Whats wrong with Mirage’s skills in Apex Legends?
The character of Mirage has become a favourite one for many players of Apex Legends. He is a legend that can be unlocked for about $9.99 in the game and has his own, unique background.
Mirage is the youngest in his family and became an expert in Holo-Pilot technology, thanks to his mother. After the loss of his brothers during the Frontier War, the work became even more important to the reduced clan. Holo-Pilot technology became a bond for the two as they coped with missing family members.
This rogue eventually got involved in bartending as a part-time job. This was a position he enjoyed, thanks to many of his patrons regaling him with stories from beyond the doors of the bar. Eventually, those stories motivated him to seek out a new life. His mother gave him her blessing, and some great equipment, before he went off seeking out his own adventures.
Mirage can send out a holographic decoy to distract and confuse enemies and he will automatically create a decoy and cloak whenever he’s knocked down. Finally, he can deploy an entire team of decoys and then cloak to evade detection.
He sounds like a great guy, so what’s the problem? Well, all legends in the game have three abilities. They are the tactical ability, passive ability, and the ultimate ability. The tactical ability has a cooldown between each use and is an elective power that the player can activate on his or her own. The passive ability is one that doesn’t require activation as it is always on. Finally, the ultimate ability is the one that you can activate and has the “wow” factor to impress you.
For Mirage, the Psyche Out is his tactical ability which allows him to send out a holographic decoy. The Encore! is the passive ability that sends out a decoy, should he be knocked down. The Vanishing Act is the ultimate ability for Mirage, which sends out a team of decoys, and this is where he falls down. Other legends have impressive ultimate abilities, like Wraith’s ability to create a portal to another place on the map, you just have to beware of who might follow you. Lifeline can bring in an airdrop package, which has lots of great defensive equipment.
So, what’s wrong with bringing in a team of decoys and cloaking? Well, it sounds great on paper, but many gamers have brought up a number of problems with this ultimate ability. First, the cloak isn’t a real cloak, per se. It only makes you look like a ghost rather than making you completely invisible. So, using it to hide from your enemies just makes you seem translucent, and let’s face it, that’s not going to fool anybody! The second issue is that the AI for the team of decoys is not very good. Well, that’s actually an understatement; the circle of decoys doesn’t actually do anything, except standing in a circle. Finally, the creation of the circle is something of a tip-off to all of your enemies. Seeing the decoys actually indicates to everyone that you’re using that ability simply by their presence! The enemies, upon seeing this circle of statues, then realize that you’ve cloaked and know to look for you, and most importantly, they know what to look for.
So, what have players decided to do about it? Team up and suggest a change or two, of course! The obvious solution to the problem of the ineffective ultimate ability is also the most popular. Rather than just standing around and doing nothing, the team of holograms needs to actually get out there and do something! There are actually a lot of possibilities that come from this suggestion. The decoys could actually attack the enemy team or interfere with it in other ways. They could cause things to explode, or even explode themselves, but they need to do more than just be mannequins.
Respawn Entertainment has addressed the idea of reworking characters in the game and emphasized caution. They believe that they need to make balanced changes and are insistent that you can rework a character to death. However, they also said that they can and do look into these issues.
