Altombre

Once it's triggered, no - it just turns into a molotov effect. You've got to shoot the nade when it's dormant to destroy it cleanly.

All of her skills are destructible. Her alarmobot and swarm grenade are visible when placed, but quickly stealth - similar to Cypher's trapwires - but you can see them when you're close by.

Killjoys often place swarms on the bomb post-plant, but astute players can shoot the bees before defusing, so KJ can't just play off of the defuse sound alone. I imagine post-plant bees will be quite effective for the first few days before people figure this out, though.

I totally understand this concern, but rest assured that none of us want this. Valorant is a tactical shooter first and foremost.

Yup, this likely speaks to some of the differential but is also a problem in itself if Sage is enough of a “must pick” that she becomes a litmus test for a team’s willingness to cooperate. I speak to it a bit more in a different reply in this thread!

It's actually the opposite - the higher an agents' playrate, the more their winrate will converge to 50%. Every game that has the same agent on both sides counts as a win and a loss for that agent in aggregate winrate, cause one of them wins and the other loses.

This is why it's important for us to understand win rates in situations where agents aren't being played in mirror matches! But we still look at mirror win rates and round-level win rates to make sure we're understanding the entire picture.

Oh you’re good, I don’t feel like you were aggro at all. Yeah, we’ve been looking into ult power a lot recently and Sage’s is definitely coming out as the strongest, so that could be an opportunity for us to dial back some power. We’d like to keep the resurrect in the game, though, so we’ll likely be exploring tuning levers there first before resorting to something like a rework.

This is all still in flight, so maybe we’ll pivot to different areas, but the ult looks like a pretty likely place for us to adjust the power on next - agreed on that.

Oh for sure - in that post I was mentioning why she's "valued" at different ranks. This has mostly come from survey data, when asking players what Sage is good at/why she's powerful, lower ranked players tend to emphasize her healing and resurrect capabilities, whereas higher ranked players tend to emphasize her ability to hard stop site executes. Both groups of players value the other side of the coin, though - all of Sage's outputs are undeniably powerful.

In terms of actual balance data, we have to split by a number of metrics because we have mirror matches in our game (it's hard to understand Sage's winrate when there's a Sage on both teams 90% of the time - one's gonna win, one's gonna lose). So raw pick rate, % round winrate on defense, % round winrate on offense, and match win rate are our primary metrics - we look at those with and without mirror matches so we can understand an agent's power in isolation as well as an agent's general power in the ecosystem. Naturall...

Yup, good intuition on this one. I'd say this probably accounts for some of her winrate differential, but we're looking at literal millions of games across our entire MMR spectrum in all of our regions and her winrate is substantially higher than other agents, to the point where it's extremely unlikely that this would account for a meaningful portion of that delta. Also, philosophically, even if this phenomenon WAS meaningfully explaining her winrate, we don't really want an agent who is so powerful and agreed upon "meta" that only uncooperative and/or toxic teams don't pick them. That pattern existing at all means that a portion of the agent meta feels solved or forced, which flies in the face of our goals for that system.

If players only viewed Sage as a "must pick" on one or two maps, that could be alright, assuming the power deltas were reasonable - but seeing Sage as a "must pick" in every situation, combined with an extremely high play rate and very high win rate make...

We're not currently talking about full ability reworks like that, and would like to avoid that if possible. I agree with your points around stall + heal uniqueness on Sage being an issue due to lack of choice competition - I spoke to that a little bit in another one of my replies here. We want to approach this methodically so we can shave off power in the right areas, but want to avoid full reworks like that if we can!

Choice competition is something that's definitely an issue, both with her healing and her hard stall. We tend to find that healing is more valued in lower MMRs, and her hard stall power is more valued in higher MMRs, although obviously both outputs are useful across the spectrum.

I think having low choice competition definitely makes the risk of a character being imbalanced higher, but doesn't mean that she's doomed to be high pick rate/win rate. For example, Sova is the only character who can reveal enemies from long distances round to round with his Sonar Dart and Drone, but he's not near Sage's pick or win rates. Cypher is the only character who can adequately watch flanks without his actual gun via his Trapwires, but he's not near Sage's pick or win rates.

Long term, we definitely want better choice competition for both of Sage's outputs - her stalling and her healing - and recognize that's an issue. We feel we can work towards resolving her balance issues befor...

This is something we talk about a lot. I’m seeing a lot of misconceptions around that we’re nerfing Sage because of her pickrate, and that’s not true! She does have a very high pickrate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s overpowered, just popular.

The problem is she also has a very high winrate, and has consistently been the strongest agent in the game, even through several nerfs. We want to take our time and ensure that we’re bringing her power level in line with other agents while not ruining how it feels to play Sage and the value she provides to the game. We don’t want to butcher the kit, but we also have an obligation to our players to have balanced content.

There are some great ideas in this thread, but this one takes the cake. Bringing it up in our balance meeting on Monday

Yup, pretty much this. We’re talking about it but we suspect the Op is just one part of a larger phenomenon we want to dig into and understand before making any hasty changes.

Yeah, this is one of the things she’s good at - consistent default pressure that enemies have to respect, even if you don’t always capitalize on it. That just tends to be a lot harder to coordinate around in solo queue.

The live balance team is a group of designers and insights folk like myself who are responsible for analyzing the state of the live game and ensuring that it remains healthy. Buffs/nerfs in the patch notes, for example, come from us.

For sure! That’s totally fair feedback and something we’re keeping an eye on. One interesting balance is that we don’t want Viper to feel like a sentinel who “sets up” an area like Cypher and then just defends it; being proactive and taking ground with her smokes is key on top of exerting control in that area once you’ve claimed it. It’s a delicate balance to strike and something we’re clearly still trying to fine tune

I've always gotta preface replies like this with: I'm not a designer, I'm insights. I work really closely with them on all of our gameplay content, but don't actually build the stuff!

With that being said - yeah, you're correct on Brim and Omen. Brim tends to do bursty executes but he's worse at fakes, Omen is amazing at fakes and deception and has a bit more personal agency in being able to flank and break angles for his team, but pays for it with less raw smoke uptime than Viper or Brimstone, and his smokes are a bit easier to push through.

Viper is primarily zone control. She has the highest commitment of any of our controllers (because her smokes get placed for the entirety of the round, minus picking up and reploying her Q). Due to this "price" she's paying, she gets to have the highest ceiling on her smoke coverage, being able to block off huge sections of the map with her E and Q for long periods of time multiple times over the course of the round. She's not...

Balance team has been talking about Viper a lot - stay tuned. If all goes as planned there'll be more buffs for her next patch!

I don't want to share any specific details or hard commit to it because it's not all set in stone yet, but that's the plan.

I don't work on skin pricing, so I can't really speak to that! I worked with skins team briefly awhile back with some concept testing, but I've been fully allocated to core gameplay of Valorant for quite some time now - maps, agents, weapons, live balance. Outside of those spaces I can't speak to much and would rather defer to other Riot folks who are more knowledgeable there

I'm not a designer so I'm not the best equipped to answer questions like this, unfortunately. We were experimenting with a lot of ideas back then on weapon diversity, and for a period of time the Guardian was performing quite well on the maps and characters we had at the time. Things have changed since then!