Apex Legends’ health bar change turned out to be a huge nerf for one character

In season 22, Apex Legends made a UI change small in size but huge in application: Enemy health bars are shown when you deal damage to them, giving players far more info. And, as it turns out, it’s a nerf to a character that thrives on confusing enemies.

That character, of course, is Mirage. Over the years in Apex, Mirage has developed a cult following thanks to the clearly dorky personality papered over with bravado and a kit that has never been good, technically, but has always made for funny clips and outplays. There’s nothing quite like taking down an enemy that’s mistaken one of your holo-clones for the real Mirage, after all. But that’s precisely the problem with the health bar change in season 22, an update that seemingly didn’t have anything to do with Mirage when it shipped. That health bar appears over the real Mirage’s head—and only the real Mirage’s head—making it incredibly easy to spot him when he’s using his Life of the Party ultimate.

The Life of the Party instantly creates several clones that move out from the real Mirage in a circle and mimic his movements, which typically makes it very difficult to figure out which Mirage is the real one before he starts shooting. But the health bar takes that difficulty away almost immediately if you’ve dealt damage to the character before or as he activates his ultimate since none of the decoys get health bars.

Players on Reddit and other social media sites were quick to spot the issue. And no one is certain if that’s a simple oversight on how the new health bars devalue Mirage’s kit or if everything is working as intended.

“I’m wondering if they didn’t even consider that or if that’s intentional,” one Reddit user mused. “Not sure which is worse.” Many commenters thought Respawn just overlooked how the change would affect Mirage. “I’m going to guess this is an unintentional effect,” one of the top replies read. “So of course they’ll remedy it in approximately never weeks.”

From a design standpoint, Respawn is in a bit of a tough spot on this one. One of the largest issues the devs mentioned when talking about the new health bars in the season 22 patch notes was “visual clarity and accurate information.” In a game where things can get very chaotic and tons of visual and audio info can be dumped on a player all at once, a health bar was something meant to aid players in how they read the battlefield.

But Mirage is the only character in the game that intentionally tries to confuse players with incorrect information. That is the entire point of his kit; he sends out decoys and cloaks himself and allies when reviving. If you’re playing Mirage correctly, you should be sending opponents exclusively wrong information until it’s too late for them to react to you one-clipping them from an unexpected angle. And of all the characters who need or deserve a sizable nerf like this, Mirage is incredibly low on the list. He can be confusing and frustrating to play against, sure, but his abilities are very situational and not oppressive by any means.

So, what does Respawn do here? If the devs put health bars above every decoy’s head to match the Mirage clone, that creates far too much visual clutter to deal with. The most likely solution is probably giving Mirage a buff to eliminate health bar views when he’s in his ultimate, but it might be too early for such a big tweak to the new health bar system for Respawn to pull the trigger on that kind of change right now.

If you’re a Mirage main, you’re just stuck in a tough spot right now. My best advice is to not bother using your ultimate if you’ve just been damaged since your health bar will more or less render it useless.