Apex Legends Designer’s Notes - MARKED, Split Two For a fully localized version of Designer's Notes for the upcoming split, please visit this link. TL;DR Below, we will share insights into meta changes coming in 30.1. We’ll discuss the thought processes behind the implementations. Conduit Refresh Fuse Buff Catalyst Buff A Retrospective of Corrupted Attachments & Energy Ammo Rework Checking in on the effects of the Revamped Power Journey INTRODUCTION Welcome back to another edition of Designer’s Notes! Thank you to everyone who’s jumped in to play in Apex Legends: Marked so far. Your feedback has been invaluable in understanding how these changes have landed amongst our community. The intention with this blog, as always, is to bring you all behind the scenes and deepen your understanding of why our balance team is making the changes they are when it comes to Legend and weapon meta. This time around we’ll be discussing Conduit’s refresh, and follow-up buffs to Fuse and Catalyst. As the weapons team shipped major changes at the beginning of the season – Corrupted Attachments, Energy Weapon Rework, and Revamped Power Journey – we’ll be doing a post mortem of sorts, discussing what we see in the match data and how these new and overhauled features performed against our goals. Once this update is released, please continue to discuss how the changes feel to you; your feedback, paired with match data, are integral parts of our process of managing the meta in Apex Legends! LEGEND BUFFS CONDUIT After Conduit’s changes in Season 29, we were thrilled to see her pick rate and encounter win rate go up! What we weren’t so thrilled about was how her success homogenized the variety amongst squad compositions and pushed other Supports out of the meta. As such, we proceeded to tone back some of the strength and availability of her Tactical’s regeneration to account for its increased flexibility. We acknowledge that the juggling act of nerfing legends right after buffing them can feel a bit counterintuitive to balance, but these adjustments are necessary to maintain the balance of our Legends and, in this case, ended up generating productive community discussion about what makes Conduit unique and fun to play. We want to make Conduit even more skill-expressive, competitive in her class, and, most importantly, fun! As mentioned in the Season 29 Designer Notes, we knew our job wasn’t done after that first set of changes, so we’re back to polish up Conduit’s Ultimate, with a couple added surprises mixed in, too! Tactical Conduit and allies affected by Radiant Transfer will now see a preview visual on their shield bar to indicate how much Temp Shield will be generated by the end of the regen period. By making the regen more visually predictable, our goal is for players to learn to trust the incoming shield and feel more confident choosing when to keep the fight going. Ultimate The long-awaited Energy Barricade refresh is here! We took a deep dive into all aspects of this ability and hammered away on a ton of quality of life changes to make it feel more consistent, snappy, and useful in a wide variety of situations. Firstly, various aspects of the ability’s deployment have been smoothed out, meaning it fires faster and gets you back to guns sooner. Also, we’ve added a new HUD element and targeting visuals that help to better inform players if jammers would break on deployment. As for the jammers themselves, they now spawn higher and slightly closer together, which creates a tighter formation that covers more vertical space. Finally, jammers can now be deployed in a forward line rather than the standard horizontal formation, by simply toggling while aiming. Upgrades To go alongside our slew of Ultimate updates, Conduit’s Level 2 upgrades, Battpack and Bigger Jam, have been totally reworked to put more emphasis on new and unique ways to use Energy Barricade. The first new Level 2 Upgrade is Concurrency, which allows Conduit to refire her Ultimate once within 10 seconds of its initial fire with no cooldown. However, each barricade has 2 fewer jammers and spawns in a tighter formation, so each barricade individually covers less space, but has the potential to cover more when used together. Our intent is for players to build their own jammer formation using the new forward deployment toggle - whether that be an X, a V, an L… or really any shape you can dream of! Its opposing upgrade is Jammed Up, which empowers Conduit’s jammers with a larger radius and a jamming debuff on hit that obscures information on enemy’s HUDs. This jamming will feel different to effects like