Respawn Plans to Nerf Octane's Stim in Apex Legends

Everyone's favorite speedster is a dominating force in Apex Legends, but that may change soon with Respawn's plans to nerf Octane's Stim. His Stim grants him the ability to gain speed and maneuverability, at the cost of a small portion of health. Thanks to his passive ability, the speedster's health auto-regenerates that cost health and more as time goes on.

Respawn Plans to Nerf Octane's Stim in Apex Legends

Respawn's plans to nerf Octane come from the dominating gameplay this Legend has had, and they've been tracking it for some time. The solution to balance this dominance seems to be affecting his Stim, making it take more health in exchange for being able to use it again sooner.

"Octane's pretty trackable [in my opinion], but we need to hit him a little bit," said Lead Game Designer Daniel Klein in a patch note comment thread. "He's become extremely dominant (to no one's surprise) so we'll need to shave a little power off."

Klein continued, "I think I found a reasonably fun-neutral way of doing so: I'm currently thinking about increasing the health cost for his Stim but letting you stim again much sooner (there's currently a 3-4 second delay between the old stim running out and you being able to stim again). This is kind of a buff if you look at just the speed at which you move, but taken together with the increased health cost it'll allow you to drop your health real low real fast. I always thought Stim's health cost was a fun way to pay for power with life that was tuned too softly to matter."

Other plans for Apex Legends include a change to loot drops, a nerf to Horizon, affecting her ability to wiggle back and forth in the air on her Gravity Lift, and changes to Fuse, who has the lowest win rate. Although Respawn has been making micro and macro updates this season, it's likely that any further major changes will not be introduced until Season 9.