I was actually on a team last night with someone I think is part of NRG Esports, as he had the NRG tag and I've seen videos of NRG pros with that tag. His stats were really good, as well. We didn't do particularly well. Landed in a spot with other teams and I got downed immediately. Got revived, but we never really found our footing. I tried to be aggressive, which of course didn't work out well when I ran into a room with an entire opposing team waiting for me.

For a solid 50 or so games I thought each team got their own individual drop ship and everybody started from different points.

It wasn't until yesterday that I realized everybody dropped from the same ship.

I had a bunch of good (for me) rounds this weekend. A few wins, nearly a back-to-back win, lots of kills (again, for me), a kill record for me (5 in one game, including wiping a squad), and generally just good team work and tactics and stuff, most of the times I got killed I felt like it wasn't due to awful mistakes, just either bad timing or totally outclassed.

I wish there were good stat trackers for the game - I don't even know how many games I've played without going into each legend and adding them up. It's hard to tell what legend I do better with, or which ones I've gotten better at over time, etc. A little frustrating.

I have also had good results lately. Pulled off two pairs of back to back wins this weekend and I've only won 5 times total. Had one 6 kill/1000+ damage game.

Is there some sort of match making going on? I've found generally opponents are tougher when I'm squaded up. All five of my wins have come from queuing up solo.

I don't think there's really matchmaking, no. But I could be wrong.

I have always theorized that games like this are easier in prime time, just like poker, because there are more casuals. A lot of people playing on a tuesday night are more serious.

There are confounding factors though, like on a tuesday night I also got up early and worked all day and made dinner for my family and I have like 1 hour to play, probably not really at my best.

That's another reason I want good stats.

I did some looking and everyone seems to agree that there is not skill based match making

I played a decent amount over the weekend, as my family was gone for about 30 hours. I'm still so so so bad at it. Like it's weird how bad I am when I'm generally a pretty solid FPS player. I did just buy a new mouse, so that is probably hurting in the short-term as I get used to it. I also started playing on my laptop so as to avoid all the crashes on my regular gaming PC. It runs great, but the laptop naturally has a small monitor and the keyboard is smaller than I'm used to for gaming.

But boy, am I bad. This weekend was even worse than normal - I think I had one kill. My teams were pretty terrible, too, so that didn't help. I'm working on getting braver and more aggressive. I think once I get used to the new mouse, I'll at least contribute a bit, as I would guess my aim and movement abilities will improve. I'm having fun, though, so whatever (except for the one time a teammate called me a pussy when I was the only one left and was trying to figure out a way to save my teammates without running head-long into an entire opposing team with limited ammo).

One thing that has helped was that I changed the aim-down-sights setting. The default is when you right-click, it stays ADM until you right-click again. I switched it to click-and-hold. I realized I was often finding myself ADM and then trying to run to safety in a fight, only to not be able to because I wasn't right-clicking again to get out of ADM mode. I would guess the default is better for aiming because you don't have to hold down the right button the whole time, but I'm so used to doing that in other games that it was messing me up. Took me a while to figure out what was going on.

If battle pass is a pay thing, which I assume it is, I hope it weeds out all the good players and lets us bad ones play against each other in the F2P version.

Yeah, changing your equipment is hard. There are some new nvidia drivers that are supposed to be better crash wise, and soon to be some new AMD ones. Even with your laptop you can probaby use an external keyboard/mouse/screen though?

Operating solo is something that takes getting used to, as is figuring out how to get your team respawned. It's funny - if I see a respawn happening I usually want to push it because it means there's at least one man with no weapons, so a full team should be able to take them on pretty easily. But other people don't seem to do this. So sneaking to a respawn location often isn't too hard, actually. If it's pretty early game you can even go to one not too far outside the zone, or about to be out of the zone, as those will be "safer"

Yeah this was a game changer for me in PUBG. In general when you have choices, take the one that will benefit you the most in a panic. It does not take long to remember to hold ADS to aim, but in a panic your first instinct will be to let go, so hold-to-ADS will serve you well.

