Every time a new season of Apex Legends rolls around, there's a certain level of hype for the new character. Over its various seasons, fans have seen everything from a defensive legend who can manufacture fences to a speed demon who bounces around the field to a robot who wishes he could die added to the game. As such, when players hear about a character seemingly designed to blow things up, it's simple enough to still perk ears. As with every legend, it seems like many are going to be bickering back and forth on who uses Fuse day one.
What's going to set apart Fuse from other characters are his abilities, especially as Apex Legends move to put him on their tier list. Now that players have seen his abilities in action, it's worth trying to approximate where he would fall. Of course, as seen in the trailer below, Fuse's abilities are all of an explosive nature.
Apex Legends Fuse: A Lot of Bark, No Bite?
Fuse's passive, at first glance, seems impressive, but ultimately, it seems like it could go either way. Effectively, whenever Fuse would "toss a grenade," he instead loads it into his arm for increased range, speed, and accuracy. As demonstrated in the Apex Legends season 8 trailer, he directly sticks someone with an Arc Star after all. The problem with this ability lies in the fact that his grenades are as limited as everyone else's. Speculatively, being able to stack grenades in the backpack again would have been a recently useful ability for Fuse, but given that his passive is still limited to the grenades he can carry, it's a unique limit. On the other hand, someone who is accurate with it may be able to stick more people and land better thermites than other legends, making it a bit of hard-to-predict situation.
His tactical is less so, despite actually being rather unique for an Apex Legends character. Fuse's tactical is the only in the game designed to directly deal damage; Revenant's can but its design is to cancel abilities, Bangalore's smoke can but its design is to provide cover, Caustic's gas does so but only mostly as a defensive tanking ability, and more. As a result, there's one of two situations here: either it deals a solid amount of damage in a small-to-decent area but has a long cool down or deals minor damage in a small-to-decent area.
What's for certain is that it doesn't really stop players from pushing their attack because it has no dazing effect (as an example), seen from how the legends in the trailer press forward while taking damage. It's likely to be a medium AoE with low-to-decent damage, accuracy will likely be important, but chances are, this is something that will start off weaker than it needs to be in Apex Legends, before being buffed in the long run.
Then, there's Fuse's Ultimate ability: the Motherlode. Fuse fires a rocket from his back that blows up, spreading fire around an area. In many ways, it seems very similar to Gibraltar and Bangalore's, but with a bigger after effect. As a result, it seems the upfront damage will be mitigated to accounted for the potential DoT of the fire.
Apex Legends: Fuse on a Tier List
All of this is to say that Fuse has his gimmick, but based on what was shown, it's more likely than Fuse enters the Apex Games as more underwhelming than some characters. It doesn't help that Fuses entire shtick revolves around grenades, and Wattson exists as a powerful counter to him already. While this is sure to shuffle in the seasonal balances, in our Apex Legends beginning-of-season 7 tier list, we broke the legends down as follows:
- S Tier - Bloodhound, Gibraltar
- A Tier - Crypto, Lifeline, Mirage, Revenant
- B Tier - Bangalore, Caustic, Octane, Rampart, Wattson, Wraith
- C Tier - Horizon, Loba, Pathfinder
Of course, it remains to be seen, as there are a lot of factors in terms of damage output, but it's clear that he's a character with the sole purpose of putting out damage. Everything from his passive to his ultimate scream this, but they also scream for careful balances, buffs, or maybe even nerfs. As such, it seems safe to say that Fuse may enter the Apex Games as a better character than Horizon, but likely finding herself in B-Tier. As yet-another-assault character, Fuse continues the meta, but he doesn't seem poised to shake it up come Apex Legends' season 8.
Apex Legends is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, with PS5/Xbox Series X upgrades and a Switch version also in the works.
