How to Drop Faster and Farther in Apex Legends

Evan Gower April 22, 2021

Getting your hands on the best gear is key to your team’s survival in Apex Legends. Putting the first boots on the ground in a loot-rich environment is a huge priority for any player that knows their stuff.

How to Drop Faster and Farther in Apex Legends

There are a few different approaches that you can take to getting you and your team out of the dropship and into the action. It depends on how you time your jump, where you want to end up, and how far you need to travel to get there.

Hot Dropping

If you want to get on the ground before your enemies, you have to jump early, and you have to drop fast. In essence, this means dropping as soon as you possibly can, pointing your face to the earth, and making a bee-line for the ground. After all, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Of course, this is a tactical trade off. Yes, you may get your team on the floor first, but if you end up in the middle of nowhere, you’ll quickly find yourself outgunned. Plus, other teams might have the same idea, and you could easily get into a fire-fight as soon as you land. Learning the map and the best loot spawn areas can help you to work out where to aim as you make your descent.

Delayed Hot Drop

Basically, the same tactic as above, but you wait until the dropship moves over a better looting area before you make your drop. If the enemy has the same idea, you might still find yourself competing for loot, as well as your survival.

Players that have already made it to the ground may see you coming and take you out before you manage to get set up. Try to avoid clustering up with enemy players on the way down. One of the best ways to do this is to look around while gliding down. You can do that by:

Pick a location and jump out of the ship towards it; make sure it’s not straight down, or you’ll reach the ground before you can look around.
Press the “Freelock” button. This will lock your trajectory and allow you to move your camera around to look for other people
- On PC, the freelock button is “Mouse Right Click.”
- On Xbox/PS4, the freelock buttons are “LB”/”L1” respectively.

Gliding

While zooming your way to the ground is a popular tactic, you won’t be able to cover much distance from where you make your jump. It also isn’t necessarily even the quickest way down, especially if your path is angled rather than a straight drop.

The best way to go is to combine short boosts straight down towards the ground with glides toward your objective. Follow these steps to get the most out of your gliding:

When dropping down, aim to get an airspeed of about 145.
Then flatten out your flight path by aiming nearly horizontal in the direction of your desired landing zone.

3. When your airspeed drops to between 135-125, aim your nose to the ground again.

This method can help you get much further away from the drop than a direct burn to the ground would. You can cover over half a mile if you manage to get the timing right. That way you can get to loot-rich areas that people taking the direct road might not manage to get to in time. Try to get yourself directly over your landing zone, and make the last part of your jump a direct drop down to where you want to land.

After You Drop: Boost Jumping

Once you’re on the ground, taking advantage of this trick can help you get around more quickly and ensure you find your way to the best gear before the enemy does. Boost jumping, when done right, is even quicker than a straight sprint. Once you get the hang of it, you might find it becomes your default method of travel.

To make it work, follow these steps:

Start sprinting as normal.
Just before you want to make the jump, hit the slide button. You only need to slide for a very short time, around a quarter of a second, as you’re taking advantage of the speed boost that comes from when you first start sliding.
After that quarter-second, hit the jump button. If you’ve got the timing right, the extra momentum provided by sprinting into a slide will throw you forward much further than a standard jump.

Drop Quickly and Carry a Big Gun

These are our top tips for getting your team out of the dropship and onto the ground as quickly and efficiently as possible. They will allow you to get tooled up and ready for action before the other team has time to blink. Do you have any other methods or tactics that you don’t mind spilling the beans on? Let us know in the comments section below!