I played a ton of PUBG and in PUBG you should use ADS pretty much 100% of the time you shoot. That's not really true in Apex. Some weapons do fine at short range without it, like the wingman is really not bad hip firing, and you strafe WAY faster if you don't ADS, like nearly 100% walking speed I think, so you won't get hit as much

It's usually a pay thing, but optional. In most games you earn points that you can turn in for items. If you pay, you get extra benefits - in PUBG if you didn't pay the items you earned would be temporary for example. In a lot of games it encourages people to screw around a bit more because they add new objectives that earn points, that are not necessarily good for winning the game, like in PUBG they'd tell you to drive 2km in a match or something or take out 50 tires, or shoot an uzi 300 times in a match. So people would do silly stuff to make their objectives.

Switching to Apex from PUBG the biggest adjustment I feel like I had to make was always pressing advantages. It's relatively hard to secure a kill in apex because there's so much cover and the various ults give protections. So if you've done a bunch of damage to at least one opponent, hopefully more, but you're still at full health you need to close in and finish the job.

The next thing I've been working on is the opposite, pulling back when the tide shifts. The map is small and people can move fast/quiet so its common to get into a fight and then for 1 or more team to show up and get involved.

Movement is super important. If you shoot at someone and don't kill them, you need to relocate and not just peek from the same location. Bonus points if it's unexpected. Going up is always a good idea, especially if you learn some cheeky spots people don't expect. Like a lot of 2 story buildings you can get onto via climbing onto an open door, people never expect you to be there.

Sometimes if you're getting chased through a building, open the exit door but wait inside where they'll run past you and blast them from behind, etc.

I dunno. I am a lot better at theory than practice, but my advice is try to see where things go wrong and theorize about how it could have gone differently.

To that last point, yeah, I know what to do "in theory," but in practice it's much different.

Oddly, I played one game this afternoon and we won. I didn't do much - we didn't meet another squad for a while and when we did, we got sandwiched and I died. Took my team a while to resurrect me. When we got down to about 3 teams, I didn't have much equipment because of my previous death and I got sniped. Got rezzed again, which was fortunate, because I was needed to rez a teammate (I was Lifeline) right after that.


Down to the final 2, we were in a bad position - the other team had the high ground - but one of my teammates made a portal to a spot behind a rock, closer to the other team. I was down to a sliver of health by the entrance to the portal, so I used my health drone to heal up just before the portal closed. I teleported and somehow actually knocked the second-to-last enemy and we won. I contributed!

So I might have posted this before, but I've found some sort of, uh, mindfulness exercises to be useful. The idea is, you have a collection of strategic things you know you need to do.

Pick one. Work on that all day. Like I'll be like "today I am using grenades every time it's even remotely useful. I'm picking up every grenade and I'm going to try to think of cases where they'll be useful"

If you do this long enough it becomes second nature and then you fold the next thing in.

A favorite of mine from PUBG is "I am about to shoot. Do I have cover near by? Because you need to have cover near by, because once I shoot they will start shooting back, and if they have cover and I don't, I will lose"

Or maybe "don't shoot unless you think you can secure a kill or must shoot (i.e. you've been seen etc." Spend a bunch of time being sneakier - use walk and crouch and get on top of stuff and wait.

Make it so that "today is SMG day" or "today is wingman day" where if you see one you pick it up and use it as your primary. Accept that you'll lose even more than normal, just suck it up and practice with it.

Same goes with extreme hot dropping. Although I think every player should actually start with 1-team hot dropping. Drop a bit further away until you're consistently dropping with 1 other team or worst case, 2 other teams. Get good at navigating these fights and drop hotter. Rinse and repeat. You will die a lot! Even great player, if they drop with 5 teams, die a lot. They just die less than you (or I) do. And when they don't die, they have 5 kills and all the gear.

Dropping hot is dumb, if you want to win. But it's good, if you want to get better at fighting. If you play smart then most games go like this:
* drop somewhere remote
* loot for 15 minutes
* die instantly because I don't know how to fight
* learn nothing because 99% of my game time is spent not shooting.

I used to play PUBG games where I never would fire my gun. I got frustrated and was like "guys, why are we collecting these perfect arsenals we can't use. Let's drop to Pochinki and pick up a shotgun and a level 1 vest and go to town"

Have I played with you at all dlk9s? I don't remember what your name is on origin. I only play with 2+2ers a few times a week.

I haven't played with any friends. My play time is very inconsistent, so I haven't bothered.

