Apex Legends Myths Busted: Testing Every Idea We Can In Respawn's Shooter (2024)

Chucking a bunch of grenades into a battle scenario seems like a good idea at the time, until you start to consider that you might be catching teammates as collateral damage. After all, grenades can have intended and unintended side effects--like blowing doors open and stunning the people on the other side. So do you need to worry about grenades doing friendly fire damage or affecting teammates?

The answer is: no. Grenades don't damage teammates. You can whip frags, arc stars, and incendiary grenades to your heart's content without worrying about accidentally downing your teammates. Blowing yourself up, though? That's another story. Grenades you throw will damage you if you're too close to the blast radius, so you'll still want to be careful where you put them.

Apex Legends is a pretty vertical game, encouraging players to climb up buildings, use ziplines to reach high places, and drop onto flying supply ships. But sometimes getting up high makes getting back down a little scary. So can taking a fall damage you in Apex Legends?

The answer is: nope. There's no fall damage, which means you can leap off tall structures as much as you want in Apex Legends with no worries. You will be slightly stunned from a long fall, which means you'll be vulnerable for a moment before you can move or fire your weapons, but that's the worst of it.

It's worth noting that falling can kill you if you step off the edge of the map in certain places. Regions like Swamp and Airbase have gaps and long falls that will send you out of the play area, which is an instant death. The good news is your stuff will be located back up in the playable area, so your teammates can reach it and retrieve your banner--and usually you can get back and reclaim your own stuff. Take it easy on edges and bridges in those areas, though, or you risk knocking yourself right out of a match.

Playing as Lifeline gets you lots of opportunities to use her ultimate ability, which calls down an orbital supply drop with some handy items like health packs, shields, and scopes. When you call a supply drop, however, you have to designate its landing spot, which marks that location for you and your teammates. But stand in the marked location before the drop lands, and you'll see a big red exclamation point on your screen, suggesting that you should vacate that spot before the drop arrives. So can a supply drop actually do you harm?

The answer is: no--at least, not your own supply drops. If you or a teammate calls in a drop and you stand in its landing position, you'll eventually just get gently pushed out of that location when the drop arrives with no harm done.

However, supply drops can be deadly to other teams, as demonstrated by this video from Redditor barmaLe0. It shows an opponent getting killed by a Lifeline drop in the middle of a fight. So enemy supply drops can hurt you--and that leads us to believe that random supply drops occurring in the world can probably hurt you, too. But we've yet to test that theory.

Over long distances, bullets are affected by gravity. That's true in Apex Legends, too, and is especially important to note when using a sniper rifle. Fire a Longbow DRM at a long distance and you'll even see the arc as the tracer round starts to fall. Sniper scopes include rangefinders and reticles to help you deal with bullet drop--we detailed how all that works in our list of things Apex Legends doesn't tell you. So we know bullets are affected by physics, but what about Apex Legends' energy weapons?

The answer is: nope, no bullet drop for guns that shoot energy. That's sort of obvious-sounding, but we checked it anyway. While guns that shoot physical rounds, like the Kraber and the Longbow, will see bullets drop and therefore travel on a curved trajectory over distances of more than about 150 meters, energy travels in a straight line with no regard to physics. It means your Triple Take is likely to be more accurate than your Longbow at extreme distances, although the trade-off is in damage dealt and the Triple Take's three-shot spread, which grows wider the further it travels. Either way, you don't have to raise your aim with energy guns to make those headshots, so keep that in mind when lining up long-distance kills.

Anybody who's pulled an early hot drop in Apex Legends has gotten familiar with the melee button, as many early fights turn into frantic slap-fests while everyone panics in an attempt to find an actual gun. You may also have noticed in your flailing that there are three different melee attacks you can do. If you're standing on the ground, you'll throw a punch; jump into the air and you'll do a flying kick; and run and slide, and you'll pull a Ryu-style dragon punch. So are any of these attacks better than the others and more likely to take down opponents?

The answer is: no. All the melee attacks in Apex Legends are equal to one another, dealing 30 damage per strike. That's pretty high--almost as much as a Longbow headshot--but obviously very hard to land since you need to be at arm's length to an opponent. Jumping and sliding to do different moves can be great for keeping you from getting killed in an emergency, but you don't want to do only one kind of attack for more damage. All melees hurt the same amount, so mix up your attacks and your tactics and maybe you'll survive your slapfight.

