Making Caustic more Mobile: AOE vs Damage
Caustic currently sits in a bad place. He lives inside, or he dies outside. And for a game like Apex, there is a lot of outside that you will be forced into by the ring.
So how do you get caustic, a character clearly designed to be "anti-full send" to function outside? The answer I have, is multi-purpose gas.
- Invert his tactical and his ultimate, and give his ultimate a slightly faster cooldown.
- Gas grenades (now a tactical) use an AOE mode of the gas, where they cover a wide area, but do no damage or slow (unless hit by ultimate). Effectively acting as a clunkier less dense bangalore cloud, that can become threatening in the right situation.
- The gas trap (now an ultimate) should be more sinister, being hit by the trap specific gas stacks on an effect of "compound toxin" on an enemy in its range. The trap specific gas both continuously applies toxin stacks and activates the damage/slow effect, but the toxin effect no longer directly targets health.
- Compound toxin stacks are Caustic's way of killing with any of his gas. When enemies afflicted with toxin stacks enter any gas effect (AOE or trap) they take damage and slow based on how many stacks they have until they exit the gas. The stacks slowly wear off after time. Stack damage is applied to shields first rather than directly to HP.
- If the gas trap is destroyed, not disabled, the gas enters "AOE+ mode" where the gas spreads out into a grenade AOE, but automatically inflicts 1 stack of compound toxin on any enemy that enters the gas with no stacks, causing them to take low damage and slow.
- Allow all allies to see enemies in gas with toxin stacks on them. Caustic specifically can still see any enemy in his gas so long as he too is in the gas.
The idea here is to allow caustic to CREATE his own death trap rather than being forced to seek shelter to make use of his traps. Ideally caustic can use grenades to create a fog, (the fog on its own is only a mild visual deterrent to enemies with no toxin stacks) see enemies in the fog, and either use that fog as a "do not try to rush me" zone, or punish those that do with a well placed gas trap, now causing the enemies inside the AOE gas to take damage from the AOE gas as well having fallen for the trap.
*Caustic map exclusive: On his area of Kings Canyon, activating the loot fills the room with AOE gas (which is harmless without stacks). Once the timer is up, anyone who took loot is hit with a stack of compound toxin.