Apex Legends players are already rightfully excited about Mad Maggie, the new Legend that arrives in the game in Season 12. But the new patch also means tons of changes to other characters and the weapons available at your arsenal—shaking up what's strong and weak in different game modes and forcing a rethink to you might approach gameplay. While Respawn Entertainment still announces these buffs and nerfs, it turns out the developers have also made some shadow nerfs to submachine guns (SMG), secretly tuning down their effectiveness in combat. Here are all the (known) changes to SMGs that you should take note of, as these weapon nerfs weren't officially disclosed in the Apex Legends Season 12 patch notes.

Shadow nerfs to SMGs in Apex Legends

Twitter user Shrugtal, a trusted source for Apex Legends data and game features, ran the statistics and uncovered the secret nerfs. The changes affect hip firing, which allows players to launch a faster first shot without waiting to aim down their sights. It's less accurate than ADS but it's still viable when you're quite close to your target, where the accuracy may not matter as much when you just need to get your shots off quickly.

However, the nerfs come in the form of increased hipfire spread, affecting three Apex Legends SMGs—the Alternator, the Prowler, and the R-99. Shrugtal details the changes as follows:

  • Standing: 1.0 -> 1.2 (+20%)
  • Running: 1.5 -> 1.7 (+13%)
  • Sprinting: 2.5 -> 2.7 (+8%)
  • Airborne: 3.5 -> 4.0 (+14%)

Higher spread essentially further reduces hip fire accuracy, as it refers to how the bullets you fire cluster around the spot or hitbox that you aim at. ADS typically has tighter spread already than hipfiring, so that the bullets land closer to where you're actually aiming, but now this increased spread makes hip firing a fair bit worse with SMGs.

Another secret change to Apex Legends weapons that Shrugtal uncovered is a buff to Volt SMG. The official patch notes had announced the wrong number, when in reality the max clip value is 28. This may have been an accidental error on the devs part, though, it's unclear why they would gloss over announcing certain changes, even seemingly minor ones. In this case, the hipfire and SMG nerfs aren't small fixes that players can just overlook, but it seems Apex Legends continues with the trend of going off the radar for shipping out some of these item changes.