Apex Legends game designer David Bocek hinted at nerfs to his namesake weapon yesterday. And now, Respawn followed through, taking the powerful Bocek Bow down a peg.
The battle royale’s newest addition has been a point of contention, with many complaining that it’s overpowered and “ruining” the season. It didn’t take long for Respawn to swoop in with changes, however, targeting the bow with a number of nerfs that should balance it out immediately. The Spitfire is also getting a minor tweak in the update scheduled for “late afternoon PT.”
The Bocek Bow’s max charge body shot damage is dropping from 70 to 60 and its charge-up time is increasing from 0.54 to 0.56 seconds. The charge-up time when equipped with the Deadeye’s Tempo hop-up, which can increase its rate of fire, was also bumped up from 0.32 to 0.38 seconds. The stack size will drop from 16 to 14 and the inventory slot count will be decreased from 48 to 28.
Even though the deadly weapon is still relatively silent, these changes should make it a lot harder to compete with assault weapons and snipers. It’ll deal less damage and take longer to charge up, making every shot count. Since the bow is effective at most ranges, today’s nerfs should also make mid-range duels more fair.
As for the Spitfire, its damage per bullet is decreasing by one, from 19 to 18, and the purple and gold magazine’s size is dropping from 55 to 50. This should limit the bullet spam that players face when enemies incessantly shoot the LMG.
While the update that balances weapons will be out later today, a server and client patch that will address a few bugs should be live now. The bug fixes include a few quality-of-life changes to Arenas mode, like tracking “time survived” more consistently and matches properly ending if there are no players left on the enemy team. And Valkyrie’s passive will no longer highlight players who are dead or in spectator mode, limiting the confusion.
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