Apex Legends player highlights major balancing issues with Passive Abilities

A disgruntled Apex Legends player has outlined the game’s issues with Passive Abilities – highlighting just how big the discrepancies between some Legends’ capabilities are. 

Apex Legends, like a number of FPS games of recent years, has incorporated unique abilities and gadgets to distinguish its characters from one another.

Each Legend comes with a Passive Ability, Tactical Ability, and Ultimate Ability. The latter two both come with ‘cooldowns’, meaning players can only call on them sporadically.

Passive Abilities, though, are abilities that do not need to be summoned or earned and are always active whilst playing as any particular legend. Fuse, for example, boasts the Grenadier Passive, meaning he can always stack an extra grenade and throw them further and faster.

In a January 1 Reddit post, player ‘isijavawi‘ outlined what they consider to be the “problem with Apex Legends balancing”.

Attached was an image describing the Passives of Valkyrie, Revenant, Pathfinder, and Crypto, seeking to highlight how unbalanced they are.

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On Valkyrie, the player says: “[Her] Passive allows her to fly to the top of any building or high place. Also [she] can scan almost an entire POI passively by flying.” They summarise her as having one of the most oppressive Passives in the game.

In contrast, they point out that Revenant’s Passive can actually make him easier for enemies to hit, whilst Crypto’s Passive simply emulates part of what his tactical ability does.

They also point to Pathfinder, suggesting that his Insider Knowledge Passive – which actually just reduces his Ultimate cooldown – is not an ability at all.

Plenty of other players echoed the concerns, with the post sitting at over 2,400 upvotes at the time of writing. One fan echoed the issues Revenant has climbing uneven walls, despite recent buffs his abilities received. These problems are particularly relevant on the Season 11 map Storm Point, which has plenty of rocky surfaces for Revenant to scale.

Whilst Passive Abilities are not the only balancing factors in Apex, the ones with worse abilities do tend towards the lower tiers and pick rates. It’s on Respawn to make any changes they deem fit.