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  • Apex Legends has added the Evac Tower in Season 17 Arsenal as a new survival tower.
  • The Evac Tower is a mobile re-deploy balloon that will allow teams to rotate their position without the use of a Valkyrie.
  • These Evac towers have an HP pool and can be destroyed, so they shouldn’t replace Valkyrie.

With the release of Season 17 Arsenal in Apex Legends, a ton of changes are coming to the free-to-play battle royale game. Players have met the new Legend, August “Ballistic’ Brinkman, seen the new progression system with Weapon Mastery and much more. One cool new addition to the game that you might’ve missed is the newest survival item, the Evac Tower.

Survival Items in Apex Legends

Survival items are a somewhat recent addition to Apex Legends with only two such items so far in the game, Heat Shields and Mobile Respawn Beacons. Both of these items are absolute game-changers and can be extremely powerful. In fact, the Heat Shields aren’t even allowed in professional Apex Legends gameplay for the ALGS.

Survival items take up a special slot in your inventory, so each member of your squad can only hold one type of item — one Mobile Respawn beacon or two Heat Shields. But the newest Survival Item is going to change how the game is played even more.

The Evacuation Tower

The Evacuation Tower isn’t something that’s new to Apex Legends, not exactly. They’ve actually been around for as long as Kings Canyon has been! They’re the redeploy balloons you see scattered around Kings Canyon, World's Edge, Olympus and there’s even one hidden in Broken Moon.

But now, you’ll see a whole lot more of them. The Evac Tower Survival Item being added in Apex Legends Season 17 allows you to put up a Redeploy Balloon anywhere on the map, so long as it’ll fit.

This allows your team to escape from sticky situations and access new rotation options that would’ve otherwise only been available to you if you had a Valkyrie on your team.

Is Valkyrie Obsolete?

If you’re a Valkyrie main, I wouldn’t worry too much. The Evac Tower isn’t going to put you out of a job. Valkyrie’s ultimate ability, Skyward Dive, is still the superior way to get out of dodge and rotate with your team.

The Evac Tower doesn’t take you as high as Valkyrie’s ultimate does, so you can cover more ground with Valkyrie. It also takes time for the Evac Tower to land, just like with a Mobile Respawn beacon. That means the other team is going to know you plan to leave and rotate.

Evac Towers also have a limited time before they go away and on top of that, they can also be destroyed. Apex Legends developers have said it’ll take a coordinated effort and focus fire from a team to destroy one before it can be used, but it is possible.

Regardless of if you decide to stick with Valkyrie or not, the addition of the Evac Tower is going to change the way every team in the lobby plays with new options on how to rotate and escape fights.

Season 17 Arsenal

Season 17 Arsenal of Apex Legends is shaping up to be massive with a lot of interesting changes coming in for all players. Check out the newest Legend, Ballistic and all he has to offer.

We’ve also got you covered on some of the new changes like an improved Firing Range, an overhauled ranked system, a reworked Ping System, the new progression system in Weapon Mastery, the changes coming to World’s Edge and the Evac Tower survival item.

Apex Legends Season 17 Arsenal launches on May 9th. You can check out our full patch notes here.