Apex Legends Season 12: Known Legend Buffs and Nerfs

Heading into Season 12 of Apex Legends, many changes are expected to come to different Legends in order to help the competitive balancing of the game. It's important for Respawn to monitor which characters in their game are becoming "overpowered" and which have issues that make them nearly impossible to play with.

With monitoring these factors come "buffs and nerfs" to Respawn's Apex Legends. The developers have already alluded to a few characters seeing changes in the upcoming season, as a new Legend enters the fray. Here are the expected buffs and nerfs we know so far that should be coming to Apex Legends Season 12.

Apex Legends Season 12: Buffs and Nerfs for Legends so far

To clarify, these buffs and nerfs are yet to be confirmed by any patch notes, they are just changes that Respawn devs have mentioned publicly. We'll have to wait for the patch notes for Season 12 to confirm these changes:

Crypto: Buff

Crypto has been one of the least used Legends in Apex since his arrival, due to his drone abilities hindering his mobility and allowing you to get killed easily. Buffs to Crypto have been hinted at for months, with one developer confirming that Respawn is looking into changes for the surveillance expert.

“Crypto is being looked at and should be getting some improvements in the future," one developer said back in August 2021, "just not sure when they’re coming… Maybe a way to use the drone on the fly”.

Pathfinder: Passive rework

Players in the Apex Legends community have called for a changes in Pathfinder's passive for the past few seasons. Live Balance Designer John Larson said in an Interview with Dexerto that the team was open to reworking Pathfinder’s Passive, but they don’t want to give him a “straight-up buff”.

Since Pathfinder is one of the most popular Legends in the game, its unclear how soon the developers may start the rework process, but likely we can see changes sometime in Season 12.

Gibraltar: Nerf/Changes

John Larson mentioned in the same interview that the development team are discussing how to alter Gibraltar. Larson described Gibraltar as a “must pick” character in competitive and at the game’s highest level of play.

“It’s tough though, because a lot of the ideas I see are things like, give bubble health… I don’t like how that would affect Gibby, and that’s not really how I’d nerf the bubble, that would be way too big of a nerf.”

It would likely be difficult to nerf Gibraltar without making him too unusable, but Respawn will certainly look into the changes as Season 12 rolls in.

Scan Meta: Changes

In the Raiders Collection Event patch, Respawn mentioned they’d be evaluating the Legends that fall into the scan or “reveal meta” and attempting to make changes to them over time.

While some of these characters like Bloodhound remain incredibly strong, others like Seer have an extremely low pick rate. It’s obvious the devs want to rectify this without disturbing the overall balance of the game, so expect Seer to have some sort of buffs in Season 12.

One developer discussed previous changes to Seer, and how they plan on revisiting those changes soon. “Seer was dialed back to a healthier spot with the balance hotfix soon after his release, however, after four months of evaluating his use in the live game, the detonation delay seems a little too sluggish…we want to improve its feel while continuing to evaluate the reveal meta as a whole.”

Hopefully these changes will have a positive impact on the game, and allow for more useable Legend options in Apex to expand.