Apex Legends — Lifeline Guide
Apex Legends is the kind of game where the amount of healing items you have can truly be a deciding factor on who wins a fight or, more importantly, who wins the entire match. If you’re out of medkits or syringes, you could find yourself taking on a fight with roughly 20 health and get absolutely stomped on by the enemy, putting your team at a disadvantage or losing the game altogether.
If you constantly find yourself having this issue, then maybe Lifeline can prove to be your saving grace. Her utility and healing that she can provide can make for an invaluable tool for your team to utilize and could even make the difference between win and loss, and life and death for her and her squadmates. With that being said, there’s a lot more to know about her than what it might look like on the surface.
To start though, let’s talk about her abilities. Her passive ability, Combat Medic, allows her to do three different things. It allows her to revive her teammates faster, have a shield in front of the ally currently being revived, and use different healing items 25% faster. The shield will be automatically placed in a 90-degree angle in the direction you’re looking during the revive.
Her tactical ability, D.O.C Heal Drone, throws down her Drone Of Compassion in the direction she is looking. Whenever you or an ally steps near it, they will have a tube from the drone going into them and receive constant healing as long as they manage to remain near it. If they step away or are at max health, the cord will release from the person and automatically stop healing them.
Finally, her ultimate Care Package, calls down a care package to wherever in the area you select that will land after a short time and contain three different things. These can consist of Phoenix Kits, syringes, medkits, shield batteries, shield cells, weapon attachments, and armor, helmets, backpacks or knockdown shields of either level 2 or level 3 rarity. Generally, there will be a healing item, an attachment, and a piece of equipment in each care package.
At first glance, this all seems quite simple and easy to get the hang of, but there’s a lot to be known about each individual ability before you can start pulling off wins with her.
When it comes to her passive ability, there are a few things to keep in mind here. With your revive speed and shield wall, you’re going to want to be careful about who you revive and where that person is. Going for a revive out in the open is never going to be a good idea and that is no different with Lifeline. As soon as the revive is done, the shield is will immediately disappear which means your teammate could easily just go down again and you could either take large amounts of damage or even go down yourself. I find it’s best to do this whenever you’re stuck in tight spaces or just around a piece of cover as it means that not only will the shield be in the ideal position, but your revived teammate will be able to easily take cover and heal up themselves. As far as the healing speed bonus for you goes, you’re going to want to give a legendary backpack to your teammates rather than yourself. I’ve found that the speed bonuses don’t appear to stack, not to mention you already have faster healing to begin with. Another teammate with faster healing means an easier job for the both of you.
With your healing drone, you’re going to want to use it out of battle rather than in battle the majority of the time. In Apex you spend a lot of time either pushing your enemy or repositioning to get a better angle on them. With this in mind and the fact that your drone is very immobile, it likely won’t get much use by your teammates excluding a few quick heals. If you’re holding down a location for an extended period, that’s the one exception to this rule. Keep in mind though that if an enemy were to push up to the position you were at (and it stays up for a fairly long time), they can also get the heals off of it which is a big negative for you. When you’re out of fights and looting up places though, giving them the healing drone will be invaluable as it will give your team access to more healing items during the next fights. Another thing to keep in mind is the amount of people getting healing. The more on the drone, the less each individual person will get healing but the more it will be spread out. Keep this in mind the next time you’re trying to heal all your teammates at low health.
And finally the care package. This one is arguably the one that I feel can do you the most harm instead of good when used improperly. You can get a lot of great items from the care package itself, but the cost is that any player can see the care package coming down from the sky. During the early game, this has a much lower chance at impacting you negatively because the majority of teams will be too busy fighting with each other or gathering loot to try and contest you. Late game though, this will just give the enemy intel on you which can be used to either watch your position or push you and get some easy kills. Really the only option you have late game is to just not use it. Way too high of a risk with much too low of a reward. This may seem like common sense but I’ve seen so many people do this since I first started playing. This should also seem like common sense, but try to only take one thing from your supply drop. There are three items from it for a reason and each of them should be given to one teammate so you all can thrive from its contents.
And that’s about everything you need to know when it comes to Lifeline. Despite being a very basic character on the surface, you hopefully can now see what potential she has in terms of heightened game sense and utility for your team. If you can harness these abilities and master them, then I think you’ll find something quite beautiful and enjoyable in Lifeline.
