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Apex Legends update 7.0 patch notes preps for Steam release

The full patch notes for Apex Legends' upcoming 7.0 update are up, as Steam owners get ready to jump into Ascension.

Ozzie Mejia

November 2, 2020 10:45 AM

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Apex Legends is kicking off Season 7 this coming Wednesday. To prepare its vast player base for Ascension, EA and Respawn have released the full Season 7 patch notes. This includes everything coming in terms of new characters, vehicles, weapons, and balance changes. And yes, it includes everything coming to Steam owners.

Apex Legends Season 7: Ascension sees the debut of new character Horizon, a new vehicle, and a new skybound map called Olympus. Let's take a look at the patch notes from the Apex Legends website.

Apex Legends update 7.0 patch notes

• New Legend: Horizon
  • Passive: Spacewalk: Increase air control and reduce fall impacts with Horizon’s custom spacesuit.
  • Tactical: Gravity Lift: Reverse the flow of gravity, lifting players upward and boosting them outward when they exit.
  • Ultimate: Black hole: Deploy NEWT to create a micro black hole that sucks in nearby Legends.
• New Map: Olympus
• New Vehicle: The Trident
• LTM: Olympus Preview: To help you understand and explore the map without fear of getting shot, we are introducing a new playlist called Olympus Preview. This mode teams you up with 30 Legends on Olympus and allows you to roam the map to learn map drops, loot areas, and practice your routes to the end game. Circles are still on and once circle 4 finishes, players are brought back up to the plane to start the second skydive run. There are a total of 3 runs before the match ends. This mode is only available for one week.
• Clubs: With this season, we are introducing clubs. Join a club with like minded legends and make it easier to find your champion squad. Don’t see a particular club you like, then create one and let your friends know to join! Read more on clubs here.
• Steam: Boot up Steam and start downloading and play Apex Legends! If you’re coming from Origin, all your progress and unlocks will carry over. And for a limited time, log into Steam and receive these Half-Life and Portal inspired weapon charms.
• Battle Pass: The Season 7 Battle Pass is all about that high fashion. Level up your Pass to unlock the skins like the Wraith “High Class” and Octane’s “Fast Fashion”.
  • Challenges are no longer points-based and are now granted between 1 to 5 stars, depending on their difficulty. Collecting 10 stars will take you to the next Battle Pass level. We have also added tabs to the challenges menu in the lobby that allow you to toggle between daily, top weekly, and event challenges. Within a match, players can open the map and see this same widget in game. For more on the changes to Challenges, check out this dev blog.

Quality of Life Updates

• Attachment Swap Improvements: When replacing an attachment with one from the ground, if the old attachment is an improvement for your other weapon, the old attachment will get automatically transferred.
• Replicator Updates
  • For Season 7, we have removed weapons from the crafting pool and have replaced them with Shield batteries. The high level attachments will still be tailored towards a weapon category.
  • We now prevent other players from picking up items that you crafted for the first 5 seconds after crafting. This can be disabled by pinging the item.
• Air Drop Clarity
  • The colors of the beams have been changed to differentiate between normal airdrops, Lifeline's airdrops, and Replicator airdrops. Normal drops are a light tan, Lifeline's drops are blue, and Replicator drops and teal.
  • All of the airdrops' landing area FX while it's coming down matches their colors.
  • Airdrop beams still stay visible when close to the airdrop, instead of fading when you get close. The beam still disappears when the pod is opened.
  • Misc
    • The Arc Star now shows an Arc Star model when one is thrown near you, instead of a grenade.
    • Added a new VO line when you are using a Phoenix Kit
    • Added a new VO line when you drop a Holo Spray
    • You can now ping ammo in your inventory to request more from your squad
    • Made modifications to The Ring to reduce the amount of unplayable space in the circles.
• Map Rotations
  • Regular Map Rotation: For 2 weeks, Olympus will be the only map you can play on. After that week we go into a normal rotation between Olympus and World’s Edge. We will be vaulting Kings Canyon for the time being.
  • Season 7 Ranked Rotation: The first half of Ranked Split will be played on Olympus. The second half of ranked will be played on World’s Edge. For more information on this season’s ranked updates, check out the ranked blog.

Legend Meta

• Bangalore
  • Rolling Thunder: Reduced the time it takes for explosion from 8 seconds to 6 seconds.
• Caustic
  • Nox Gas Trap/Nox Gas Grenade: Legends no longer get a blurred vision effect while in the gas. Damage updated from 4-10 ticks of damage to 6-12 ticks of damage.
• Mirage
  • Psyche Out/Life of the Party: Decoys now have 45 health
• Octane
  • Swift Mend: Doubled healing rate (from 0.5 hp/s to 1.0 hp/s)
• Wattson
  • Perimeter Security: Increased damage per touch from 10 to 15.
• Loba
  • Black Market: Ammo taken no longer counts towards Black Market’s maximum. You can scoop up all the ammo in range.
• Rampart
  • Sheila: Now takes 1.25 seconds to fully spin up, down from 2 seconds.
  • Amped Wall: Now takes 3 seconds to fully build, down from 4 seconds.
• Pathfinder
  • Hitbox: (See Apex Legends website for specifics.)
  • Grappling Hook: We’re making a number of changes to Grappling Hook. In 6.1 we shipped a very conservative version of this change; now that we know this didn’t meaningfully affect his winrate or, anecdotally, how frustrating it is to fight him, we’re shipping the much more aggressive version of the changelist. We also want to make it clear that players should not be punished for chaining grappling hook perfectly into other movement mechanics.
    • Pathfinder no longer needs to be on the ground for Grappling Hook to be considered finished.
    • The speed to which Pathfinder needs to drop for us to consider Grappling Hook finished was increased from 300 units/second to 500 units/second
    • The maximum cooldown grapple can be set to was lowered to 30 seconds, from 35 seconds; the maximum amount of travel time before a new cooldown is set is now 5 seconds, rather than being uncapped. This means that effectively, you can never incur more than a 35 second cooldown.
    • The amount of distance you can travel before you hit maximum cooldown was roughly doubled.

