The Problem With the Spitfire

[Bliikksem_]

A quick little bit of background of what kind of player I am:

I started playing apex on Xbox a couple of days after it launched, I played through season 0 and about halfway through season 1 and then took a break up until the beginning of season 2. During season 2 I got up to diamond 4 and got my first and only 20 bomb 4k game on the wraith. Season 3 came around and during season 3 I got up to diamond 2 or 3 (i forget), but I gave up early on that seasons ranked partly due to dashboarding, but mostly due to the oppressive camping gibby/wattson meta. I was hopeful for some large changes to the meta in season 4 that would bring us back to the hyper agro days of season 0/1, also sbmm in season 3 I felt was extremely oppressive and strict with pubs and ranked feeling like the exact same mode; none of these problems were fixed in season 4 (at least to the degree I was hoping for) and so after a relatively short amount of playtime in that season I stopped playing apex again for the second time. During this break, I put together a pc and really only really started playing apex a lot again during season 5, now on pc, in the height of the crypto EMP and rev totem meta which I really hated due to the lack of counterplay. Also around this time I decided ranked is not for me because I don't enjoy the passive careful playstyle that you are forced to adopt in order to do well in ranked. Season 6 came around and in the beginning it was a complete mess, with the ttk changes and the devo being reintroduced as ground loot (a decision I still think was a massive mistake to this day). I still played through it, though my playtime began to drop off a bit due to the start of school (I'm in my last year of high school) and due to the fact that I was getting a bit burnt out on apex again. In season 7 I played a bit, but not very much because of the same reasons as mentioned before. This season I've played roughly 200 games (which is VERY little by my standards) largely because I can't seem to stomach the game for more than an hour or 2 at a time because of how frustrating it has become to play. All in all between xbox and pc I over 2000 hours played and a pretty terrible approximately 2.2 KD.

    Now to the spitfire. I'm not sure what the original design goal of the spitfire was, but to my eye it is meant to be a weapon that requires a low amount of skill to use optimally, meaning to be balanced it needs to have a lesser reward compared to other more difficult guns like the r3 or r9. It used to accomplish this design goal well, having low recoil, a massive mag, but very low DPS to compensate. Sure it could still be frustrating to die to at times, but generally, when you died to it it was because you missed your shots with your harder to use gun. At the end of the day, it used to be a gun that bad players could use as a crutch for bad aim, as it has very little recoil and if you miss a few shots it doesn't matter much as you have another 40 to still shoot. This wasn't a problem because it had a very low DPS of around 150 back then (I'm not sure of the exact number it was at, but it was somewhere in that ballpark) and it would lose out against higher dps more skilful guns like the r3, r9 and volt (181, 198 and 180 DPS respectively) which are balanced by small mag sizes and higher recoil. The r3 is balanced because it has a slow strafe speed, small mag, and (relatively speaking) strong recoil; the r9 is balanced for the same reasons, but with harder recoil, a smaller mag, but more dps and a faster strafe speed, and the volt is balanced around having a tiny mag size and similar DPS to the r3, but with the smg headshot multiplier rather of 1.5, rather than the ar multiplier of 2. All 3 of these guns have large skill gaps associated with them where good players far out perform bad players given the same situation, and they all used to outperform the spitfire provided that the person using them had good enough aim to utilize the higher dps before needing to reload. Contrast this to now, where the spitfire has 171 dps. Now while the dps is still slightly lower than the r3 it can compete due to how ridiculously easy it is to use in comparison, now it is a gun with no downsides, it has no recoil, a massive mag and it deals enough damage to still easily compete with the guns that require higher amounts of skill. Even with good and bad players using it the skill gap is smaller because using it practically negates the skill required to control recoil. This makes it extremely frustrating to die to.

  Now that I've explained why it's a problem I'll explain how I'd fix it. The way I see it there are really 2 ways to balance it. The easiest of the 2 being to just revert the damage buff done to it, while the harder way to balance it would be to introduce a larger skill gap to it. Personally, i'd go with the former of the 2 options for a few reasons. Firstly, it is something that is known to work well, the spitfire was already in a decent state pre-buff and reverting it back to how it was is less likely to alienate people. Secondly introducing a skill gap to the weapon goes against the original design goal of the weapon, as introducing a skill gap would involve massively increasing the recoil and massively reducing the mag size which would make the spitfire not really function like an lmg anymore and it would become essentially an easier to use but worse flatline, in my opinion, that would kind of be a step backwards in balance and wouldn't really work well in apexs' weapon sandbox.

   This is just one of the many problems with the game right now. Right now it feels like in the apex cafe my apex coffee was made with dirty toilet water rather than actually being coffee. Put more simply I'm really not enjoying the game right now mostly because of the balancing decisions respawn is making at the moment. For a long while now it feels like respawn is largely ignoring us launch ogs who want a more agro more fast-paced game based more around mechanical skill and movement, rather than peoples ability to sit on high ground until dead from boredom, or pushing an "i win" button at the right time and killing the enemy team because we happened to have our ults up like how it is in overwatch. The hacking problem will be dealt with in time, but a larger problem to me at least is respawns current balancing philosophy where good players are ignored and bad players are put on a pedestal.

stats from the apex wiki: 

https://apexlegends.fandom.com/wiki/M600_Spitfire

https://apexlegends.fandom.com/wiki/R-301_Carbine

https://apexlegends.fandom.com/wiki/R-99_SMG

https://apexlegends.fandom.com/wiki/Volt_SMG

[TheApexLegendNub]

@Bliikksem_I am fairly certain in season 9 we will be getting valk and the compound bow, but if I am wrong and we get a different legend they may add the leaked Dragon light ammo LMG and if that is the case it explains why they don’t want to nerf the spitfire because a new LMG could be on the way

Honestly I think buffing the spitfire was a lowkey Rampart Buff which is another reason they don’t want to nerf it yet