Apex Legends Cipher: Strongholds and Wingman Strategy Guide

Apex Legends: Cipher has been live since November 3, and by now most lobbies have settled into the new normal. The season didn't just add a mode and call it a day — Strongholds, the reworked Akimbo Wingman, a rebuilt Crypto, and ranked Legend bans all change how a fight actually plays out. Here's how to use each of them instead of just reacting to them.

01What Season 31 Actually Changes About Your Approach

Four changes in Cipher matter for how you actually play a match, not just what the official Cipher patch notes list on paper. Strongholds give you a third high-value objective alongside Care Packages and Replicators, so mid-game positioning is no longer just "which Care Package do we contest." The Wingman went from a Sniper Ammo pistol to a Heavy Ammo one, which quietly shifts who's fighting over Heavy Ammo Arsenals. Crypto's drone now runs on a battery instead of a flat cooldown, which changes when it's actually safe to scout. And in Diamond and above, you're drafting around two banned Legends before the match even starts.

None of this requires relearning the game. It does mean a few habits from last season — auto-looting every Wingman you see, treating Crypto as a pure info bot, ignoring the third structure that lands with the Care Packages — are worth dropping.

02How to Capture a Stronghold Without Feeding the Enemy Team

Strongholds are the new bunker-style structures that drop alongside Care Packages: two Care Packages land at the end of Round 1, then one Care Package and one Stronghold drop at the end of Round 2. The structure itself kills anything underneath when it lands, and it deploys up to four indestructible barriers and two Hardlight frames around itself if there's room — which means the area around a fresh Stronghold is already a built-in choke point before anyone starts fighting over it.

Until a team captures it, nobody can get inside: Loba can't steal from it and Alter can't breach it, so there's no clever workaround, only the fight. Capturing one works like a slower, team-based version of a standard ring fight:

• Progress only ticks up while exactly one team is alive inside the capture zone.
• If a second team enters, the capture is contested and progress stops moving until it's down to one team again.
• Progress is shared across your whole squad, doesn't decay if you step out, and fills faster with more living teammates inside the zone.
• Whichever team is standing in the zone when the bar hits 100% gets the Stronghold — the doors and roof hatch open, and every surviving member of that team gains a level on the spot.

That last point is the one most squads underrate early in a round: a successful capture is a guaranteed level for every teammate who's still alive, on top of the loot inside. It's worth fighting for even if you don't need the guns.

How to Capture a Stronghold, Step by Step

1. 1Strongholds land with the second wave: two Care Packages drop at the end of Round 1, then one more Care Package and a Stronghold drop at the end of Round 2. Watch the map ping as Round 2 closes.Round 2 end
2. 2Don't walk into the capture zone blind. The structure's up to four indestructible barriers and two Hardlight frames create ready-made cover for whoever gets there first, so clear visible enemies before you commit.Before capture
3. 3Progress only increases while exactly one team is alive inside the capture zone. Step in as soon as it is clear and stay put.0:00
4. 4Capture progress is shared across your squad and speeds up with more living teammates in the zone, and it does not decay if someone briefly steps out.Ongoing
5. 5If a second team pushes into the zone, progress freezes until only one team is left alive inside. Be ready to fight it out rather than retreat.Mid-capture
6. 6Whichever team is in the zone when the bar fills gets the Stronghold: the doors and roof hatch open, and every living member of that team gains a level immediately.100%

03Best Legends and Team Comps for Stronghold Fights

Because a Stronghold fight is really a hold-the-zone fight inside a boxed-in area, the Legends that matter most aren't necessarily the ones that matter in an open rotation. A few things to build your comp around this season:

• Lifeline is a much better anchor for a long Stronghold hold now. Her tactical cooldown dropped from 25 seconds to 15, D.O.C. can heal her while she's gliding in, and her Level 3 upgrade adds a Revive Shield that shields teammates while D.O.C. revives them — exactly the kit you want when you're committed to a multi-second capture timer under fire.
• Revenant got faster tactical and ultimate cooldowns (tactical down to 15 seconds with a quicker charge, ultimate down from 180 to 150 seconds), which makes him a better pick for repeatedly forcing fights to clear a Stronghold zone before you commit to capturing it.
• Loba is weaker support for this objective specifically — her tactical and ultimate cooldowns both went up, and she gets nothing out of a locked Stronghold since she can't pull loot from it until it's captured. Don't build your capture plan around her Black Market.

