All the Legend and weapon changes coming to Apex Legends Season 16

Apex Legends is going to look a little different in a week's time. Respawn have broken the mould a little bit with Apex Legends Revelry and the game's four year anniversary - instead of adding a new Legend as usual, they've spent their time elsewhere to bring a host of Legend meta and weapon meta changes, alongside the new Team Deathmatch game mode and improving player onboarding that we reported on earlier in the week.

Apex Legends Season 16 is going to break a surprising number of targeted adjustments to various different guns, Legends, and abilities. And all that on top of the entirely revamped Legend class system, which gives every Legend a brand new perk (or in some cases two!) to play with. Read on for a full list of all the major changes that are coming to Legends and weapons with Apex Legends Revelry.

New Apex Legends class system and perks explained

The remastered class system is probably the biggest change to the meta that Apex Legends Revelry will introduce. Replacing the four classes (and one trait) we're all long accustomed to ignoring, Season 16 will add five all-new classes: Assault, Skirmisher, Recon, Support, and Controller. Here's what they all do.

Assault class

The Assault class is home to Legends Ash, Bangalore, Fuse, Mad Maggie, and Revenant. These Legends enjoy two brand new perks which help cement their role as a bastion of high-powered aggression.

Assault Legends have the ability to open a hidden shelf inside new red supply bins, in much the same way that Lifeline can currently open the hidden shelf inside blue supply bins. Red bins are weapon-focused, and the shelf contains smart loot attachments for the whole squad. The upshot is that this perk gets more powerful the further into a match you get.

Assault Legends can also carry an extra stack of ammo per inventory slot. For example, they will now be able to carry 80 Light Ammo in a single slot, instead of just 60.

Skirmisher class

The Skirmisher class contains the most Legends of any class: Horizon, Mirage, Octane, Pathfinder, Valkyrie, and Wraith. These characters are united by their flanking potential and their ability to get in and out of danger with ease.

Skirmishers bring to the table an interesting new perk. Each of them will be able to see the red weapons inside Supply Drops before they've even landed. Look into the sky towards an approaching Supply Drop as one of these Legends, and you'll instantly see whether it contains a Kraber, a Bocek, or some other high value weapon.

This special weapon icon also persists after the Supply Drop lands, which means if it disappears suddenly, you'll know whether an enemy player has just looted the Supply Drop.

Recon class

Recon Legends are the scanning heroes: Bloodhound, Crypto, Seer, and Vantage. These Legends can no longer use their role passive to view the next Ring location - instead, they can scan Survey Beacons to reveal the location of all enemies on the map for a full 30 seconds. Yikes.

The counterplay here is that all enemies on the map will be notified of the exact Survey Beacon you just scanned, which means you might attract quite a lot of attention shortly after scanning. But it remains an extremely powerful perk, possibly the strongest of the lot.

Support class

The Support class contains the Legends Gibraltar, Lifeline, Loba, and Newcastle - characters with powerful team survival and enhancement abilities.

All Support Legends will now enjoy Lifeline's old passive ability to open the shelf under blue supply bins. The loot in these blue shelves are now exclusively survival items (healing consumables, heat shields, and so on), and there is a bit of a smart loot system in place with these shelves as well now, so they'll try to provide items that your team is currently lacking.

But the more exciting perk for Support Legends is this: they can now use Crafting Stations to craft dead allies' banners, even if the timer ran out before they could collect it from the ally's corpse. This means suddenly the old technique of guarding an enemy's corpse in case their teammate tries to recover the banner is less viable, because if there's a Support Legend among them, they can just hurry to the nearest Crafting Station instead.

Controller class

Finally, the Controller class. This class contains the Legends Catalyst, Caustic, Rampart, and Wattson - all experts at taking a location (particularly indoors) and fortifying it ahead of a fight.

Controller Legends can scan Ring Consoles to reveal the next Ring location. Yes, you read that right - there is a new gadget type in each of the Apex Legends maps. Survey Beacons are now exclusively for reveal the whereabouts of enemy Legends as Recon heroes, while Ring Consoles are now the go-to device for revealing the Ring placement next round. And Controllers now have access to this ability instead of Recon Legends.

Legend meta changes

Apex Legends Revelry will introduce a number of targeted changes to the abilities of several popular Legends. Some are minor quality of life changes, while others look to give underperforming characters some extra utility - or clip the wings of the strongest Legends in the current meta.

Bloodhound

Bloodhound is getting a rather major change to their Passive ability. In addition to the tracks they can follow, Bloodhound players will also occasionally find White Ravens in the environment, which when interacted with or scanned, will immediately take flight and soar towards the nearest enemy player. A White Raven will also appear the moment Bloodhound activates their Ultimate, allowing you to immediately track down nearby enemies.

