Apex Legends Guide: 12 Tips To Help You Win Gun Fights And Be A Better Teammate
GameSpot may receive revenue from affiliate and advertising partnerships for sharing this content and from purchases through links.
No matter how good you are at the side stuff in Apex Legends--things like staying alive, creating strategies, and helping your teammates teammates--there's one skill you absolutely must have if you want to win: the ability to win fights and get kills. You don't have to be the best point-getter on your team, but it's impossible to become champion in Apex Legends without winning at least one fight along the way. And nobody wants to have a teammate, or be a teammate, who isn't pulling their weight.
Of course, improving your ability to kill your opponents is a lot easier said than done, especially with some 50 million people jumping into Apex Legends since its launch. Shooter experience, and skills those honed in other battle royale games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, certainly help, but there are a lot of less-than-obvious that can help you take down more wins in battles. That means your team will spend less time reviving you, and you can spend more time helping them stay alive, as well.
There are lots of things you can do to win more firefights, though. Knowing how much damage you're doing to enemies, putting yourself in good positions, and making sure you're only entering engagements you're likely to win will help you reduce your deaths and land more spots in the top three. Use these tips to help you win more battles and help your team to victory.
Adjust Your Sensitivity
Probably the most important thing you can do for yourself to instantly improve at Apex Legends is to mess with your sensitivity settings. Apex includes a few options for sensitivity, allowing you to adjust your regular look speed and the speed of your movements when aiming down sights, and tweaking those to match how you play will make you more accurate almost immediately. If you're regularly missing a lot of shots, sensitivity issues could be your problem. Don't be afraid to experiment with the settings to find what you feel comfortable with. As a rule, if you're finding yourself swinging your aim past enemies and having to correct, your sensitivity is too high. On PC, you probably want your mouse DPI set to around 300 or 400; if you have a gaming mouse, you can adjust it in the mouse's software.
Learn To Use Damage Information
A lot of info is conveyed to you the first time you hit an opposing player with a shot. When you hit someone with your first bullet, you see how much damage you've inflicted--but Apex Legends also shows you exactly what kind of damage you're inflicting. If your opponent is wearing a body shield, you'll see an armor icon next to the damage number, and the color of the icon and numbers will tell you what kind of armor they're wearing. Knowing how much damage you're doing to an enemy can give you essential insights into how a fight is going, and whether you're likely to win it.
When you engage someone and shoot them, note the damage you've done and the armor they're wearing--white armor protects them for 50 damage points, blue armor for 75 points, and purple and gold armor for 100 points. If your armor is worse than theirs, you'll want to think seriously about disengaging until you can get the upper hand by breaking their armor or otherwise out-damaging them. When damage numbers turn red, you know you're through an enemy's armor and damaging them directly--and if you see red numbers outlined in yellow, you know you're dealing headshot damage. Getting used to recognizing how much damage you've done to an enemy and what kind of damage you're doing will help you make key decisions, like whether to press the attack or fall back to heal.
You can change how damage information is displayed in Apex Legends to help you make those decisions. By default, damage info is set to "Stacking," which adds up all the damage together. You can change it to "Floating," which shows you how much damage each shot does individually, or "Both." Pick the one that helps you the most--Stacking or Both should give you enough information to gauge how close to death anyone you're fighting actually is.
More Things Apex Legends Doesn't Tell You
It takes a lot to win a fight and while the tips we offer here will assist you, winning in Apex Legends also requires that you understand many of its hidden mechanics. Be sure to watch the video above for a rundown of all the stuff the game doesn't tell you.
Go For Fresh Armor
Any time you pick up a piece of armor, it'll give you the full, fresh damage reduction. That includes armor you get from the loot boxes of enemies or even teammates, and it's essential information to have if you're in a fight but have a second to breathe. If you defeat someone but know their team is still around, try popping open their death box quickly and taking their armor to get an advantage in dealing with the enemy. It's much faster than trying to heal yourself and the protection can be essential. Just note that damaged armor you drop when trading armor will not be fully restored, so you can't game the system by switching armor with a teammate.
Only Engage Enemies In Fights You Can Win
You'll often see new or inexperienced players start opening fire on enemies the second they see them, regardless of range or whether the enemy has a better position. That's almost always a mistake. The element of surprise can be huge, it's true, but trying to snipe enemies at 300 meters is almost always a recipe for disaster. In almost all cases, the chances of you dropping an enemy team at extreme ranges is really low; the time-to-kill (how long it takes from when you start shooting an enemy to defeat them) in Apex is pretty long in comparison to other battle royale games, and it means the chances you're going to get kills from far away even with sniper rifles are low. Most of the time when you engage an enemy at long ranges, you're just giving them a chance to get ready to fight you, and giving them the opportunity to beat you.
Instead, never fire on an enemy unless you're confident you can kill them. You might not always instantly down someone when you start firing, but you don't want to pick fights and give away your position unless you're expecting to take down whoever you're aiming at. Giving enemies a chance to react to you (or other teams a chance to find you) is often deadly. Don't give opposing players chances to beat you they wouldn't otherwise have.