The practical takeaway: send your most durable, self-sufficient squad member in to hold the zone while the rest of the team clears incoming contests from behind the Hardlight frames. A Stronghold fight rewards whoever can out-sustain the zone, not whoever wins the first engagement.

04Taming the Akimbo Wingman in a Real Gunfight

The Wingman rework is a straight trade, not a buff. Base damage drops from 50 to 45, and picking up a second Wingman automatically puts you into Akimbo mode rather than letting you choose. In Akimbo, your headshot multiplier falls to 1.25x (56 headshot damage instead of the single Wingman's higher multiplier), but you get a doubled magazine, a slight fire-rate increase, and shots that alternate between both guns in quick bursts — hold the trigger and it keeps releasing bursts automatically. The cost is more recoil and a longer reload, and it now runs on Heavy Ammo and Heavy Magazines instead of Sniper Ammo, so you're pulling from Heavy Ammo Arsenals instead of sniper caches.

That ammo switch is the part worth planning around before the gunfight even starts. If your squad is already running Heavy Ammo weapons, a second Wingman competes with them for the same boxes — don't grab Akimbo just because you see it on the ground if it starves your Flatline or Hemlok. In the fight itself, the wider magazine means you can hold an angle longer without reloading, but the added recoil punishes spraying at range; treat it as a close-to-mid trade weapon that out-sustains a single Wingman rather than a sniper replacement. Cipher also added tap-fire burst queuing, so tapping again during the Akimbo Wingman's burst queues the next one instead of wasting the input — worth practicing in the firing range before you rely on it in a Stronghold choke fight.

05Playing With or Against the Reworked Crypto

Crypto's passive — the Ally.MoveTo speed boost — moved into his base kit automatically, just slightly weaker than before. The bigger change is the drone. It now runs on a 25-second battery of active use before it auto-recalls, recall takes 6 seconds, and redeploying afterward has no cooldown at all. Scanning switched from a camera-view cone to a full 360-degree zone, though it no longer pings loot bins or doors. He can also mark any enemy in line of sight (4-second cooldown between marks), and that mark lasts 8 seconds and keeps ticking even if the drone gets recalled or destroyed mid-mark.

The EMP ultimate is more flexible too: Crypto can trigger it while actively piloting the drone or from a drone he's already deployed, and if he has an available, undeployed drone, he can self-deploy it just to fire the EMP. With line of sight on a target, the EMP does full shield damage and a heavier slow; without line of sight, it drops to 50 damage and a lighter slow, and Crypto never damages himself with it. At Level 2, his upgrade swaps Ally.MoveTo for "Got Eyes On You," extending mark duration by 4 seconds; at Level 3, Hackathon is replaced by "Charged Up," adding 10 seconds of drone battery.

Playing him well now means treating the drone like a resource with a timer, not a free scout: push your mark-and-retreat window inside that 25-second battery, recall before you're forced to, and save a self-deployed EMP for a fight where you need the shield damage without exposing yourself. Playing against him, assume any squad with a drone out can mark you from any angle, not just from where you last saw it.

The official Apex Legends: Cipher Gameplay Trailer, posted October 29, 2026, ahead of the season's November 3 launch.

06Smarter Picks Under the New Ranked Legend Ban

Diamond and above now opens every ranked match with a ban phase. Each player requests one Legend to ban, and when the timer runs out, every requested Legend's odds of actually being banned equal its share of the total requests — it isn't a simple top-two vote. If fewer than four unique Legends get requested, the system fills the gap using last week's most-played Legends until there are at least four candidates, then bans two from that pool. Whatever gets banned simply can't be selected for that match.

The practical adjustment is to stop building your ranked strategy around a single "best" Legend and keep two or three solid options warmed up instead. A heavily-played, heavily-requested pick is statistically more likely to disappear before you lock in, and the fallback pool pulling from last week's most-played Legends means the current meta's top picks are the ones most exposed. Treat your Legend pool the way you'd treat weapon familiarity — broad enough that a ban doesn't force you into something you've never practiced.