Apex Legends dev confirms Gibraltar gun shield changes coming

Apex Legends devs at Respawn have confirmed that Gibraltar will be getting a change to his Gun Shield, which will hopefully fix the biggest problem players have with facing the legend at the moment: bleedthrough.

Gibraltar is basically the tank of Apex Legends, with a big Dome shield for his teammates and a smaller “Gun Shield” that appears when he aims down sights for himself.

Obviously, these make him tougher to take down in a fight, but the trade-off being he has one of the largest hitboxes in the game. A lot of players have complained quite a bit about one thing Gibby’s shield lacks – damage bleedthrough.

Now, Respawn has announced they’ll finally be adding the interaction in an update sometime after the start of Season 8. If you’re confused on what bleedthrough actually is, don’t worry, as we’ll explain it all right here.

What is Bleedthrough in Apex Legends?

Bleedthrough refers to the transfer of damage to the target after a shield has been destroyed. Take any level of armor you can find in Apex, for example. Say you have 50 armor: If you take over 50 damage with one shot, that remaining damage doesn’t just go away. Instead, it transfers to your base health pool.

Gibraltar’s Gun Shield doesn’t work this way. Instead of transferring damage over, it does make it disappear. This means you can have just 1HP left on your shield, and negate the full damage of an incoming shot.

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This might seem like a minor detail, but it definitely makes Gibraltar much tougher to take down during a gunfight and has been a significant annoyance to non-Gibby mains for a while. Thankfully, Respawn seems to have a plan to fix it.

While the updates won’t make it in time for the Season 8 update, Respawn dev JayBiebs did reveal two major changes coming for the legend in a post on the game’s subreddit.

“Bleedthrough and damage counting towards stats/evo to mitigate some of the shield economy difference in poking engagements against Gib,” they wrote. “We really wanted to get the gun shield change in for 8.0. But we discovered a bug in how damage is registered by the gun shield with single projectile vs. multi-projective weapons.”

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Exactly when the update will happen remains to be seen, but from the comment, it seems devs are pretty far along with the updates – so it wouldn’t be a shock to see it arrive a week or two after Season 8 begins.