Altombre

Reyna's winrate inversely scales with MMR (more effective in low ranks than high ranks), whereas Sage's winrate scales with MMR. In diamond, immortal, and Radiant, Sage is actually the highest winrate agent by a decent margin.

In the lowest MMRs like Iron, she's still quite good though - she never goes below #3 in any bracket, and jumps past Reyna to the #1 spot in high MMRs. People just tend to think she's weak because of the nerfs, she was just even more powerful before.

Not for a bit, we're holding back on big changes during First Strike. We still think she needs a bit of help but it'll probably be a few patches before we get Viper anything substantial.

Thank you, I appreciate it! And just to be super clear - it's totally fine to criticize us or express frustration, especially when you're doing it in a respectful way like you have. It's alright to enjoy the changes we've made and still be disappointed at the lack of Viper changes, and it's good for us to keep feedback like this in mind to make sure we don't get complacent and continue to be ambitious with the quality of patches we can ship here.

Thanks for being so open with us and sharing this, and please continue to do so!

We're working on an insights blog post that'll give some insight into agent winrates (and specifically Sage) soon!

Yup, we're building that functionality right now. That's definitely our intent long-term!

Made a quick edit, Sage actually made it up to #2. Reyna was #1 this last patch, Killjoy and Sage are quite close but Sage beats KJ by a few fractions of a percent :)

Sage is the #3 winrate agent on this patch and has been every patch since her nerf - what specifically do you feel needs to be buffed?

Edit: just double checked and she’s actually crested up to #2 on this last patch!

We haven’t forgotten about Viper, she’s just got a lot more moving parts to manage compared to other agents. Our focus right now is stability for First Strike, but we want to look at the Controller role afterwards and see what improvements we can make there.

I know Viper hasn’t been in the best spot, despite our efforts thus far. We do still want to continue to work on her, we just had some higher level issues we felt needed tackling first (like the Operator, and changes to make Sentinels more interactive and healthy). She’s definitely still on our mind as an opportunity to improve.

We agree! We’ve got some Brim buffs that we’re testing internally, but don’t want to release them and shake things up too badly during First Strike. Controllers are definitely on our mind, though!

Yup! Good call out here.

This is also not true, Sage’s winrate is the highest in immortal+ actually, it trends up as mmr gets higher

We’re working on an insights blog post that’ll have this information, so stay tuned!

Yeah she's been a top 3 winrate agent from the launch of the game til now, nerfs just dropped her from indisputed #1 to moving around between 1-3 depending on the patch. Sage is very, very good still.

We look at mastery curve data too - we're not such data novices that we wouldn't be able to account for this. Breach players at the peak of his mastery curve (which is, admittedly, quite long - it takes longer to "master" Breach than most agents in the game) still sport winrates that are lower than many players' games 1-5 on agents like Reyna or Sage. Breach is just not that strong in matchmaking, full stop.

In terms of balancing between pro play and matchmaking, yeah that's a whole different discussion. We're still building out how exactly those should intersect, but it's a very frequent talking point for us and something we're actively working on. First Strike should be a big learning opportunity for us here, and we're communicating with pro teams semi regularly to get feedback from them on top of the data we analyze daily.

She's doing a bit better, but still needs some help. We've had some spicier changes bouncing around for testing internally, but nothing we've wanted to ship yet, especially now with First Strike going on and this batch of Sentinel changes + Skye that we wanted to ship.

For controllers, we're looking at buffing Brimstone a bit first, since that's an easier case, but Viper is still on our radar. We just needed to shift around resources to clean up some other aspects of the game on the last patch or two, but we haven't forgotten about her, don't worry!

It’s less pickrate and more winrate, but yeah both are true. Few people play breach, those that do play breach are not very successful with him (lowest winrate in the game, right next to viper).

For those who will say it’s because people are inexperienced, even accounting for mastery curves breach is weak. Breach “mains” who play him a ton become more successful, but his peak winrate amongst the players who main him is often still below game 1-5 winrates on agents like Sage or Reyna.

We’re working on some Brimstone buffs right now, they just weren’t ready for this patch. Stay tuned!

Nope. Once KJ dies her alarmbot and turret deactivate.

We did do this!

This is something that we wanted to do, but we don't quite have the tech set up and clean now. It's one of the downsides of launching the map early, some of our "map launch" tech isn't quite set up. We're trying this version of launching Icebox, but are definitely taking notes for future map releases in terms of how to make this a better experience for you all.

👀