Earlier this week, I reported that season 4 of Apex Legends has started. You may be wondering, “hey, are there any specific things to know from this new version of the game?” Well, say no more, because I’ve decided to dig in to give my own takeaways on the season. Please note that I’m hardly a professional player, just somebody that plays semi-regularly, so don’t expect any super intricate takes like comparing damage numbers or whatever.

Revenant is the newest character on the block, and wow, he is such a scumbag. His voice lines all give the impression of being a scumbag teammate yelling at you over voice chat in actual character form. He honestly makes Caustic, the edgy mad scientist, look like a saint. His rudeness is honestly kinda funny, but also, it legitimately feels bad trying to communicate to teammates in-game without voice chat while using him. The usual “thank you” line you can spout for him is “don’t think I owe you anything,” which makes me come off as so much of a jerk that just staying silent probably feels more grateful.

So in the news post, I derived his abilities from a bunch of rumors, which, for the most part, came true. His decided active ability is Silence, which locks the skills of anyone hit by his silencing grenade for a few seconds. So, depending on who you’re going against, this is very valuable. It prevents characters from popping their escape options, like removing Bangalore’s smoke grenade and restricting Pathfinder’s ability to grapple out of fights.

It can also prevent harsh retaliation like Bangalore’s and Gibraltar’s ultimates. It won’t do much good against characters like Wattson, who’s abilities work on pre-planning, and Lifeline, whose active is only really useful after a fight finishes and will be, at most, a mild inconvenience to people playing her. It should also be noted that you don’t need to hit enemies directly with the Silence. The blast from the Silence creates a small AOE void that will inflict silence on anyone that walks through it. So, depending on the situation, it’s useful for aiming at enemies in choke points.

Revenant’s Ultimate, where he places down a totem that will teleport downed/killed players to it with a little health, seems pretty useful. However, there are some things to remember. Players have to remember to actually interact with the totem to get its benefits, which is something I’ve learned the hard way. As a Revenant, you also need to remember to put it in a safe place because it can actually be shot and destroyed, or, even worse,

Caustic can put a gas trap next to it, which will immediately kill anyone that teleports back to it in an ultimate show of disrespect. Additionally, any damage taken in the totem-provided shadow form gives directly affects health and you can’t heal, so it’s not as if you’re some juggernaut. Finally, there is a circle dictating how far you can go from the totem before the protection gets removed, and you can’t renew protection from the same totem.

With that in mind, Revenant’s Ultimate is more useful in planned strikes than sudden firefights. I think that it would be best used for pushing at enemy teams holing up in buildings, especially if you can hide the totem in another building nearby. It seems optimal to pair up Revenant with Wattson because she can lock down the building with her electric fences. A Wraith could also put up a portal next to the totem and the fight to immediately get teammates back into the action, though it of course runs its own risk of enemies using the portal to go directly to it.

Season 4 also introduced a new sniper rifle, the Sentinel. What the trailer didn’t communicate was that all the sniper rifles in the game, minus the G-7, now classified as an assault rifle, now have a separate ammo type. To me, this is a very fair change. Sniper rifles of course previously shared ammo types with whatever group they belonged to. The problem with that was that sniper rifles would get an unreasonable amount of ammo, since what would be a full clip or two for an assault rifle would become something around two dozen shots for a sniper rifle. This would also mean that really skilled snipers probably wouldn’t have to worry about ammo too much. By creating a separate ammo type, the game no longer runs into this problem.

It also makes sense because all the sniper rifles are just plain different from each other. Triple Take fires a spread of bullets, Charge Rifle fires a small beam followed up by a huge blast, the Longbow is semi-automatic and the Kraber is just powerful. The new sniper rifle, the Sentinel, has a unique ability where you can spend a Shield Battery to charge up its shots so that they do higher damage to shields. To me, it seems like a more balanced version of the Disruptor Round hop-ups; which was a temporary weapon attachment for the Alternator that turned it into a real beast that was fortunately patched out.

Energy weapons have also seen a huge shake up. The Devotion has switched places with the L-Star as a crate exclusive, limited ammo weapon. This honestly disappoints me because the Devotion is my favorite weapon in the game. As the Triple Take is now a sniper ammo weapon, the only energy weapons in the game are now the Havoc and the L-Star. The Turbocharger and the extended magazine for energy weapons have also been removed to accommodate these changes, as they’d only really help the Havoc.

While the Havoc feels like a less viable weapon because of these changes, I feel that it really brings the L-Star up. As a crate weapon, it only had a limited amount of ammo, and because of its high recoil a lot of that ammo would be wasted. While I hardly used it myself, it generally seems to be regarded as the weakest of the crate weapons. However, as it’s a normal weapon now, you can shoot it for as much ammo as you can carry, which I feel makes it more viable than it used to be.

There have also been changes for Bloodhound regarding their Ultimate. Their Ultimate, Beast of the Hunt, gives Bloodhound a decent speed boost, highlights all enemies in red within grayed out vision, and shows footsteps to track down nearby enemies. The ability has been buffed so that whenever Bloodhound downs anyone during the Ultimate’s duration, an extra five seconds gets added to the duration. This means that a skilled Bloodhound player can theoretically sustain the Beast of the Hunt for longer times, using their speed boost and footprint tracking abilities to hunt down people to keep the timer going.

After the release of Crypto in the last season, Bloodhound has been considered to be a lower-tier character. While Crypto requires cooperative teammates to make good on his surveillance, Crypto can survey a larger range and can do it from a safe place while Bloodhound is only good at surveying the general vicinity, outside of using sniper rifles and needing to get into the action themselves. That said, I personally consider Bloodhound’s Ultimate to be better in that Crypto’s Ultimate, an EMP blast from his drone, still needs full cooperation with his other teammates. That is on top of the fact that it could easily be countered, it is hard to miss a glowing orb after all. These buffs will definitely make Bloodhound stronger for skilled players. With that said, please, Respawn, change their active ability. It just sucks.

A new, notable part of the map is the Harvester, which is a large, multi-leveled building. I think that with its design a lot of characters can find their own niche fighting there. Its focus on verticality accommodates Revenant’s climbing passive and the mobility Pathfinder and Octane provide. There are a lot of closed off rooms where Caustic and Wattson can wall themselves off in, etc. The lava fissures that divide the map also provides a new, risky way of escaping from engagements via taking damage from heat but riding the heatwaves away to safety.

The map in general also has a nice look to it, with the huge harvester beam tinting the sky orange to give the impression of a sunset. Overall, it’s a good update that offers a lot to players. Of course, season 4 offers a lot of new things and big changes for players to get used to. It’s still pretty early, so it’s hard to say how the metagame will evolve from here.

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