Crypto’s EMP in that the focus of Conduit’s debuff is on information denial rather than on mobility-centric crowd control like movement or turn slows. FUSE In Season 28 (February 2026), Fuse got a partial rework, featuring a brand new Ultimate and several new Upgrades. While Fuse typically sits in the middle of the pack in terms of popularity, we saw him rise up a decent amount after those changes. Despite his numbers looking overall pretty solid, we wanted to acknowledge your feedback on his new kit by spending more time polishing it up and addressing a number of community concerns. Passive Spoilers for later in the notes, but we’re removing Wreckless, which provides explosive damage resistance, and incorporating it into base, with a bit of a nerf. We acknowledge that any kind of Damage Resistance is a powerful persistent effect to have, but explosive resistance is very thematic and extremely useful alongside the tools Fuse has in his kit. Along those lines, we observed that Fuse’s opponents did not, or rather, could not approach a fight with a Wreckless Fuse differently, as there was no easy way to tell from a glance that they’d be resisting damage. Now, the guessing game is over, which means there’s more room for cool new Upgrades, too! Tactical The most bombastic aspect of Fuse’s Season 28 adjustments was arguably his new Level 2 Upgrade, Knuckle Jumper. This season, we are incorporating it into his base kit because it’s absolutely rad as hell. And, as a bonus, it can now be enjoyed in Wildcard too! However, in doing this, we are also nerfing its overall strength to emphasize the tradeoff of using Knuckle Cluster for movement rather than damage. As such, Fuse will no longer receive reduced Tactical cooldown when jumping, and the jump power has been reduced slightly compared to the old upgrade version. We’ll be keeping a close, watchful eye on Fuse’s mobility, since, at his core, he is a Legend whose intended strength is blowing up the opposition, not zipping around the map. Ultimate After the rework to The Motherlode in Season 28, we recognize that we didn’t hit the mark with the power some players expected. We’re taking steps to improve the feel and utility of this ability, including decreasing the raise time, adjusting the firing arc to focus on efficacy at closer ranges, decreasing the damage falloff on the central explosion, and decreasing the time it takes for the mini-bombs to explode. Altogether, this ability should now feel more responsive and satisfying than ever before, resulting in a new-and-improved cascade of explosions that would bring a tear to Fuse’s eye. Upgrades As mentioned, Knuckle Jumper and Wreckless have been removed and Reignition has been moved from Level 3 to Level 2 to make way for an explosive pair of new Level 3 Upgrades. Big Bang increases the area Knuckle Cluster’s explosions cover, while Sticky Bomb makes Knuckle Cluster stick to enemies you hit, granting cooldown reduction for your tactical. Overall, the shift to Fuse’s Upgrades provides two distinct styles of aggression for Fuse to mix and match between: area coverage versus utility uptime. There have also been minor tweaks to both Reignition and Pyro Techniques to better suit this new Upgrade suite. CATALYST Despite Catalyst seeing some upward movement with her recent buffs in Season 28, her pick rate has not retained as much of that trend as we had hoped. Because of this, we wanted to revisit Cat’s problems from a slightly different perspective: polishing and refining the base-building experience. Our approach involves addressing long-time community-requested quality of life features, soothing the tension of moving from base to base amidst the fast pace of battle, and adding even more playstyle expression through revamped upgrade choices. Passive Cat has long been immune to the effects of ferrofluid, even that of her enemies. Despite this immunity’s tenure, we’ve decided to remove it because we’ve observed that it created inconsistent scenarios when compared to how other legends interact with their enemy counterparts. We felt this change was especially relevant on the competitive side of play, where potentially a third of the lobby could be unaffected by the majority of her kit. In turn, this evens the playing field no matter what sort of team composition Catalyst takes on. Tactical More often than not, by the time a Catalyst has crafted the perfectly protected base, the ring, aggressive enemies, or other complications have forced her to leave her meticulous masterpiece behind. One way we’re looking to ease the burden of rebuilding is by implementing