Apex Legends is just a few days away from a new season, a new map, and a new legend on November 1, 2022. Season 15 brings with it the ‘Techno Witch’ Catalyst, a defensive legend who can create and fortify structures.
First, a quick breakdown of her abilities:
- Tactical: Piercing Spikes – Throws out a patch of fluid. When enemies get near, it turns into spikes that damage and slow. Enemies need to be near it to destroy it by exposing and damaging the core.
- Ultimate: Dark Veil – A large wall of fluid that slows incoming enemies and darkens their vision. Physical objects, including bullets and people, can pass through it, but it blocks vision and scans.
- Passive: Barricade – A new button prompt on doors, allowing Catalyst to rebuild or reinforce doors. Reinforced doors take twice as long to destroy with melee attacks and can only be opened by friendly players. Can reinforce up to two doors at a time, and they stay reinforced until another door is reinforced or they’re destroyed.
Catalyst is a master of controlling the space around her. Dark Veil restricts enemy movement and creates countless opportunities for surprise attacks and quick escapes. Her passive and tactical have all sorts of potential, keeping enemies in their place before letting her teammates run riot on them. For example, a combination of Barricade and Rampart’s Shiela is a delightful prospect.
“There were two aspects we wanted to approach with Catalyst,” gameplay engineer Chris Winder explains. “One was this ability to create structures or gameplay spaces out of this type of fluid – it didn’t start as a fluid, but different types of structures that can be used in the gameplay space and affect the space in an interesting way.
“I think there’s some way to naturally pull that into this controller-style gameplay where you’re controlling a space and you’re able to dictate how advantageous it is for you and your team to play around that area. Especially just the way the Tactical and the Passive work together to lock down doors or lock down passageways, and discourage teams from entering.”
Her Passive ability is very exciting. Doors offer all sorts of tactical opportunities in Apex. You can block them, blow them open, or use them as a chokepoint for incoming enemies. Catalyst has control over one of the environment’s most important features, making her potentially unstoppable in the right hands.
“I think the ability to reinforce a door, including doors that have been destroyed, is going to be a very powerful ability in the right hands,” Winder agrees. “It can be used strategically to lock an exit for players. They’re trying to escape the ring, and you know that they’re going to try to rotate through this area and you can cause them some more grief there a little bit or delay their time through that area. So yeah, I’m actually really excited to see the players take advantage of that in interesting ways.”
Her Ultimate is bound to shake up the meta significantly. The fact that Dark Veil blocks scans will cripple most of the meta’s top teams, almost all of whom use scanning legends. Bloodhound and Seer are effectively hard-countered by this ability, as even Seer’s heart scanner won’t work for the 30 seconds Dark Veil is active.
“It was never meant as a targeted attack against the scan meta, but we knew that it would have some impact there,” Winder explains. “I’d say it was meant more holistically as a vision blocker. So it needed to be able to block scans to really fulfill that back gameplay fantasy. So yeah, we’re interested to see what it’ll do. Being able to prevent third parties a little bit gives teams a bit of pause, trying to figure out what’s on the other side of that wall. And if they should jump in or not, or jump over the wall and maybe isolate themselves in a way that they didn’t want to. It has a lot of ways it can be used and expressed in the game, defensively, or offensively.”
How people end up using her remains to be seen, but Catalyst is sure to lead to big changes in Apex Legends going forward.
Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.
