Your Path to Masters in Apex Legends
Apex Legends is a battle royale that combines a unique set of weapons with a roster of ability-wielding legends. The premise is simple, but the nuances of the game mean it isn’t as approachable as other popular shooters.
Whether you’ve played since Season 1 or you’re just jumping into the most recent season, Apex is regularly changing and adding new components. This guide will cover some basic tips for increasing your lethality plus some advanced mechanics for the more experienced players.
Here are 10 tips and tricks for anyone looking to improve in Apex Legends!
Use More Hipfire
In practically every shooting game, aiming down your sights, or ADS-ing, will improve the accuracy of your weapon. The improvement in precision is often balanced by a reduction in movement speed. This is exactly the case in Apex Legends, with movement speed being slowed in relation to the size of the weapon.
One of the key priorities in a battle royale game is survival, which means minimizing the amount of damage you take. In many situations, you can achieve this with good positioning and decent movement. You can maintain your optimal movement speed by hip-firing in close-range battles!
While your enemy is ADS-ing, they are an easy target for you to hit. If you hip-fire while strafing, the evasiveness you sustain is well worth the slight decrease in DPS from having a wider spread of bullets.
Get in the habit of using hip-fire and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the effective range of most weapons!
Learn About Apex Legends Recoil Control
Many of the weapons in Apex Legends are hard-hitting and tend to kick upward as you fire downrange. This movement of the weapon is generally referred to as ‘recoil’.
Every weapon has a set recoil, which means for a given number of bullets fire – usually, one clip – a pattern of the bullet spread will be consistent. Unless you plan on going pro, there isn’t much use in memorizing the recoil pattern of every weapon in the game. Instead, check out the recoil pattern of your top three guns and just pull your reticle downward for all other automatic weapons.
Additionally, the recoil pattern tends to be more unforgiving at the end of a clip, having a wider spread of bullets. You can reset the recoil pattern by letting go of the fire button and then pressing it down again. In this way, you can return to the beginning of the recoil pattern where the bullet spread is tighter. This can be really useful when aiming at enemies who are far away!
Grab Ammo from the Black Market
Loba entered the Apex arenas in Season 5, bringing a new way for squads to loot up on their way to a victory. Her Black Market ultimate grants access to any items within the circle surrounding your Boutique.
Each person who opens the Black Market can take two items out to bolster their inventory. What you may not know is that taking ammo from the shop doesn’t count toward your 2-item quota!
Loba’s ultimate is one of the best ways to ensure your team has enough ammo to stay in a fight. Make sure to carry at least three stacks of ammo for your assault rifle as you approach the mid-game of a match!
Recharge Shields with Wattson’s Ult
Wattson Interception Pylon is the best counter to explosive spam and devastating enemy missile ultimates. What you may not know is the Pylon has a secondary benefit of recharging your broken shields!
If your shield has taken damage, simply stand near the Pylon to have your shield health replenished. It’s a fairly slow process but is invaluable when you’ve run out of shield cells and batteries in the late game.
Take Turns Healing
In the heat of battle, it’s common that every member of your squad will have taken damage. Don’t be fooled into thinking that everyone can heal at the same time!
The order of priority should be something like this:
- Whoever is in the most danger – this will vary by battle, but is usually the person who is closest to an enemy threat
- The squadmate who has the lowest amount of total health + shield
- Everyone else
It’s important that you have at least one team member either scouting for incoming threats or laying down suppression fire while the rest of the squad regains health. Top-level players will “rotate in and out of battle” by having the scout(s) swap positions with the healing member(s) to maximize your team’s total health pool and damage output.
Memorize the UI
Since there are so many different items available and quick ping options in Apex, the developers utilize a wheel system to give players flexibility. Try to memorize the location of commonly used items/callouts on their respective wheels. This will enable you to perform more actions per minute (APM) which will increase both your killing power and survivability.
Here are some of the most important wheel locations to memorize in Apex Legends:
- Shield battery
- Explosive of choice (mine is the thermite)
- “Enemies have been here”
- “Looting over here”
With a few minutes of careful study, you can quickly learn where the most commonly used user interface actions are located on your screen.
Make the Most of Natural Cover in Apex Legends
Another great way to increase your survivability is to take advantage of each map’s natural cover. As you rotate around the map, try to spend as little time as possible crossing large, open spaces. Instead, stick close to walls and keep the high ground advantage over your opponents to make it harder for them to hit you.
As a corollary to this rule, you should ALWAYS heal and reload behind cover. You never want to be caught in an animation that doesn’t have your weapon out, especially if you are low on health.
Do the Damage Math
If you’re still with me up till this point, I’m gonna hit you with an advanced tactic. When you hit an enemy, pay close attention to the color of the damage markers. The majority of enemies you encounter will have a shield. The color of the damage markers correlates directly with the color of the shield.
For reference, here’s the health of each shield:
White (50) | Blue (75) | Purple (100) | Gold (100) | Red (125)
Once a shield has lost all its health, you’ll hear an audio clue indicating you are now inflicting damage to the enemy’s base health. If an opponent is at full base health, that’s another 100 damage required to knock them to the ground.
By identifying the shield type and keeping track of your total damage numbers, you can calculate a shockingly accurate account of the remaining health. This is great for both communicating when an enemy is low and for figuring out how many more hits are required to kill an opponent.
I know this one requires some serious concentration and quick algebra, but it’s worth it in the long run!
Bangalore Ult is for Zoning
We’ve written about the need for a Banglore buff in the past, but all we’ve gotten is better smoke. Her ultimate is still the slowest moving thing on the map and continues to be largely misunderstood.
If you want a barrage of missiles to kill wounded enemies and finish off knocked opponents, go with Gibby. For any scenarios where zoning – directing enemies away from or toward a zone – is of greater importance, Bangalore is your legend!
Bangalore can cover a crazy amount of surface area when all the missiles land. This is perfect for pushing enemies off the high ground or getting them to rotate from behind cover.
The Rolling Thunder ult will rarely damage opponents, but it may be the single best zoning tool in Apex Legends.
Die Together
I know this sounds strange, but teams that die together in Apex Legends tend to have more success in the long run. If you’re dying together, that most likely means you are moving together and fighting together. These are two of the best ways to increase your team-fight win rate on the battlefield!
Over time, you’ll get really coordinated. Your squad can start landing on unsuspecting stragglers and beating them to death straight out of the dropship. In trios, each team member will only need to land two melee hits to knock an enemy!
Getting Better at Apex Legends
There’s a lot going on in any given match of Apex Legends. You need to keep track of your inventory, your cooldowns, your teammates’ position, and status. On top of that, there are incoming enemies, potential enemies, and a closing circle, among many other things.
The good news is that you don’t have to take on all of these improvements at once! Choose one to focus on in a gaming session and try to internalize it as part of your Apex behavior. At the end of the day, you want these things to be instinctual so your brain is trained to take action subconsciously.
Once you’ve got these 10 tips down, check back in for more advanced tactics for improving your Apex Legends!
What are some of your best tips and tricks for improving at Apex Legends? Join the conversation in the comments section, below!