a long-requested quality of life feature: placing traps now automatically reinforces and rebuilds doors. Alongside a Tac cooldown decrease, Catalyst should now feel much more equipped to readjust her reinforcements as the battle migrates across the map. Ultimate Dark Veil has proven to be a powerful and adaptive tool to suit many offensive and defensive situations, but we wanted to tweak the firing time just a smidge to make it smoother to deploy and raise the wall. Also, allies are no longer negatively affected by passing through the wall, enabling Catalyst’s squad to play more aggressively around them without fear of being blinded. Upgrades Cat’s upgrades are seeing a big shakeup, with Sole Piercer being removed, alongside Resilient Veil and Ferro-Door being moved down from Level 3 to Level 2. The former is gaining Ultimate cooldown reduction in addition to its existing wall duration increase, while the latter is now also increasing the maximum amount of reinforceable doors. As for Level 3, Hidden Spikes is getting moved up to match up against a brand new upgrade: Ferro-Frenzy. This upgrade increases the maximum number of traps allowed on the field by one while also increasing the rate the traps deal tick damage. In return for these hefty benefits, the traps are significantly smaller, so intelligent, preemptive placement will be rewarded. WEAPONS & LOOT REVIEW We wanted to give a bit of a retrospective on the Weapons & Loot changes that we implemented at the start of the season, and shine some light on some of our takeaways and next steps. We’ll be briefly covering the addition of Corrupted Attachments, the Energy Ammo Rework, as well as the Revamped Power Journey. As a refresher, the introduction of Corrupted Attachments and rework of Energy Ammo were meant to provide new and unique ways for you to strategize your loadout, and the Revamped Power Journey targeted loot inflation that has built up over the years. CORRUPTED ATTACHMENTS & ENERGY AMMO REWORK Both the addition of Corrupted Attachments and the Energy Ammo Rework were geared toward a similar goal: creating new, and interesting ways to strategize while building your loadout throughout a match. With these two major changes, and the targeted nerfs to R-99, Alternator, RE-45 and Hemlok done at the season’s start, we saw one of the biggest shake-ups that the weapon meta has seen in well over a year. The four aforementioned guns saw decrease in both usage and win rates, allowing for other weapons in their classes to step up and fill the gaps. Energy weapons are also some of our biggest movers on the season, with many of them seeing an improvement in their position across the weapon meta. Overall, everything has played out as we had planned. Seeing how this was such a big shift, and there has still been quite a bit of movement in the numbers over the last few weeks, we are taking a conservative approach to weapon tuning this patch. Triple Take, Bocek and Charge Rifle will each be receiving a buff to move them a bit closer towards their fellow weapon class-mates. REVAMPED POWER JOURNEY We made some wide and significant swings with the changes to our loot delivery systems when tackling the Revamped Power Journey. As discussed previously in the last iteration of Designer’s Notes, one of our main reasons for making the change was to tackle the loot inflation that had been growing in Apex for a long time. When designing and executing this overhaul, we had anticipated some disruptions, but all-in-all, we are happy with the results. The weapon power journey is extending later into the match, allowing for a much healthier power curve as the game progresses. We have noted some specific pain points from the community and are seeing that reflected in our internal data. Next update, expect some changes targeted at healing item spawn rates and loot availability in the late game (post bin-reset). Loot balancing is always an ongoing effort, never a single event. We'll continue to monitor data and feedback, and make applicable changes to loot in the future when necessary. CONCLUSION We hope you have found this blog helpful in deepening your understanding of the processes and rationale behind the development team’s balancing changes. For a comprehensive log of all changes coming in Marked Split 2 be sure to check out the full Patch Notes dropping on September 14th, 2026! Play Apex Legends for free* now on PlayStation®4, PlayStation®5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch™ 2, and PC via the EA app, the Epic Games Store, and Steam®. 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