Wouldn’t say I do “mindfulness” well but remembering to use grenades a lot and using weapons that I’m not as comfortable with are both things that I try to focus on when playing. I tried to change my controller configuration to make accessing grenades feel more natural but I was already too used to the default scheme so have just gone with it. Grenades are strong and using them frequently helps you get more kills! I do like dropping hot as well but I’m not very good at it so unless my teammates are strong we usually get wiped.

Mindfulness is maybe the wrong word, but just the concept of a "tactic of the day" is something you can use to get concepts to be really ingrained

Grenades are very good in apex legends, but not in the same way as any other FPS I've played

The arc star and frag grenade have fairly long delay times and you can't cook them, they are really not very good to throw at someone who's expecting you unless you can actually stick an arc star to them. What they are *great* for is throwing at a party 100 yards away who has not seen you yet, because they will explode very close to the time of impact. The throwing guide is extremely accurate and you'll have a few seconds to get a precise aim, there is nothing better than landing a few hundred points of damage before your target even knows you're there. If you get a hit, you push

The thermite are good for zone control, you can throw them across a doorway or area you don't want opponents to cross and buy yourself a few seconds (or force your opponents to take damage to cross it). I have never purposefully injured someone with a thermite that I know of

BTW the frag grenade will NOT go off until it hits something even if it's timer runs out, so if you throw it straight up it will explode the instant it hits the ground but not sooner. Not sure about the arc star.

I hit someone with a Bangalore smoke grenade once. That was neat.

I think it would be nice if more legends had something on landing that would do exactly 10 damage, to turn a 4-punch-kill into a 3-punch kill. Bangalore does 10 with the smokes. I think pathfinder should do 10 if he successfully grapples an opponent. Maybe wraith should do 10 if she runs through someone while void running. I dunno, it's a thought.

I found this today

P.S. there should also be a punch kills stat. I probably have more punch kills than AR kills.

Grunched this thread, what in general is the “best” of the typical guns laying around? I don’t like snipers and pretty much always go for the heavy ammo ARs, but curious which of those is best or if I’m missing out on another type of gun I should be using?

It depends a little bit on your preferred style.

The wingman is probably one of the highest powered guns in the game, since it can do 90 point headshots with no augmentation. It's very accurate even at mid range, and has good hip fire.

In a similar class is the peacekeeper, again because it does so much damage in a single shot. Both were recently nerfed to have lower firing rates. The downside of these is, you have to hit your shots.

After those I like the R-99 and the R-301. I think the spitfire is decent. Everything else except the P2020 and the mozambique are basically "fine".

The G7 is actually pretty good not as a "sniper" but to ping people in the head with a 1x or 2x at less than 100 yards.

Snipers are fairly useless in this game, because it's very hard to secure a kill with one. I rarely pick them up.

If I had to choose between an R99 and the spitfire, I'd take the spitfire unless I had an extended mag for the R-99, because those things have tiny magazines and changing mags mid fight is tough.

Interesting, I had been essentially ignoring all the light ammo guns, going to have to give them a try

I did the same at first too, but the R-301 Carbine is the best gun in the game and I don't think it is close.

R-99 rate of fire is so insane you need the bigger magazines but it is also good.

Not the hugest fan of the G7.

Essentially any gun will be decent once you get a level 2+ barrel and stock. But I've really zoned in on R-301 and Peacemaker combo as my go to.

I feel they need to do something to extend the usefulness of the sniper. They are definitely most useful right at early game where there are distinct advantages at fighting from a distance and the circle is biggest. But once the ring closes even once they pretty much are pointless as a rifle with scope is just better.

I don't think upping the damage is the answer. Actually I'd say a 4 man squad would result in more sniper use. It is pretty tough to engage 2v3 while your third guy snipes, but I think it'd be better 3v4.

I think the problem with sniping is somewhat built into the game
* healing stuff is very common
* there is cover everywhere, and escape routes are very easy, you're rarely ever really caught out in the open
* there's an extra revive step so *actually* getting a permanent kill requires you get all the team mates and that's impossible at a distance due to the above

At a certain point you pretty much *have* to advance to CQC to destroy a team, and if you're at true sniping range, good luck doing that before they get completely healed up

Squads of 4 might help but IMO they'd need a bigger map and more players for that. Map is tiny.

They need to have some sort of death pit mode or something with small circle and respawns so I can actually practice combat. As it is now it takes about 10 minutes to get 5 seconds of combat practice so feels like my learning is super slow