Apex Legends Season 9 Patch Notes Rundown – What to expect when Legacy hits

With Apex Legends season 9 Legacy arriving in a couple days, patch notes are bound to follow. There are a lot of new, exciting changes coming to the new seasons. Quality of life, legend and weapon changes are all coming to the new season, and we are here to summarize the season 9 patch notes for you.

Apart from the Arena mode and a new way to express yourself through emotes, Respawn has added Starter Kits. This bundle of items that include basic white armor (which includes a knockdown shield), 2 shield batteries and 2 syringes. Player starts the match with this kit and it helps early survivability, which is a great change. Additionally, with everyone starting with a basic white armor set, the spawn rates of the has armor been reduced. This also means that instead of white armor being everywhere, there is a more diverse loot pool.

On top of better starts to matches, there has been updates regarding the ring times and shrink speeds. The changes are focused towards late game rings (4-6). The ring 4 round time has been reduced by 15 seconds but with a longer total shrink time. The ring 5 shrink speed was increased to 40 seconds (from 20 seconds). Finally the last ring round time was reduced to a minute and the shrink speed was increased to 2 minutes.

Loba and Lifeline received the biggest changes from the patch. Loba's change is simple, this makes her viability shoot up drastically. The upgrade is that she can now run and slide while using her bracelet teleport (while aiming and while the bracelet is in the air). This puts her on a similar level to other movement based legends. I don't think this will make her the best movement legend. But with a unique ultimate and a good movement based ability, she could definitely find a good niche.

On the other hand, Lifeline got a rework to her passive and ultimate kit. The passive ability of the revive shield has been removed. The passive has been replaced with the drone being able to revive two players at the same time. Then, her drone got a bit of a buff, with a faster healing and deploy rate. The big change however is the upgrade to her ultimate. The care package now gives a guaranteed upgrade to one person in your squad (unless somehow you all are in maxed armor and weapons). The upgrade can either be equipment (helmet, backpack, knockdown shield), or weapon attachments. Although the nerf to the drone combat revive is big, it is counterbalanced by the huge buff to her ultimate.

There are also some minor changes to the legends with the release of season 9. Octane, who has has a crazy rise in popularity due to his recent changes has been delivered a nerf as expected. The cost to use his Stim has been increased to 20 HP (rather than 12), but the cooldown has been reduced to 1 second. This means there is practically no cooldown for stim usage, you just need to be careful not to drop yourself to 1 HP.

As mentioned in the our Legacy Trailer breakdown article, Fuse got a buff. Although the prediction of the larger area of effect of his tactical did not come true, he got a buff in another form. His tactical now has 2 charges instead of 1, which will hopefully increase the Australian's pick and win rates.

Lastly, Horizon got a change, and to put it in a few words: movement in her tactical has been slowed. Specifically, the lift speed and side-to-side acceleration was reduced. On top of that, there is now a limit of 2 seconds to sit on top of the gravity lift. This prevents people from healing up to full while juking around in the lift (cause we all know how hard it is to hit people in the lift). These changes are good, because being able to get off a full Battery/Med Kit/Phoenix Kit while in the lift was stupidly good.

The marksman weapons are a new class of weapons that are halfway point between snipers and assault rifles. Excelling at medium to long range engagements, the class includes the new Bocek bow, G7 Scout, Triple Take and the 30-30 Repeater. They offer an increased movement speed while aiming down sights compared to snipers but at the price of lower damage.

The long waited return of the Peacekeeper. Rotating out of the care package, the Peacekeeper returns to ground loot with reduced pellet damage and increased rechamber and reload times to balance it out. Replacing it in the care package is the Triple Take, which can provide some interesting opportunities for long range engagements.

The last big change with the new season is with hop ups. With the new Legacy Season, Hammerpoint and Skullpiercer hop ups have been removed in favor of the new shatter caps (for the 30-30 repeater and bocek bow) and the deadeye's tempo (for the sentinel and boeck bow).

With all these changes, the upcoming new legend and the new arena modes, Season 9 is looking to be the best season to date. With how the Dev's listen and balance the game, there is only improvement for Apex, cementing it's place further as one of the best Battle Royale games out there. The season 9 patch notes have been warmly received by the community. Now it's just a case of impatiently waiting until they hit the client.