Every seasoned Apex Legends player knows that ending up outside the ring is inevitable—whether you’re frantically looting a body in the storm to fighting others while trying to get to safety, surviving the ring’s damage has become a talent in itself for many fans of the game. Unfortunately, many players have been taken by surprise by a recent change in Apex that has boosted out-of-ring damage.
Patch 1.2 was rolled out by Respawn Entertainment about a week ago that introduced the new Elite Queue, which pitted players who have reached a top-five finish as a team. The game mode, however, still plays the same way except that the out-of-ring damage has been increased by a huge margin.
In this clip sent to the Apex Legends subreddit, we can see how potent the ring damage can be as a player watches nine squads die almost all at once. A majority of the deaths were caused by bleed out or from “Out of Bounds”, leaving only three lucky squads left.
These changes to Elite queue will drastically change the strategies that surround looting and picking fights. Players can no longer continue looting because they are now forced to run to the next zone or risk taking huge damage. Additionally, players can no longer pick fights that are very far from zone because they might not have enough time to heal before the ring damage kills them.
It will be interesting to see if this new mechanic will be applied to future competitive Apex Legends tournaments, since this should encourage more fighting and more excitement for the viewer base.
