Apex Legends Patch Fixes Heat Shield Sound Bugs, Addresses Loba Tactical Ability

Update: Respawn has addressed the exploit tied to heat shields, so heat shields are back in Apex Legends' ranked playlist. Our original story follows.

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Respawn has rolled out a small hotfix for Apex Legends, and it's mostly aimed at squashing bugs, such as those affecting Loba's tactical ability, as well as an audio bug affecting the new Heat Shield item. However, it also removes the Heat Shield from the game's crafting pool. The patch also fixes several issues with the new Nintendo Switch version of the game.

The Heat Shield is a deployable item that lets players temporarily survive inside the game's damaging circle, allowing you to resurrect downed teammates and the like. However, there were reports of some players using an exploit to survive infinitely inside the circle, which is probably the "rare exploit" the tweet mentions. Crafting was added to Apex late last year, and it allows players to use Replicators to build their preferred gear from materials they collect in the playfield.

Apex Legends' Chaos Theory event has been live for the past few days, which introduced Heat Shields and gave players the option of solo queueing into Trios or Duos games. We also recently heard that Mass Effect items will be coming to Apex soon. Finally, as mentioned above, the Nintendo Switch version of Apex is now live.