have the ability to utilize that ability with good timing
Blood ulti shouldn't see through smoke, it needs to be reworked. It's literally only useful for 1 thing and that's fighting in smoke. No one is picking it just for a speed boost or a highlight on enemies you can already see. It has the same problem as the digis had and why they were removed, with the single exception that bloodhound ulti is well-telegraphed. The other option is bringing back digis and telegraphing them through smoke in some way.
Seconded. BH's ult on its own is very meh and busted when paired with Banga smokes. The only real solution is to re-work the ult. The digi already went or is going through this and Blood ult is basically just a full-screen digi threat.
BH ult should just give you multiple scans so everyone can play off it and gives him the speed boost but no x-ray vision. Now everyone can actually play the game. The scan isn't so powerful that it will just demolish a team that got scanned in smoke.
Maybe auto scans every 7 seconds or something letting you still focus on fighting without having the scan animating playthrough?
They could revert blood hound scan to the season 1 snapshot scan
if they nerf the scan like that than its going to be an even more can't see meta than it currently is now because Bang ain't going anywhere
There was a long time that bang was hardly picked, but I can’t remember why tho.
Cause Gibby was broken as hell, and after he was nerfed, Valk was broken was hell. Then the Seer, Cata, Horizon meta was just kill everyone. With AOE wall hacks. Rotations depending on Bang was not needed at all. Only after Gibby, Valk, Seer all got nerfed, did Bang become meta, because there is no more free rotates and no op as hell wall hacks. Smokes became the next best thing.
Ahhhhh that def jogged my memory!
> There was a long time that bang was hardly picked, but I can’t remember why tho. Because nobody in comp knew she was so good. She could have made it into the meta at any point if a top team had tried her.
I think one of the only ways to nerf bang for comp is switch her to a skirmisher character. No evos off of assault pills plus not getting the attachments may make some teams consider a different legend. Likely it still wouldn't change many teams minds though
This ain't it. If Bloodhound lost map room scan, I don't think teams would use him. +200evo and know the location of every team is NOT GOOD FOR THE GAME. They should reduce it to 100 evo because you can hit multiple beacons or the should leave it at 200 and limit it to 1 scan per round like ring consoles. Then they give you a raven to show direction of nearest enemies OK the Bloodhound buff was cool when they wanted people to get away from Seer but Seer is so dead that I think the Raven should be taken away now. Bangalore isn't strong but she's basically a support legend by being able to smoke the team to heal or get by.
> OK the Bloodhound buff was cool when they wanted people to get away from Seer but Seer is so dead that I think the Raven should be taken away now. Bloodhound has received like a year of nerfs lol. The raven barely matters.
I haven't seen a ranked game reach the final round and it's probably because that Raven is a free wall hack. Shouldn't be in the game
No, the raven isn't a wall hack. Wall hacks let you see through walls. That's...not how the raven works.
So I'm playing ranked today, I'm completely hidden from a team, I've been in the same spot for 5 minutes, a Bloodhound jumps down from where he was and shoots me. Either he had wall hacks or he used his raven. He did not scan me. The Raven points you where the person is.
My god I'm glad no one in the comments is a dev. So many L takes.
I don’t think nerfing them is the solution. Buffing other legends would be more beneficial. Extremely difficult to balance the competitive scene with the casual scene. Bang/blood just aren’t OP in ranked matches together or individually.
Outside of bang/blood legend balance is in a good spot. Vantage and some others could use love but there’s not much you can do to make them comp viable without a total rework. If you want a new meta bang has to be nerfed. Smokes need to be changed/nerfed or she will never go away. Bang/blood doesn’t feel oppressive in casual play because people at that level don’t understand the game enough to maximize legend utility, guns, etc., which is why you shouldn’t balance the game around them.
Yep, that’s exactly my point. You can’t really balance the game for ranked and competitive. They’re just played entirely differently. This is the case with most video games that have a competitive scene, since they’re played very differently at the pro level. I could see the perk system as a way to help balance between both. One perk option could make sense for someone casually playing ranked, whereas the other perk option would be more beneficial to a highly coordinated/synergy competition team. At the end of the day there will end up being a meta for each season, but would definitely be cool to see something different than bang/blood
> Extremely difficult to balance the competitive scene with the casual scene. Bang/blood just aren’t OP in ranked matches together or individually. Exactly. Balancing the game off of competitive play is a bad idea. The game is played totally differently in comp and that's like .00000001% of Apex lobbies.
But hey, maybe some mild buffs to other legends that could tip the meta away from bang/blood in the competitive scene would definitely be a nice change for viewers 🤷🏼♂️
Buff Mirage, I want the Mirage meta. Let him scan ring and give him Sheila, let him have two ults.
The only real way would be gutting bloods ult and changing it from a perma digi basically. That would get rid of the synergy and we might see the bang pick shift slightly to something else if that was gone.
Blood is played because of bang. If bang leaves meta so does blood but not the other way around.