One of the handiest things about having Lifeline as a medic is that she gets her own cover when she needs to revive someone. Start a revive as Lifeline and you'll activate a shield in front of you that covers about a quarter of the 360-degree space around you. That's enough to help you get someone off the ground and back into the fight, hopefully. The question is, how does that shield work--more specifically, can a teammate standing behind Lifeline's shield shoot through it to hit enemies, while avoiding incoming damage?

The answer is: no. Lifeline's shield blocks fire in both directions, which includes friendly fire, so you can't use her reviving a teammate as cover to get some shots off while invulnerable.

Caustic's toxic gas can change the entire dynamic of a fight. Dropping gas traps or throwing gas grenades with his ultimate creates deadly clouds that choke and blind enemies, while also slowing them down. Caustic is unaffected by his own gas, but is the same true for his teammates?

The answer is: kind of. Caustic's gas will kill enemies but not teammates--that's the good news. The bad news is that the gas can still greatly obscure teammates' vision, making it tough to fight through it. Obviously the effect is much worse for enemies, but for teammates Caustic's gas is a lot like Bangalore's smoke grenades, creating a thick haze that can hide enemies or make it tough to navigate. On the plus side, enemies afflicted by the gas get highlighted in green for both Caustic and his allies. That only goes for gas dropped by your team's Caustic, but it can still help when identifying opponents' locations.

Wraith's ultimate of dropping portals can be extremely useful if used correctly. You can drop portals to help you get around enemies or to escape bad situations, or even to trick enemies into coming at you one at a time through your own spectral conduit. But just what are the limits of Wraith's spooky passageways? If you're downed on the battlefield, can you still use a portal?

The answer is: yes. In fact, this is one of the best utilities of a Wraith portal--using them to get out of trouble. If you're downed in a fight, you can crawl through a portal to escape the battle and get out of danger, at least temporarily, and that can be handy in getting you into a position where a teammate can resurrect you. Just note that enemies can also use your portals, so just because you escaped through one doesn't mean you can't be tracked.

So what exactly are the limitations of the portals? Can they transport objects, like grenades or bullets? Can you use them to get fire on an enemy you otherwise couldn't it?

The answer is: nope. Portals will take humans only. Shooting at a portal will not send the bullets out the second portal--those bullets will just continue forward as if there was no portal there at all. The same is true of grenades: Throwing a grenade at a portal will just find it exploding on the ground beside it. Portals are not solid, so they don't block objects passing through them, but they also don't transport them from one portal to the other.

Using character abilities in tandem is with your squadmates is what makes Apex Legends' approach to battle royale refreshing in the first place. Since you can send people through Wraith's portals, the inevitable next question after bullets and grenades is whether Mirage's holographic decoys will travel through.

The answer is: no, unfortunately. Though they look like people, decoys act just like bullets and grenades in this respect, moving straight through the portal as if it wasn't there and continuing on in a straight line. No sending fake people through portals to cause disarray and panic among your enemies.

Two of the most offensively useful ultimate abilities in the game are Bangalore's artillery strike and Gibraltar's mortar strike. Both can do serious damage to enemies and sometimes turn the tide of a battle by providing covering fire when you're in the thick of things. At the same time, there's always the concern about catching teammates in the crossfire. So do you need to worry about killing your teammates with airstrikes?

The answer is: no, although that's not the whole story. When it comes to Gibraltar, you can airstrike while friendlies are fighting with no worries--like grenades, the strikes won't hurt your squad but they will hurt you, so be sure to stay out of the area that's being bombarded or use Gibraltar's shield for cover. As for Bangalore, her artillery strike is less about damage and more about stunning enemies for easy cleanup. The stuns can affect teammates the same way Caustic's gas or Bangalore's smoke grenades can, even if the ultimate won't actually damage your squad (and of course, your own airstrikes can hurt you). So Bangalore's ultimate is best used on an enemy position when you're attacking, rather than in the middle of a fight you're already waging.

We're testing more Apex Legends questions all the time and we'll continually update this list as we discover more intricate details of the game. Meantime, if there's anything you want to know about Apex Legends, let us know in the comments and we'll do our best to send our squad out to find answers.

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