Vantage players, rejoice: Your legend has been fixed with the April 10 Apex Legends patch, which is now available for all platforms.
Mobility in Apex is everything. Characters with abilities or traits that provide speed, height, or range can engage fights, escape tricky situations, and provide unique utility for their team. A character’s movement abilities play a huge part in every enemy interaction, and those without any are left at a severe head-to-head disadvantage.
Vantage, a sniper who provides support to her team, lost her one option for repositioning to multiple bugs last month, severely crippling her ability to act alongside her team.
Respawn announced a new patch today, centered around addressing many notorious bugs that have been plaguing Apex, including fixing the issues that separated Echo from Vantage. Other known issues that have been fixed include the changes to the UI for weapon attachments and the pay-to-win iron sights on a new Flatline skin.
The bugs first started appearing around March 23, when the Sun Squad collection event was released. Normally, Vantage players can deploy Echo by either pressing or holding down the tactical button. Pressing the button deploys Echo in front of Vantage, while holding the button prepares Vantage to jump to Echo immediately afterward.
The newest bugs affected the second method; players found Echo deployed at ranges over 1,000 meters away, completely out of reach to jump to. Not only is a line of sight required to use the tactical ability, but recalling Echo is a process that could take over 20 seconds to complete, effectively disabling the ability altogether for use.
Many players were disgruntled by the lack of communication from Respawn over the bugs, and Vantage’s pick rate sharply declined as a result. The sniper savant held a 2.8 percent global pick rate at the start of season 16, holding steady at 14th place out of the 23 playable legends, according to stats site Apex Legends Status. With the discovery of the bugs, Vantage’s presence sharply declined, dropping to her lowest presence of 1.2 percent and putting her in the bottom three legends.
With the fixes to her tactical ability, Vantage players can use Echo without any fear of incorrect spawn locations. Vantage’s pick rate has already started recovering with the patch’s release, now rising to 1.7 percent after being freed from all of the critical bugs affecting her and Echo. Vantage is now in 18th place, out of the bottom five in global pick rate, according to Apex Legends Status.
The fixes to Vantage and Echo bring more light to similar issues surrounding the spawning location for other legends’ deployable abilities. Crypto’s drone suffers the same problems, sometimes spawning across the map when initially used, also disabling the use of the ability. As Respawn continues to acknowledge and quickly fix game-breaking bugs in each patch, the community is optimistic for these bugs to be fixed as well.