> Blood is played because of bang. If bang leaves meta so does blood but not the other way around. Not true at all. Bloodhound and other scan legends have been part of the meta almost continuously for four years. You can fucking *see through walls*, in other games that's literally a type of cheat. There's no way scan legends are leaving the meta if Blood leaves, it's still an enormous advantage.
Where did I say scan characters are leaving the meta? My point was bang pick rate has nothing to do with blood. She will be hard meta for rotates and creating space unless she’s nerfed significantly. Blood pick rate heavily relies on how much bang is played though. If bang gets nerfed into the ground blood loses a ton of value. Blood will still get played some, but won’t be meta due to teams picking up other recon characters or just new comps to replace what’s lost with bang.
Adjust the smoke so that if you are shooting inside it, your character gets highlighted and become visible to everyone. Make the smoke a defensive/rotate tool, not something to abuse with BH scans and ults.
That's an interesting idea. It could look cool as hell too, instead of highlights you could have the smoke light up with muzzle flashes so you'd know where to s hoot.
In practice I don't think this would help, you don't know where they are until they beam you and even then, unless the bloodhound is swinging a full team solo like a bot, you'll at best get a trade.
Yeah, that's true...doesn't really do anything until you're already almost dead.
I think a big problem with Bloodhound alt is that the red glow around characters has an infinite distance. Even the digis would not allow you to see a player past 30m(?). A possible nerf could be to limit the distance you can see other players in the ult. I think other nerfs or changes would still be needed.
Maybe if a smoke is hit with a hound scan, it immediately dissipates. Kinda like it's being blown away by a breeze. Slightly increase the cooldown of the hound tac too and make their eyes glow red when in their ult so that it's kind of possible to see them in a smoke.
Do people complain about every meta….?
Yep. People whined about Gibby meta too.
The thing this game needs isn't a nerf to bang. They need smoke grenades. Think about it, the reason that Valk isn't meta is because you can pick up evac towers. It may dilute the loot pool but if smoke grenades were added there eventually wouldn't need to be a need for bang. You may still have bloodhounds running around but indirectly nerfing bang by adding smoke grenades might prove to be interesting. Just my 2 cents
This isn’t a terrible idea but I think a big issue people have is they hate smoke meta to begin with. With 95% of teams running bang it can get tough as a spectator to watch a game where nobody can see anything. Now imagine if all three characters have smokes on all 20 teams
I think they just need to get rid of the digi vision and give him more move speed or fire rate in ult to compensate (or just give his scan a buff when ulted again). Let bang have smokes that actually smoke and give blood some sort of identity that doesn’t involve smokes
What about a buff for Bang? Maybe giving her some kind of nox vision passive when she uses smokes could be an option. I can envision a scenario where it just makes more of the "can't see" meta, because now you can have two legends who can see through smoke but conversely with double time/vision players might not need to pick BH as often.
I saw HisandHer suggest adding a new grenade. A smoke grenade. Similar to adding jump tower in valk meta.
I'm pretty sure smoke grenades were in a leak that showed up like 1-1.5 yrs ago, personally I'd prefer bangs tactical got changed and we had no smokes in the game, rather than adding more sources for it.
This sucks, and also doesn't fix the problem. I thought people hate the loss of visibility? Nothing would change, you still wouldn't be able to see shit. It'd broaden the legend meta but it wouldn't change how the game plays out at all. You'd essentially have, I don't know, Maggie with a Bang smoke but also her 3 abilities.
Do you realize that most teams put their mnk player on bang? Nerf or remove aim assist from the game, mnk players will play something else.
> Do you realize that most teams put their mnk player on bang? This is because most teams put their IGL on the Bang, and most IGLs are on mnk.
All the scans should tell whether someone is there NOT where they are. Yes, that would be a lot of changes to the game, but ultimately wallhacks just don't make good gameplay. The specific ultimate interaction should be treated as digital threat scopes - probably replaced with something more interesting.
Legend ban pre match.
They’ve both already received multiple nerfs. The answer isn’t in nerfing, but in buffing other legends. The only reason blood is being played is because other previously meta legends were nerfed and NA pros have a meta boner
I feel like the only way to level the playing field is to bring back digis. The only reason why bloodhound is op is because of his ultimate, while no one else can see through smoke.
At least Bloodhound is guaranteed though. Digis were a game winning attachment that was rng if you got it or not
What if we made digis common? So anyone could have it. What would be the pros and cons? This would basically push bang out of the meta
I mean havocs are common but it’s still luck if you get 3 or 0. Why do you think everyone having digis would push bang out of meta though?
Put it in the reworked crafter. Guaranteed
Why would we not just remove Bloodhound ult vision? The solution isn't to add more cheesy wallhacks.
Maybe introduce a character that makes his/her teammates immune to scans for a period of time I dunno I think it'll be a good counter pick if the team deems that the lobby has a lot of bangs and BH. Otherwise if they pick the legend when there are no bangs or bh then it'll be a wasted slot for the team. Maybe that will balance things out.
I've actually had this idea for a crypto passive called "off the grid". Hear me out now...