Apex Legends Season 16 is reworking the Legends class system, and adding a new TDM game mode

Relax, friend. That momentary disappointment you feel at the prospect of no new Legend being added with Season 16 of Apex Legends? Allow me to assuage it with exciting news about what the devs have been working on instead. Namely - a complete rework of the Legend classes and perks system; a new top-tier burst Assault Rifle; a rotating playlist of limited time modes, including the new Team Deathmatch mode; improved onboarding for new players; and much more.

Read more about all the major changes coming with Apex Legends Revelry on Tuesday 14th February below, and join me as I aggressively chew the walls in anticipation of the five new character classes that are about to shake up the Legend meta.

New character classes: Assault, Skirmisher, Recon, Controller, Support

The headline feature of Season 16 for many Apex players will be the complete rework of the current character classes system. Now there are five character classes: Assault, Skirmisher, Recon, Controller, and Support - and each one will have one or two passive perks that are unique to that class. We'll have more information on the exact effects of each new class perk later in the week.

This change is a great one though, and long overdue. The current class system for Apex Legends is one big mess, with over a third of all Legends belonging to the Offensive class while just two belong to the Support class. And only one class (Recon) provided any actual gameplay benefit.

Lead Legend designer Devan Mcguire explained that the change was intended to help clarify the Legend meta and give players more to think about when it comes to deciding on their team composition each match. Now, each match you'll be leaving behind at least two important perks, so deciding which classes to include or exclude in your team will become a much bigger deal than before.

This monumental Legend change comes alongside a host of specific Legend and ability changes and reworks touching Lifeline, Wraith, Seer, and more. We'll also have more details on this later this week. Exciting stuff!

Nemesis: The new burst Assault Rifle

The Nemesis Assault Rifle is the first new weapon to be added to Apex Legends since the C.A.R. SMG back in Season 11. And my god, is it powerful.

The Nemesis is an Energy weapon with a four-round burst on an automatic trigger, and a special trait which decreases the delay between bursts the more you fire. As you fire (regardless of whether your shots hit), a bar will fill up above your weapon UI panel, and once you fill that bar, your fire rate with the Nemesis will be devastatingly quick.

According to Eric Canavese, Apex's Lead Weapons Designer, the Nemesis is "tuned pretty hot", and "definitely is gonna gun for the [R-301 Carbine] and the Flatline" - two guns which have dominated player loadouts at every level of play for years now. It seems like the Nemesis is built to more or less top that weapon power curve on release, so we'll all need to quickly learn to fear the sound of that four-shot burst when Apex Legends Revelry drops.

Arenas is shutting down

Bad news for Arenas lovers - the Arenas and Ranked Arenas game modes will be shut down at the end of Season 15, to make way for new game mode opportunities (more on this below). It's no secret that, after a fairly decent start back in Season 9, the Arenas mode has not seen nearly the level of popularity that Respawn wanted.

So they've made the hard choice, and decided to vault Arenas for the foreseeable future. Maybe it'll come back at a later time in a reworked form. Who knows? And in the meantime, there's a lot more in the way of game modes to look forward to...

New Team Deathmatch game mode

A brand new, long-awaited game mode is arriving to Apex Legends with Season 16 - Team Deathmatch. This 6v6 TDM mode consists of a max of 3 rounds in a best-of-3 format. Like the previous Control game mode, players will get to choose between different preset gun loadouts each time they respawn, and the aim is simply to kill more than you die, until one team hits the target number of 30 kills.

Skull Town, Party Crasher, and Habitat are the three maps available for TDM so far, and the new game mode will release on day one of Apex Legends Revelry - where it will remain in its own game mode slot for 3 weeks.

Persistent playlist of LTMs

Once the 3 weeks of Team Deathmatch are up, another key addition to Apex Legends Revelry will be unveiled - a new permanent playlist of rotating game modes called Mixtape. This playlist will rotate every 15 minutes between three different modes - TDM, Control, and Gun Run - and should serve as a great way for players to get warmed up before dropping into the main Battle Royale mode.

Maps will rotate quicker in Ranked Mode

Ranked players will be very interested to know that maps will rotate much quicker for the Ranked playlist in Season 16. Whereas before each season was divided into two splits, with one map per split, now the three chosen maps for Season 16 will rotate every day in the Ranked playlist, just as they do in the Unranked playlist.

Bot matches for new players

Apex Legends Season 16 looks to drastically improve the onboarding experience for players new to Respawn's fantastic shooter, and one of the biggest ways it will do this is with the new orientation matches.

Players with new accounts will need to complete a number of orientation matches before the main game modes are unlocked for them. These orientation matches are set on Kings Canyon, and they'll be the same as regular battle royale matches, but they'll be filled mostly with 16 teams of bots, with just a few slots for player teams of roughly the same level of experience and skill.

Players will graduate from these orientation matches after a certain number of matches are played (fewer if they get into the top 5, or immediately if they win a match). But in the meantime, they can also enlist the aid of more experience friends to join them and help them through these orentiation matches if they want.

New Firing Range settings

The Firing Range is also getting a bit of love this season, with a new settings screen made available that can tailor the Firing Range experience for your needs. The most exciting quality of life change is that you can toggle infinite ammo, so you no longer need to periodically run back to the start of the range to resupply.

But there are also various settings which can change the movement, speed, and behaviour of both the moving targets and the dummies, to help make your target practice routines a bit more natural and interesting.

Those are the key changes that we're able to talk about so far with the upcoming Apex Legends Revelry season. Despite the fact that no new Legend or map is being added with Season 16, there's an awful lot to be excited about when the new update launches on 14th February. To keep your skills sharp between now and then, check out our Apex Legends tips and tricks guide.