With Season 17 of Apex Legends close at hand, a plethora of new content arrives with it, including one refined gunslinging legend – Ballistic. 

New Legend

Montgomery Brinkman, better known as Ballistic in the Apex games is a suave gentleman at the fine age of 63. But don’t let his age fool you, as he’s more than ready to show the younger generation how things were done back in his day.

Ballistic was very reckless and aggressive back in the Thunder Dome days. He was a huge hit with the fans, and he’ll be bringing that same aggressive play style to Apex Legends. Trying to be a better person, he’ll also be offering some team utility.

Abilities

• Passive – Sling

Store a third weapon in the sling, accessed via inventory or character utility action, allows Ballistic to carry a third weapon, but this weapon can’t be kitted, so it can only be a base weapon and it won’t take any attachments.

• Tactical – Whistler

Shoots a projectile that heats up an enemy’s guns as they shoot. Overheating causes damage. Hold the tactic to lock-on.

This is a retrofitted pistol that has a smart bullet and allows the player to do it if you can lock onto a target and then the bullet will track the target. If it hits the target, it applies a buff that will overheat the weapons if the target shoots.

Once overheated, they’ll take some damage and play a little reaction, but also in case the bullet does miss its target, it will stick around the map and create a little zone that will apply the same debuff if the opponent walks into it.

• Ultimate – Tempest

When Ballistic activates Tempest, there is a pulse coming out from his backpack and this will apply buff to himself and his teammates. That buff gives them faster reloads, faster armed movement speed and infinite ammo. The other thing it does for Ballistic specifically, is it upgrades his sling weapon into a gold version of the gun.

World’s Edge Map Changes 

New POI – Monument (Apex Museum)

Monument is a deep bunker and has these quick access sniper nests. Players can use zip lines to get up there, giving them long range positional control for spotting and just gathering that information about what’s going on in the area.

Players can also hide safely into the bunker below if things get too spicy. The devs created this glass ceiling that creates an interesting component to the fights and allows a lot of insight to the bunker below to see who’s being the cat and who’s being the mouse in this sort of situation.

Fragment and Lava City

The devs have relocated fragments of every famous construction stack building. In its place is the heart of the new World’s Edge change dubbed the Stacks, which will be replacing the long forgotten lava city.

It’s a highly vertical space with interconnected rooftops and it just creates these really frantic fights and cat-mouse kind of gameplay. It’s positioned right between Rampart’s Big Maude and The Dome.

Harvester

Additionally, there’s some small modifications to Harvester as well. With the lava across the map rising, it’s all traversable by foot now.

The devs added a new honey pot at the centre where players can go to get some really good loot and then also created a new crossing with some ziplines, so players can dive into that from above through the sky dive.

Mirage Voyage

Previously appearing on Storm Point and Broken Moon, the Mirage Voyage found its permanent home in Worlds edge.

The devs mentioned that there’s a lot of changes being made to it but exact details haven’t been revealed yet.

Weapon Mastery

To make apex more accessible for new players, this system incentivizes both old and new players to learn about the strengths and the character of the many weapons in Apex Legends.

At the launch of Season 17, all players will start with every weapon starting at level 1 and they can progress those weapons by levelling them up using them in any game mode. Having a weapon in your hand, dealing damage, securing kills and generally fighting with style; all will generate weapon XP and bonus weapon XP for that weapon.

Players will see the weapon level up at the end of the game after every match. Every 20 levels a weapon specific trial will be unlocked that will allow players to test their skills with that weapon and give players a reward once it’s completed. If players can get a weapon all the way to level 100 and finish all five trials, they will fully master that weapon, which will result in netting the final rewards.

The reward types across the weapon mastery track will have players earn things like weapon specific mastery level badges, lifetime performance trackers for specific weapons, legendary weapon master banner frames, and at the end a guaranteed legendary skin for each weapon they master.

Ping Wheel Update

A bunch of new Pings will be added this season which will increase players’ abilities to communicate with each other off mic. Pings like avoiding this area, enemy audio here, some new pings when a player is downed such as telling teammates when is a good time to revive or not. And even some new skydive pings will be added in this season.

In addition to this, one other QOL is the addition of pingging icons on the map, so any icon you see on the map can be pinged and players will get the contextual ping appropriate to that icon.

Evac Tower

The Evac tower is a new survival item and essentially allows the player to drop a redeployment tower which deploys a balloon and a zipline, allowing players to skydive from anywhere.

This new survival item is to combat players overpicking Valkyrie due to her powerful rotational tool in the form of her ult. However, this survival item has some counterplays that Valkyrie Ult doesn’t have, it has a deployment time and it has a health bar.

Firing Range

In Season 16 a bunch of stuff were added to the firing range that allows players to customise their experience, such as hit indicators, and dynamic stats. But fitting with the theme of Ballistic and Arsenal, the devs have expanded these options to make more combat focused in Season 17.

So there’s additional options for dummy behaviours which essentially lets them shoot back at the player. It even has a variety of difficulties ranging from easy, medium, and hard.

There are a few new areas in the firing range too, like a new movement area that allows players to practise movement tech.

Another place being the duelling pit here which allows players to fight against each other. Speaking of duelling, the devs made it easier to join your friends in the firing range, by adding a joint in progress that lets players jump right into their friend’s game without having them have to back out to lobby.