Respawn fixes accidental Wattson buff giving her a boost in Apex Legends Arenas

Alan Bernal
Wattson in Apex Legends

Respawn have issued a hotfix after the Apex Legends Season 10 Emergence patch accidentally gave Wattson a huge boost in the Arenas mode.

Updated August 4

Respawn released a small patch for Apex Legends to put an end to Wattson’s short-lived issue in the Arenas playlist.

The company said they’ve fixes the problem that let her have 30 pylons for her tactical ability. It’s now been adjusted so she can only have five charges at the start of each round.

Now players will only be able to get a max of nine charges when buying up in Arenas.

Original story follows below… 


As far as crowd control, no one can touch Wattson and Caustic’s knack for locking down an area. Crucially, these characters have certain limits on their abilities so that they’re not spamming their abilities all around the place.

In Arenas, Wattson can usually take up to 5 pylons for her Perimeter Security tactical, but a recent buff has considerably bumped up that number – and Respawn have taken note of the change.

There are Wattsons in Arenas that can be seen having up to 30 pylons. This gives her an ample amount of leeway to create huge links that completely block off an area.

Before people write this off as Respawn purposefully messing with the meta, this balance update definitely doesn’t look like it was intentional based on dev responses.

Additionally, even if you do want to spam all 30 pylons, players still have to contend with her 30-second ability cooldown after placing a few.

The most use out of this accidental change would be the convenience of not having to buy more charges.

This would have been an intriguing change for Wattson players to start their takeover of the Arenas mode, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

“I’ve been playing Wattson with 30 fences and I haven’t done anything different with her from 5 until I have my ult in which I can be slightly more aggressive,” Reddit user ‘BreezePosts’ said in response to someone saying this doesn’t make Wattson any stronger. “It is actually painful how annoyingly true this is.”

Even still, Respawn’s Director of Comms Ryan K. Rigney and Producer Josh Medina were surprised to see Wattson have 30 fences available to her, so it might get patched rather soon.

In the meantime, people can have fun laying down dozens of fences with Wattson in the Arenas mode, even if it won’t be for that long.

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About The Author

Alan is a former staff writer for Dexerto based in Southern California who covered esports, internet culture, and the broader games/streaming industry. He is a CSUF Alum with a B.A. in Journalism. He's reported on sports medicine, emerging technology, and local community issues. Got a tip or want to talk?