The release of Apex Legends Season 7 brought about the introduction of Horizon, a Scottish astrophysicist, who quickly became a fan-favorite Legend to play in the game. Her popularity doesn’t come as a surprise though, given her amusing voice lines (“When you’re a master of black holes, relativity becomes… well, relative”), her fun and upbeat personality, and how extremely powerful she is.
However, now that Season 8 is just around the corner, the team behind Apex Legends may be planning to nerf the much-loved character due to a statistic revealed by one of the developers. Ever since Respawn Entertainment’s hero shooter battle royale was launched, Wraith has always been the character that most players chose.
Wraith overshadowed all the other characters in terms of pick rate, win rate, and win encounter rate—even including competitive matches. Now, however, the crown has been passed over to Horizon, who dominates overall win rate these days.
Thanks to Horizon’s abilities, players who use her are able to crowd control, have advantageous positions, as well as move fast to escape danger. Even though Respawn Entertainment already nerfed Horizon during the most recent Fight Night Collection Event, it appears that the Legend will be receiving yet another nerf in the future, according to Apex Legends live balance designer John Larson.
For Horizon’s nerf during the Fight Night Collection Event, Respawn Entertainment increased the cooldown of her Grav Lift tactical ability from 16 seconds to 21 seconds. However, this didn’t seem to stop the character from dominating most Apex Legends matches.
For one thing, the Grav Lift ability, in particular, offers a lot of options for players in terms of usage. It can be used to give Horizon a height advantage or as an offensive attack in order to throw off an enemy’s movements. Not only that, it can even be used like Octane’s jump pad in that Horizon gets a movement boost.
According to Larson, however, it appears that Horizon’s tactical ability is once again in line for yet another downgrade. Although, the developer states that they will try to avoid any major changes as much as possible.
This plan to nerf Horizon was revealed by Larson in a reply to a post on the Apex Legends subReddit. In his reply, Larson states that Horizon will most likely receive the same kind of treatment that Wraith and Pathfinder received since she now holds the top spot for win rate.
While Horizon and Wraith nearly have the same encounter win rate, Respawn Entertainment intended for Horizon to be an incredibly powerful Legend upon her release simply because many other Legends in the roster were underpowered when they officially became a part of the game’s roster.
Although the nerf hasn’t officially gone live yet and it’s still in its testing stages, Larson provides different options in which they can make some tweaks and adjustments to Horizon’s tactical ability. “Looking at her tactical alone there are all sorts of dials we can turn including vertical lift speed, horizontal speed/acceleration, ejection speed/time, cool down, weapon accuracy, and the list goes on,” he states.
