Altombre

Seeing a lot of discussion regarding the CD changes - we’ll keep an eye on Killjoy’s power, but she’s definitely been outperforming Cypher (and a lot of other agents!) in matchmaking by a decent margin and has room for a slap on the wrist nerf to help solidify her identity like this. She’s currently one of the stronger agents in the game - if she’s too weak, we’ll look into changes, though. Ideally this should encourage players to be more thoughtful and committal when placing KJ’s tools, which is what she’s all about, while still giving her options if she needs to rotate or retake.

There are two options - if you’re not actively bending the bird, when you pop the flash your gun will stay out the whole time. If you’re bending the bird, you still have a flash animation but you equip your gun faster than you used to. In either case, Skye is better equipped to capitalize off of her own flashes now.

It’s a bit of a newer development, for sure. Duelists still tend to have a lot more capability to heal up after engagements or deny trades to secure more advantaged fights over a round, whereas initiators bring a broader spread or larger volume of raw utility. It’s something we still talk about a lot, but feel these versions of breach and Skye will also be easier to balance across competitive environments overall.

Yup! Breach got a similar treatment. Fewer flashes, but a faster re-equip.

Not a bug!

There are two main things - she equips out of her bent birds faster, and if she lets a bird fly straight she can pop the flash without taking her gun down. In either case, she’s better at capitalizing off of her flashes than she used to be.

I appreciate it, keep letting us know. We care about getting this stuff fixed too, I know it's frustrating. Sorry we haven't been as good on the comms front for this one!

They use a separate client for Masters itself, but still practice and play solo queue on live. We also want to try to keep the live game and pro games in similar versions of the game - having pros play "pre-nerf" or "pre-buff" content is always a bit of a bummer since the game they're playing just isn't representative of live.

I've gone into it more in other comments, but the tl;dr is that a lot of the 3.0 changes are more systemic, and we wanted to bundle them together for the best experience. We originally were going to space them over 2.11 and 3.0, but felt consolidating them would be better overall.

Sorry, this isn't an area that I personally work in (I just do core gameplay). All I can do is forward it to that team! I'm hoping it gets resolved quickly too.

Not rude at all! There are tournaments going on all the time, to the point where we can't consider all of them. VCT series and Master's are feasible for us to schedule around, though.

We have a lot of changes going on in the 3.0 patch. The tough thing is, a lot of them interact with each other, so we need ALL of them ready to be worth shipping together. For example, let’s say we’re adjusting an agent’s number of charges on an ability as well as the cost of that ability. But, we’re also updating the weapon/ability economy pretty substantially. Shipping one of those in 2.11 and the other in 3.0 is kinda needlessly disruptive, and they’ve been tuned as a bundle internally; it’d make that agent just feel really weird for 2.11 or require us to shake up their costs again for the second patch in a row on 3.0 to feel correct. We’d like to avoid patterns like that if we can.

TL;DR is that we know it’s a bit disappointing to have empty updates like this, but we think it’ll lead to a better overall experience. 3.0 and 3.1 have a good clip of changes in them!

It’s been tough for us to make big changes balance-wise with Master’s going on until recently. The next two patches will be quite significant, though!

I'm here daily alongside a lot of other folks. I just don't comment super often unless I can give updates/information on something I actually work on so I can provide something of substance

It'll be added to Competitive and Unrated in this patch!

It's in competitive starting with this patch!

delet this

After First Strike, we fielded a survey to pro players in all of our international regions who participated (both in qualifiers and those who made it past qualifiers). We gathered feedback on a ton of different areas, but one area was the time window before new agents & maps are available in competitive play.

What we heard then was that pros wanted agents to be slowed down a bit (to be available in compet play), and maps to be sped up a bit - so we adjusted our timeline to allow new content into pro games four weeks after launch this time around across the board (slowing agents down and speeding maps up). That's not to say this can't change in the future - we want to continue gathering feedback from pros, especially now that we have more agents and maps in the game than before, which makes each new addition introduce even more complexity - but, I just wanted to let yall know that the decision wasn't made in a vacuum, it was actually made as a response to pro feedback we rec...

We wanted to have this for Icebox too, just couldn't get it out in time since we pushed that map's launch date up. Hopefully the experience is better this time around :)

That's what's going to happen! Breeze will have its own queue for yall to play in, unrated mode, for a short while after launch.

To clarify, Brim could probably use some help in competitive play, he's just doing pretty well in matchmaking. Right now there are some other agents who could probably use some more help, though (like Yoru). We do talk about Brim, though, especially with Breeze entering the mix (where he's probably going to be weaker than our other controllers due to his lower effective range).