Latest Apex Legends patch update reverts armour back to previous season after fans kicked off

Apex Legends received a surprise update this week which reversed a drastic change made to armour values at the start of Season 6.

When the latest season went live on august xyz, developers Respawn Entertainment said it decided to reduce the level of damage a shield can take before it breaks, meaning your character could get downed and killed much quicker than usual.

As part of the changes in Season 6, all body armour found in the game became Evo Armour, which is a type of shield which gets more powerful the more damage you do to other players to encourage a more aggressive play style.

All shields had their protective values dropped by 25 hit points, which completely changed up the time-to-kill (TTK) rate in the game, making fights come to an end much quicker.

A lot of players were not happy with this new change, however, because firefights in Apex are typically drawn out and it has an emphasis on tactical movement and positioning.

Having weaker shields overall meant that a lot of good players could essentially completely wipe everyone out in no time at all.

The devs initially defended the idea, saying that the change was to reduce the chances of another squad taking you by surprise while you're in a long gunfight - otherwise known as being 'third partied'.

Due to the level of backlash from fans, armour values have gone back to the way they were before Season 6.

Explaining the decision, design director Jason McCord explained in a blog post: "With the introduction of the Evo Armour change, we saw (in our internal playtests) that players were achieving Red Armour (the highest rank) more often, giving players a total of 225 health".

Respawn claims that it began to see that this advantage started to swing the battles massively to those people who had max rank shields. It also meant better players were able to outplay teams more consistently regardless of if you're in a better position, for example.

He continues to explain: "We’ve analysed some data and collected player feedback enough to make a decision. We are going to revert the armour values to pre-Season 6 values".

"We are always striving to improve the experience in Apex Legends. Experimentation is an essential part of that. We won't always get things right, but it's important for us to listen and correct things when we don't."

The change is going to be welcome news to some, but it did seem like a lot of people really enjoyed the new, more aggressive and faster TTK meta.

Also included in this update is the removal of an "inappropriate Caustic voice line." This is in reference to a line used by one of the Legend characters Caustic, who referred to Korean character Crypto as a "rat".

This particular insult has a history of being a racial slur used again Asian people, so it is good to see the line removed.

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