Altombre

Definitely a coincidence - we love Morello and pretty much all of us keep in touch with him still, but if anything the balance team's process and organization has improved over the past year+ we've worked together. I explain a bit more above, the ecosystem is just a bit different these days. The game's a lot more balanced, the community doesn't have extreme pain points (like beta Raze), and we have an esports scene to consider with disruptive changes.

None of that is to say your feedback isn't valid, though - if yall feel like we aren't supporting the game enough, that's very important for us to know and I'm interested in your perspective on it.

Hey, totally feel the pain here. Hopefully it's a bit helpful if I explain - recent updates have been on the lighter side for a few main reasons:

• 3.0 was a pretty significant patch, so we wanted to give it some time to breathe and see how the changes have shaken out. We didn't want to kneejerk with changes while players were still adjusting to the new economy and movement changes + kayo.

• Balance-wise, the game is looking pretty good right now. There are still opportunities for sure, but nothing super serious that needs fast, aggressive changes (outside of Yoru, who we just need to implement art resources for some of the changes we've made)

• We try to focus our changes in windows between competitive tournaments to avoid disrupting the pro scene, unless there's something really egregious going on; considering the stability we've been holding off on major gameplay changes during these tournaments. Open to feedback on this approach, thoug...

Just to be clear, her playrate hasn’t been a huge concern; people find her fun and approachable. Lots of people playing her isn’t a problem. Super high winrates are a concern regardless though, and we have an obligation to keep the game balanced for our playerbase.

I’m the gameplay insights lead for VALORANT and one of the leads of the balance team. Curating our data ecosystem on gameplay and developing our balance philosophy is a critical portion of my job.

It'd be fun to do another balance blog post around the current state of balance, it can just be hard to find the time between everything else that's going on. I'd like to do another round of that, though.

This is the last one that we did, but it was awhile ago now.

Not sure what metric you're using to measure power, but in terms of winrate and pickrate Sage has been the most powerful agent in the game by a decent margin from launch until now, even through any nerfs we shipped. She's dipped from the #1 spot in winrate once or twice, but never fallen below top 3 (and was usually #1). She's looking a lot healthier after Patch 3.0, though!

Our internal boards have both of them even higher than this, too. Some of that power may be hard to feel, though, since we get lots of requests to buff her even when she's historically been the strongest and most popular agent in the game

sorry!

Just to set some expectations - Yoru is going to be a bit longer than we initially anticipated. I wouldn't expect changes for him in 3.02; we're working on getting them out as soon as we can, just juggling a number of different things right now that make it difficult to ship this specific set of changes as quickly as we'd like.

I wish I had more context here, unfortunately I only work on gameplay - competitive and queue ecosystem stuff is a different team, so I’m not sure if we have any plans like that.

I’m not talking about coordinated play! She’s strong in matchmaking. Strongest at low MMR, but she’s top 3 winrate across the spectrum. Experientially I understand the pain for sure, I play a lot of Killjoy. Just power-wise, she’s one of the best agents in the game still.

Killjoy's still looking really strong after this patch. Top 3 winrate club! The CD nerfs hit her, but everyone else has to spend more money on utility than they used to, and she saw no eco changes. If anything, she's gotten a bit stronger post-3.0.

Sure thing! I'm not a designer, so take this with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that this tuning is enough so that Viper's molly will still kill enemies who stand in it for the entire duration, but it deals the same DPS as before. We've reduced the duration of the molly to lessen her stalling and post plant potential, but it's 6.5 seconds so it's still enough to be lethal on enemies hiding in corners and flush them out.

Just to be clear, we're not nerfing KJ to match Cypher, just sharpening her playstyle a bit. I suspect she'll still be a good bit stronger than Cypher after these changes

Oh man. Going to reach out to our editor now, it's the other way around. Guardian costs 2250 now!

Unfortunately this isn't a gameplay thing, so I have no visibility on progress here. I can only speak to gameplay changes :(

Hey, I appreciate you sharing this sentiment. We share similar concerns with changes of this nature, for what it's worth - we don't want to move the needle so far that the economy feels extremely punishing or that utility is rare, for sure. But, in the previous economy, we felt that players weren't making interesting decisions - utility was so cheap and numerous that players could often buy full utility loadouts without much planning or forethought.

Ideally, these changes should increase the relevance of some of our close-to-premium weapons like the Bulldog and Guardian while also encouraging players to be more thoughtful about which abilities they're purchasing and when. We want every part of a player's buy to be deliberate and meaningful, rather than defaulting to heavy+phantom/vandal+full utility most rounds of the game without putting much thought into it.

We'll continue to keep an eye on this tuning going forward, though! We totally recognize that our utility i...

Yup, totally agree. KAY/O is obviously a big addition against trap sentinels like KJ and Cypher too so we’ll be keeping a close eye on her for the next patch or two as well. I appreciate you keeping an open mind on this one!

Its price IS actually decreased this patch, we just missed it in the notes. Following up on that now…

I know y’all are tired of hearing this, but we have a larger suite of changes for Yoru that weren’t ready to ship yet. The changes in this patch are just to bring his abilities into parity with others of their ilk (flashes and signatures). He has significant changes coming, they’re just going to be a little bit; we’re iterating on the last few pieces.

I know it’s frustrating. We’re frustrated too; Yoru’s a cool agent and deserves better than his current power level. We are working to get the changes out as soon as we can, though.