Apex Legends: What every gold item does

Apex Legends utilizes a loot system where rarity, and level, are highlighted by color. Unsurprisingly, gold (legendary) represents the best items. Here are all the gold items and what they do in-game.

Gold items in Apex Legends are often hard to come by due to the benefits they offer and their rarity. The gold color is preceded by, in order of most common to rare, Level 1 (grey), Level 2 (blue) and Level 3 (purple).

There is actually a rarity level higher than Legendary, which is red or heirloom. This covers heirloom items for Legends, care package weapons, and the red evo shield.

While blue and purple provide an increase in what the item achieves, gold items are the same as purple, but include an additional benefit. Gold gear comes in the form of helmets, body shields, knockdown shields, backpacks, and various attachments.

Gold equipment in Apex Legends

• Gold Helmet
• Gold Body Shield
• Gold Knockdown Shield
• Gold Backpack
• Gold Attachments

Gold Helmet

Respawn Entertainment

As you can probably guess, helmets provide headshot damage protection. The gold helmet gives a headshot damage reduction of 50%. The additional benefit it yields is an increase in charge speed for both tactical and ultimate abilities.

If you’re playing as Octane, you should probably give your gold helmet to a teammate, as your cooldowns are so short already.

• Grey: 30% damage reduction
• Blue: 40% damage reduction
• Purple: 50% damage reduction
• Gold: 50% damage reduction and reduces tactical & ultimate recharge by 20%

Gold Body Shield

Whereas helmets reduce damage received, body shields give you extra health, which can be recharged with cells and batteries. This additional health is indicated by up to five bars above your normal health bar, each representing 25 HP.

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The gold variant of a body shield gives you the same increased health of the purple shield (+100HP), but has the added benefit of increasing the power of healing items. Instead of only boosting your shield/health by 25, shield cells and syringes will add 50.

• Normal: 2 shields
• Blue: 3 shields
• Purple: 4 shields
• Gold: 4 shields and syringes & shield cells add 50HP instead of 25

Gold Knockdown Shield

The knockdown shield is a new concept to battle royale games, which at least gives you some form of hope when knocked down.

With a knockdown shield, an opponent will need to inflict as much damage as the knockout shield provides health, assuming you are facing their direction with the shield activated. The shield will only cover the front of you though.

The gold knockdown shield previously allowed you to self-revive, but this was removed with the Season 14 update. Instead, the gold knockdown now has the ‘guardian angel’ perk, that used to belong to gold backpacks.

• Guardian Angel: Revived teammates have increased shield and health

Gold Backpacks

Just like other battle royale games, backpacks allow you to store various items. The bigger, or rarer, the backpack the more you can store.

A gold backpack in Apex Legends results in teammates who have been revived coming back with more health and shield. Players will be revived with 50 shields and 70 health.

• Normal: Additional 2 items
• Blue: Additional 4 items
• Purple: Additional 6 items
• Gold: Additional 6 items + Deep Pockets: Stack extra meds
  • 3 med kits
  • 3 shield batteries
  • 2 phoenix kits

Digital Threat Scopes

There are two gold scopes in Apex Legends: 1x, and 4x – 10x variable. Both of these are the only scopes to provide digital threat detection.

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The perk of digital threat detection is the ability to see enemies through smoke and gas. Enemies are highlighted red when looking through the sight.

They are perfect if you have a Bangalore on your team who can smother the enemies in smoke, allowing you to spray through at them. Equally, if you get caught in a spot with Caustic’s gas.

Other Gold Attachments

The remaining gold items don’t provide any alternative benefit from their more common counterparts, except for the barrel stabilizer. They simply provide more, or better, of what a purple attachment does.

• Extended mag: Increases ammo capacity – gold automatically reloads holstered weapons
• Skullpiercer Rifling: Increases headshot multiplier for Wingman, Longbow, 30-30 Repeater
• Turbocharger: Removes spin-up times for Devotion and Havoc
• Barrel stabilizer (Vaulted): Reduces recoil – gold reduces weapon flash
• Anvil Receiver (Vaulted): Increased damage in semi-auto fire mode for R301 and Flatline

So, that’s all the gold equipment in Apex Legends currently, and what they do. Respawn is often changing things up though, so we’ll keep this page updated when that happens.