Mirage doesn’t scale well

Wall of text, TLDR at the bottom for those who desire it.

I’m going to start this out with what, I think, is the most important detail about Mirage. His kit is fundamentally based around using visuals to fool HUMAN players.

This creates a problem: Who are the abilities balanced against? Newcomers or Veterans? How does one compensate for players learning his tricks?

We can see this situation in action throughout Apex’s history. Take for instance launch week, in which Mirages ran rampant and players struggled to identify decoys and didn’t know Mirage cloaked in his Ult. Soon, however, players caught on, and his power level dropped. Another case can be seen after his major rework: starts out powerful, then through a combo of tweaks and player learning ends up weak.

Personally, I can think of three main ways that Mirage could be buffed. 

The first is the most commonly suggested:

Let Mirage players choose which of a variety of premise kits to use, so that not all Mirages act the same.

This has two fundamental problems. One: Such a system is a can of worms for potential issues and exploits in the current framework. Two: This does nothing to prevent players from learning about all the active kits.

The second is less prevalent, but still comes up frequently:

Implement TF2 Grunt AI to decoys, making Mirage players simply create a fully self-controlled decoy.

This method would certainly be almost impossible. The Titanfall franchise was famous for the amount of active AI units in a match. However, this was only possible due to the small player count. Adding this many AIs would just put unneeded strain on the server infrastructure EA has provided, along with increasing latency.

The third method, as far as I could find, hasn’t been brought up:

Mirages ‘tells’ could scale dependent upon the MMR of a lobby.

What this means is that the higher the skill rating of a lobby is, the less obvious ‘tells’ will be.

An example of this would be in Mirages Ultimate, in which he flickers after activating it. In low-skill lobbies this can go unnoticed, but in higher levels it is a dead giveaway. By implementing ‘tell’ scaling here, we would see the length and intensity of the flicker decrease as skill increases.

Another instance where this could be applied is in the transparency of the cloak, glow of the decoys, and luminosity of the hologram emitters. In higher skills, the alpha channel of these traits could be increased accordingly, making them less glaring to trained eyes.

The formulas by which these rates scale could take all sorts of forms and be readily tweaked to adjust power creep or loss in various tiers.

TLDR; Mirage is meant to trick players, but balancing it to all tiers of play at once is hard. By using MMR as a variable to scale the ‘tells’ of abilities, Mirage could be better tuned to multiple tiers of play.