Apex Legends players can breathe a sigh of relief: Catalyst’s ultimate ability has been fixed for the fourth time in today’s patch, now live for all regions and platforms.
Catalyst’s Dark Veil has constantly been under scrutiny ever since her release last November, failing to achieve the ability’s primary goal of dividing a fight and denying any scans from going through despite Respawn’s constant attempts to answer the root of the problem.
But today, Respawn published a new Apex patch, fixing multiple different issues and bugs that have persisted since the release of season 17 last month. The most notable change concerns Catalyst’s ultimate ability, now fixed to deny any enemy scans from going through her Dark Veil.
This is not the first time Respawn has actively targeted Catalyst in bug fixes, first trying to fix the unintended interactions between her Dark Veil and scan legends since the start of season 17 on May 9. But many pros and content creators were disappointed to find out that despite what the patch notes said, nothing changed between Seer and Catalyst.
Respawn later deleted the line concerning the Catalyst and Seer interaction changes from the official website’s patch notes, causing confusion among the community about whether the dev team intended to follow up on their previous acknowledgment of the issues.
In the May 22 patch, Repsawn carefully watched how scan legends interacted with Dark Veil, saying that the dev team is reviewing ability interactions with the ultimate. The first major fixes affected Catalyst’s most effective partner, taking out the synergy with Seer’s Exhibit going through the Dark Veil.
Many players reported immediate results once the patch dropped but later found additional glaring issues when other scans, such as Bloodhound’s Eye of the Allfather, started going through the wall, once again drawing community calls for fixes to the ultimate ability.
When it comes to the highest level of play, Catalyst has been an overwhelmingly popular legend in the Apex Legends Global Series. According to Apex Legends Stats, Catalyst ranked as the third most popular legend across all regions during Split Two, commonly paired up with Seer to take advantage of their overpowered ultimate combination.
Consequently, Catalyst’s pick rate skyrocketed on a global scale as more players recognized her potential, climbing as high as fourth place with a 12-percent pick rate across all regions and platforms at the peak of her popularity. The recent nerfs to Seer and release of Ballistic tanked her pick rate to two percent globally, putting Catalyst in 16th place out of 24 playable legends.
Players are now unable to take advantage of Catalyst’s broken ability interactions as she finally settles down in a comfortable defensive specialist niche, fulfilling her role on release to delay pushes and slow down fights, rather than initiating them with impunity and bugged ability interactions.
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With all three of season 17’s patches fixing aspects of Catalyst’s ultimate, Apex players can optimistically look at the future of the Defensive Conjurer’s role in all aspects of play. With the continued acknowledgment and transparency from the dev team about the issues plaguing Catalyst, Dark Veil may soon provide the answer to the scan meta that everyone has been asking for.
The June 1 patch also targeted multiple other bugs, such as issues surrounding Ballistic’s release, issues surrounding spawning in the Control game mode, and skins that blocked a player’s view when using iron sights. In addition, Wraith received major changes to her tactical ability, which allowed her to still use weapons in the Fight Night POI on Olympus.
