Apex Legends How to Best Use Mirage Decoy

by TheCardSaysMoops

I see a lot of players, friends, teammates, opponents, use their Decoys as sacrificial lambs.

They get behind cover, they send their Decoy out on a suicide mission running straight at their enemy. The enemy shoots the decoy, likely still sees you move, and now you’re just a few feet away in the same position.

You want to send your Decoy into cover like so

The strongest Decoy will always be the one that isn’t revealed to be a Decoy.

I want to add that it can also be useful to have your Decoy continue your running trajectory, while you duck out. Say like… when you’re behind cover and want to make it look like you’ve continued non-stop. Or you are running away from someone with a gun, and you want to duck into a room while they (hopefully) continue to chase the decoy down the hallway.

I saw a few comments over the last few days on this sub, talking about how the usefullness of Mirage will die down once players learn to recognize decoys. While I think partially true, I believe that’s the case for the way most players have used Decoys so far. I think it will be far harder to recognize Decoys in the way i’ve described.

So those posts got me to thinking about more uses of the Decoy, outside of just sprinting them across the map fairly aimlessly. I think Decoys definitely have some of the biggest potential. I do wish Mirages Ultimate was stronger, but his Tactical I think has a lot of untapped potential. I couldn’t think of any usefulness for creating Decoys while Jumping :P Lemme know if you think of any.

MY RAMBLINGS

This kinda blew up and I edited it quite a few times, so..

• Sending your Decoy though smoke.

Say an enemy Bangalore smokes to try to buy time to heal. You wanna see if they’re looking at the smoke, send a Decoy in. If the Decoy lives, you know nobody is looking and can push through the smoke.

I suppose you can also send a Decoy through smoke to distract opponents, making them waste a clip on someone that isn’t real in a very frantic moment where they’ll likely shoot at anything that moves. Maybe crouched Decoy might be more suitable for it..?

• Crouched Decoy looks like a healing player? Potentially?

I feel like this could have some potential. Have them crouch still in the corner, run away, maybe your opponent shoots it and it buys time for you to get off a heal for real??

• I wonder if it’s possible to use a Decoy to cause an enemy to cancel a heal.

Imagine you just got torn up, you go around a corner to heal. You see a Mirage round the corner, do you think you cancel? As someone who plays Mirage, I can’t count the number of times where I nearly down someone and always wish I had a grenade or something. I know the Decoy obviously won’t kill someone, but it could cause a cancel on the heal and maybe keep that player out of the fight for a few more seconds.

Just quick notes for people who might not be aware of the nuances of Mirages Decoy.

These are things I think most players who have experience with Mirage will know, but this is just to be thorough.

• The Decoy will take whatever stance you’re in when you use the Tactical Ability. If you’re crouched, the Decoy will be crouched. If you’re standing, he’ll be standing/sprinting.
• If you want the Decoy to run forever [unless he hits a wall etc], Aim at the sky/above the horizon.
• If you want the Decoy to stop at a specific point, you can aim anywhere on the ground and he’ll stop where ever you’re pointed when you used the ability.