To compensate for this new buff, Bloodhound's Ult will no longer refresh and lower the cooldown of their Tactical scan. So we're looking at a Bloodhound in Season 16 that no longer focuses exclusively on their scans as the source of their power, but instead returns a bit more to their original identity as a tracker.

Seer

Similarly, Seer is receiving a bit of a nerf to his scan potential. His Ultimate will have a longer cooldown and a shorter duration, and his Heartbeat Sensor Passive now no longer provides real-time data. Instead, it only provides info on each pulse of the heartbeat sensor, making it much harder to do a quick 360-degree scan and find out where every enemy player within 75 metres can be found.

The other juicy nerf coming to Seer with Apex Legends Revelry is that his Heartbeat Sensor is now audible to enemies, so if you're trying to be stealthy then using your Passive may give your position away.

Wraith

Season 16 is a good time for Wraith mains, as she receives her first big buff in a very long time. To improve her team repositioning Ultimate and put in more in line with the power of Valkyrie's Ultimate, Wraith's Interdimensional Portal can now cross twice the distance it could before. What's more, Wraith herself will speed up as she moves during her Ult.

Pathfinder

In a very similar manner (and for similar reasons) to Wraith's changes, Pathfinder's Zipline Ultimate is now greatly improved. The maximum distance of his Zipline is much further than before, and players travel quite a bit faster along them than before - somewhere between the speed of a regular zipline and one of Broken Moon's high-speed Zip Rails.

Lifeline

Lifeline is getting a couple of minor (but welcome) quality of life changes - mainly to compensate for the fact that her blue supply bin Passive is now enjoyed by the entire Support class. Her Care Package Ultimate now lands much faster than before, and can be placed at a much greater range than before. In addition, she is no longer held still for nearly as long while she deploys her drone to remotely revive a downed ally.

Horizon

Horizon's Gravity Lift is still not where the devs want it to be, so she's getting a couple of targeted changes to this ability. Accuracy in her Gravity Lift has been reduced, making it harder to target enemies while floating. But on the flipside of this, it now lifts you up faster than before, making it more about the traversal aspect and less about becoming an unshootable floating A/D spamming little shit.

Mirage

Last but not least, Mirage is getting a couple of pretty decent buffs with Season 16. First: when one of his Decoys bamboozles an enemy, that enemy is tracked in real-time for the duration of the effect, rather than Mirage's team simply getting a static ping of where the enemy was when they shot the Decoy. And the tracking effect lasts a little longer than it used to before.

The other change to Mirage's toolkit is that when he cloaks to revive a downed enemy, the cloak now persists after revival for a full 3 seconds, for both Mirage and his now-revived ally. This allows them to reposition, find cover, or heal up much more safely than before. The downside is that you must remain unarmed during this time. If you pull out your weapon, the cloak immediately dissipates. So you can't use it to get the drop on an enemy, but you can use it to provide a bit of extar security for yourself and your teammate.

Weapon meta changes

Alright, now onto the weapon changes for Season 16. Apex Legends Revelry is going to be an interested season for the weapon meta, with the addition of the very powerful Nemesis Assault Rifle already set to shake things up. But that's not all that's changing.

Assault Rifles are getting a bit of a nerf this season, which is a very good thing in my mind, because they're just too viable at basically every range. Respawn have evidently realised this too, because they've nerfed the hipfire accuracy of Assault Rifles across the board, making them slightly less viable at closer ranges, and giving SMGs slightly more space to shine by comparison.

The R-301 Carbine is also getting a slight nerf, with its damage being reduced from 14 to 13 per shot. Sadness. But understandable! How long has the R-301 been at the top of the meta now?

Shotguns will be improved across the board in Season 16, with individual pellets having larger projectiles to help increase the reliability and consistency of damage at close range. The Peacekeeper and Mastiff are also getting a new Stock attachment slot, and all four Shotguns will now get to enjoy the brand new Gold Shotgun Bolt attachment. As well as dramatically speeding up the gun's fire rate, this Gold Shotgun Bolt will also give players a tuned-up version of the old Kinetic Feeder Hop Up, allowing them to automatically reload shells into their Shotgun just by sliding.

The Rampage is coming out of the Supply Drop for Season 16, and replacing it is the Hemlok. The Hemlok was always powerful, but now it's powerful. So watch out for that. Additionally, the Volt and Longbow are now entering Crafting Stations, which means they won't be available as ground loot.

And that's basically all the juicy Legend and weapon meta changes that we know about for Apex Legends Season 16! If you're itching to get stuck into trying out all these altered guns and Legend abilities, you don't have long to wait. Apex Legends Revelry is coming out on Tuesday, February 14th. Prepare for its arrival with our Apex Legends tips and tricks, or read up on the current weapon meta with our list of the best guns in Apex Legends.