Respawn confirm more changes coming to Wraith in Apex Legends Season 8
Respawn has been changing up Wraith ever since her debut in Apex Legends. This is because of the various balancing issues that the character has suffered throughout her time in the game. Now, it seems that Season 8 will feature her final shift.
Wraith has gone through many changes throughout her time in Apex Legends. She has a history of being either too powerful or having broken hitboxes, and the developers have to repeatedly “fix” her. She’s still a popular pick for players and that hasn’t changed in Season 7.
Senior game developer Daniel Klein hinted at more changes for Wraith during an interview on the Third Party podcast. They asked him about Respawn’s plans for Season 8 and he jokingly suggested taking Wraith out of Apex Legends altogether.
Then he went on to elaborate on Respawn’s plans to stop tinkering with her kit from this point.
“I don’t want to hit her kit any more,” he said. “We’ve pushed that to the breaking point where it’s barely still fun, but the extremely wind-up on her tactical — as much as it was necessary — it puts the ability more into the camp of cerebral power rather than satisfying in the moment power.”
“With Wraith, our approach is going to be very similar to Pathfinder. We’re going to take a look at her hitboxes and see how much wiggle room we have there. With Pathfinder, it turned out that we had so much… that was a 20% increase in hitbox size.”
It’s clear that the devs will focus on fine-tuning her hitboxes by going the same route they did with Pathfinder’s changes in November’s Season 7 update. However, Klein is concerned that they may have nerfed Wraith too much.
He stated that he hopes to be able to buff the Voidwalker after the changes have been implemented but they haven’t started yet.
“Nothing is guaranteed yet, we haven’t started work yet. I’ve asked one of our technical artists to take a look at it. Whenever he gets around to it, we will know more.
“My earnest hope is that we can bring her under control with just hitbox changes, and then maybe even look at ways at making her more in-the-moment fun again, and find a balance point between her tactical now and what it used to be.”
So far there is no certainty that these fixes will be successful in making Wraith more balanced. We do know that things will definitely change when Apex Legends Season 8 comes around and your experience with the character will feel new.