Apex Legends Season 11 Patch Notes Reveal Huge Wattson Buffs

Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment has some big changes planned for Wattson in Season 11, so much so that the patch notes revealed this week said "this is Wattson's season." The changes for the Legend consist of buffs across the board with the exception of a slight hitbox increase to make up for the removal of the Low Profile feature in the game. Even if you don't play as Wattson, you'll benefit from the changes as well if you've got a Wattson on your team since the character's Ultimate ability has also been reworked.

The patch notes dedicated a whole section to the defensive Legend to show Wattson mains just how significant these buffs will be. Some notes from the developers explained what the goals are with these changes.

"We want to enable more active gameplay from Wattson players by smoothing out the rough edges in placing fences," the dev notes in the patch notes said. "Responsiveness tweaks, longer range, and faster cooldowns means that Wattson can much more quickly and reliably set up a defensive position, or even use her fences and pylon in the midst of open combat in a pinch."

Below are the full sets of changes planned for Wattson in Season 11:

General

• Improved the reliability and responsiveness of placing Wattson's Tactical and Ultimate in-world objects.
• Wattson can place her Tactical and Ultimate objects on valid surfaces above Wattson's eye level (to a reasonable extent).
• General hitbox size increase, to compensate for the removal of low profile in the Legacy update.

Tactical - Perimeter Defense

• Increased damage on crossing a Fence by 33%. (15 to 20)
• Increased debuff duration on crossing a Fence by 100%. (1.5 to 3 seconds)
• Increased the time allowance to be hit again by a subsequent Fence effect by 100%. (0.5 to 1 second).
• Decreased recharge time by 50% (30 to 15 seconds).
• Increased placement range by 50%.
• Decreased the delay between Fences shutting off and reactivating after an ally passes through them by 60%. (1.0 -> 0.4 seconds)
• Wattson now moves at Unarmed-speed while readying/placing Fence nodes.
• Fence nodes can now be placed as soon as the weapon is readied, instead of waiting for the animation to finish.

Ultimate - Interception Pylon

• The Pylon output has been significantly reworked.
• Reduced the number of active Pylons Wattson can place from 3 to 1.
• The Pylon now lasts forever (instead of timing out after 90 seconds).
• The Pylon now has a pool of 250 Shields that can be distributed to nearby players, instead of effectively infinite Shields.
• Increased the Pylon shield recharge rate by 150%, and smoothed regen rate. (2/second -> 5/second, or more accurately: 1/0.5 seconds -> 1/0.2 seconds)
• When a Pylon is out of Shields, it no longer recharges players' Shields, but can still zap incoming ordnance.
• Taking damage while regenerating Shields via the Pylon delays continued regeneration by 1 second.
• The UI on the ground and HUD elements now displays the amount of Shields that remain in the Pylon.
• Pinging a friendly Pylon will now display the percentage of Shields remaining in the Pylon.
• Pylon ordnance-zapping has been moderately reworked.
• Ordnance is now zapped when the Pylon detects that it would hit any surface within range and line of sight of the Pylon, instead of being zapped as soon as it comes within range.
• As a part of the changes, current issues where the Pylon doesn't reliably zap ordnance (particularly concerning airstrike abilities, and ordnance that bounced off surfaces near the Pylon) should now be addressed.

Apex Legends Season 11 is scheduled to launch on November 2nd.