Weapon Meta

• Supply Drop
  • R99 Out of Supply Drop: The R99 will be returning to the normal loot pool this season, with the same stats it had before it went into the supply drop at the start of season 6.
    • Damage: 12 -> 11 (from Care Package version to normal pre-season 6)
    • Ammo 20/22/24/27
  • Prowler Into Supply Drop: The prowler is replacing the R99 in the supply drop. Despite the Select fire hop-up being removed from the loot pool this season, the Prowler will still have the ability to change between 5 round bursts and full-auto.
    • Magazine size: 35; reserve ammo: 175
• Fully Kitted Weapons
  • Removed: Devotion, Mastiff, Triple Take, Flatline, Volt
  • New: Wingman, Sentinel, Havoc, G7, Alternator
• Hemlok
  • Increasing horizontal recoil of the first 3 shots slightly to the right (first burst when in burst mode)
  • Increasing recoil magnitude in the later stages of the pattern
  • Reducing recoil multiplier in single fire mode to help compensate for additional recoil in pattern. Recoil should mostly be increased in burst mode rather than single fire mode
  • Reducing headshot multiplier 2.0 -> 1.75 (44 -> 39 damage headshot against no helmet base character)
• Havoc
  • Updated recoil pattern. Kicks up, then right, then left, then up again.
• L-Star
  • LSTAR has a new recoil pattern that kicks horizontally at first and then settles into a relatively consistent upward recoil. Players who feather the trigger will be able to keep the LSTAR in the good portion of the recoil pattern.
  • LSTAR venting time after letting go of the trigger has been reduced 0.4s -> 0.15s.
  • LSTAR will now reduce heat faster when not overheated -- 1.15s from 99.9% to 0% charge if not overheated, still 2.45s if overheated.
• Sentinel
  • Energized Sentinel now has a pure damage increase, instead of bonus damage only vs shields
  • Energized Sentinel base damage 70 -> 88
• Triple Take
  • Fire rate 1.3 -> 1.2
• Hop-Ups
  • Quickdraw Holster Hop-up: This new hop-up attaches to the RE-45 and Wingman. When equipped, the gun becomes quicker to raise and lower, takes less time to ADS, and has reduced hipfire spread (particularly when not actively moving). This should open up new opportunities to use the two weapons, especially in close-quarters combat.
  • The Selectfire Receiver hop-up will be removed from the loot pool to make room.

Game Meta Changes

• Evo Armor requirements increased: We increased the requirements to evolve Evo Armor in order to reduce the amount of players with Red Evo Armor during the end game.
  • Level 0 -> 1 : 100 damage (from 50)
  • Level 1 -> 2 : 150 damage (from 125)
  • Level 2 -> 3 : 300 damage (from 250)
  • Level 3 -> 4 : 750 damage (from 500)
• Ring damage reduced
  • Ring 1: 2% per tick (same)
  • Ring 2: 3% per tick (from 5%) (Particularly this change should allow players enough time to pop a syringe if they are picked up in Ring 2.)
  • Ring 3: 5% per tick (from 10%)
  • Ring 4: 10% per tick (from 20%)
  • Ring 5: 10% per tick (from 20%)
  • Ring 6: 15% per tick (from 25%)
  • Ring 7: 15% per tick (from 25%)

Bug Fixes

• Audio
  • We’ve made some advancements in footstep audio playing more reliably. We have more work being done that we’ll continue to roll out as it gets completed.
• Pathfinder
  • Fixed an issue with ziplines going through platforms when deployed from underneath.
• Wraith
  • Fixed an issue with priming a grenade cancelling Wraith's ultimate.
• Octane
  • Fixed an issue with getting stuck in double jump after using a jump pad.
  • Fixed an issue with Octane being able to use healing items while on a zipline.
• Crypto
  • Fixed an issue with his drone being able to drop items from Crypto’s inventory.
  • Fixed an issue with his drone not being able to fit through certain windows.
  • Fixed an issue with his drone marking friendly Mirage decoys as enemies.
• Revenant
  • Fixed an issue with Revenant getting pushed into geo when his totem was deployed in tight spaces.
• Rampart
  • Fixed an issue with Rampart not being able to place an amp wall while jumping.
  • Fixed an issue with Sheila teleporting when placed on a hatch in World’s Edge Staging.

We have a lot more to say about the newest season of Apex Legends. Be sure to get our full hands-on preview of Ascension. Apex Legends starts Season 7 this Wednesday, November 4.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?