Use Complementary Weapons
Time-to-kill in Apex Legends also means that usually, you're not going to kill an enemy with your first magazine, unless you happen to hit the person with all of it. Most of the time, you'll need to reload and keep firing to take an enemy down. The thing is, as in most shooters, reloading takes a while in Apex Legends, and it's actually quicker to switch to your second weapon than to jam a new magazine into your gun. That means you should try keeping two complementary weapons in your inventory. Use your first gun--your favorite assault rifle or automatic, say--to knock out an enemy's body shields or injure them some. Then switch to your second gun to finish the enemy off, using something powerful like a Peacekeeper shotgun or a Wingman hand cannon that does a ton of damage with one blast. Experiment with combinations that work for you, but try to engage in battles with both your weapons and you'll likely be more successful.
Avoid Giving Away Your Position
Good players are looking for chances to catch you unawares and kill you before you have a chance to fight back. In Apex, as most battle royale games, one of the biggest assets you have at your disposal is controlling information other teams have about you, and you want to avoid giving them anything you can as much as possible. Firing your weapons, making needless noise, and even calling Lifeline's care packages can give determined enemies a big target. Whenever possible, don't give anyone anything to go on; if you need to call a Lifeline package, do so in places where you have decent cover, and make sure you're watching for approaching enemies while it drops, just in case. Whatever you do, don't stand in the open presenting an easy win for an ambusher.
Always Go For Cover
Inexperienced players will often rely on their ability to shoot over their ability to avoid getting shot, and this is a great way to lose. In all situations, you want to try to be behind cover or using cover to mitigate the shots coming at you. This requires getting a sense of the cadence of your enemy's shots--with shotguns, for instance, you can get a good sense of when a shot is about to come, so you can try to time your movements to be behind something when the blast comes in. The same is true of when a gun requires reloading; listen carefully and watch your enemy's animations and you'll know exactly when to expect punishment to come your way. You want to bring as many advantages to a battle as you can, because any given fight that's just you and the other person trading shots is usually just a coin flip scenario. If you can hit your opponent more than they can hit you, you win, so think about your environment and how to use it to your advantage.
Stop When Shooting, Move Between Shots
When you're trading shots with someone else, you want to make sure you have the best chance of doing the most damage you can, while they have the worst chance. Players who stand still and fire away are really easy to hit, even if they also are finding themselves under the best aiming conditions. To help enemies avoid shots, keep moving, jumping, dodging, and trying to be as unpredictable as possible. The thing is, all that motion doesn't help you land your shots--erratic hopping around is going to cause you to miss, too. So try to build a rhythm in which you stop momentarily to perfect your aim, fire your shot under optimal conditions, and then move again. It's a bit tough to get good at juking and stopping, but if you can, it'll help you avoid damage while dealing more in general.
Reposition Yourself
It's kind of amazing how often you'll find that a team you're fighting has tunnel vision and can't break away from their expectations. If they see you coming from a certain direction, they'll usually expect you to keep coming from that direction, and you can get yourself a major advantage by disrupting that expectation. Whenever possible, try to reposition yourself in a fight so that you're not where the enemy expects you to be. This can be as simple as crossing to different cover or working around the outside of a fight while out of sight, but especially in small engagements, you can often catch people unawares if you can just move to a new spot without them seeing you. Do your best to disrupt your enemy's information about you--and keep in mind that they'll probably try to do the same.
Flanking Isn't Worth It If It Leaves You Exposed
This is a dovetail with the idea of seeking cover and minimizing your exposure: Don't bother flanking if you're trading a strong position for a weak one. Coming at a team in cover from an exposed position is mostly just likely to get you killed in a lot of cases, even if you're definitely going to surprise them. That's not always the case against one or two opponents, but trying to run up on a squad alone and in a bad position usually just gives them an opportunity to turn and drop you. If you're flanking, do so to a place with cover, where you can hit the enemy but they have a hard time hitting you, so you can make the most of the opportunity. A flanking maneuver that gets you killed and leaves your team down a fighter is just helping your enemies.
Don't Linger In Fights Too Long
Every second you spend in a battle leaves you vulnerable, and not just to the other team. Everyone has stories about how they were in the thick of a fight between one squad, nearly triumphant, when another team rolled up out of nowhere to take advantage of the situation and wreck everybody. The longer you spend fighting another squad, the more likely that third team is to appear on your position, since every shot gives away your location and everybody wants to go for those easy, opportunistic wins. If you feel a fight dragging and you're unable to effectively defeat the other squad, consider bailing out. Get away, heal up, reset, and try to be away from where a team on the prowl might expect to find you. It'll help you avoid those annoying situations where you get sandwiched between two squads in a losing situation.
Try To Be The Third Team
By the same token, as often as possible, you want to be the third squad showing up unexpected to a raging battle to wreck everyone while they're distracted. When you hear a fight nearby, try to get close and do something about it. Often you'll improve your weapon and armor situation by killing players who've been able to grab good stuff, and there's no better opportunity than when those folks are already weakened from another fight or completely surprised by your arrival. The other tips still apply--get good positions like cover and high ground, don't needlessly expose yourself, and don't give yourself away--but use those opportunities to sandwich a squad and take them out, then pick up their battle midway through to drop the second squad.