Apex Legends may finally get class changes—and they could fundamentally change the game

For a long time, Apex Legends’ characters have been sorted into classes that didn’t mean much outside of being a general descriptor for how each character’s abilities fit into a team. Characters with shields or other objects designed to hold down areas were put into the defensive class. Characters with scan abilities belonged to recon. Characters that mostly dealt with being aggressive and dealing damage got the assault tag.

With the exception of recon class characters being able to scan survey beacons for future ring information, the classes in Apex haven’t really meant anything all that special for characters. But that could change very soon if some leaks hold true.

While the character leaks about Ballistic took center stage yesterday, they contained within them the legends of Apex re-organized into different classes, with a few completely new classes that aren’t currently in the game. According to leakers and insiders, these new classes are legitimate, and many will give characters new class-wide abilities.

The original assault, recon, and support classes are all still there but with some faces in different places among them, like Gibraltar and Newcastle joining the support cast. Elsewhere, new classes like control and skirmisher appear. The control class is made up largely of legends that used to be branded in the defensive category, like Wattson, Caustic, Rampart, and Catalyst. The skirmisher category, on the other hand, looks like it’s populated with “movement” characters like Wraith and Valkyrie that have always been somewhat awkwardly placed in the current broad classes while containing elements in their ability kits that seemed to belong to other classes.

Related: All leaked Ballistic abilities in Apex Legends

If these leaks end up coming true, it could mean a sizable change to how characters are played at every level of the game. The leaked recon class only has four characters in it: Bloodhound, Crypto, Seer, and Vantage. Pro players value recon characters highly for their ability to scan survey beacons, but this change seems to limit the number of characters that can actually do that significantly. There’s also the question of whether this will remain the class ability of recon characters or if that is subject to change, like the leaked change to the assault class that lets those characters store more ammo in their inventories.

The class change also seems to indicate that more significant changes are in store for Pathfinder. While the grapple-hook legend has not been a staple in the upper levels of the game for a while now, he remains one of Apex’s most popular characters across all levels of play for the depth of his movement options.

No matter what level of Apex you play, these class changes look like they’ll switch up some elements of all your favorite characters. And that might be exactly what the doctor ordered for a meta that many players have complained is stale over the past several seasons.