Sage is the strongest agent in the game, though, and she's a sentinel! But yeah, these changes made Viper have a stronger defensive profile for sure.

It's definitely not ideal and something we talk about. We've learned a lot about the tradeoffs of utility's power and utility's frustration since launch. We've tested some things internally, but won't have anything definitive (if we ship changes at all) for a bit regardless. Definitely an opportunity for us to improve on, though!

Unfortunately there aren't any super clear paths to get onto the team right now outside of design - currently the "balance team" consists of Insights (data/strategy), Design (to analyze problems/pitch solutions/implement solutions), and Production (to account for our workload and coordinate timelines with folks on different teams). We don't have a "high skill" requirement, but since a lot of folks in this working group have been on the project for several years, most of us tend to be on the higher end of the skill spectrum; definitely not a requirement though.

AFAIK we don't have any openings right now specifically for balance, but all of our content designers also work on balance (if you make a character or make a map, you're also part of the process of balancing it) so "the balance team" may be a bit bigger than it seems on the outside.

If you're interested in general gaming/career advice feel free to DM me here or on Twitter, always happy to answer questions!

We definitely consider both. Skye’s power is looking alright in matchmaking and competitive play right now, but we also consider our design goals for the character and what type of experience we want to foster. If we were to make changes to Skye, they probably wouldn’t be purely balance-driven; numerically she’s not bad.

An example of changes like that would be the Bucky changes - numerically, the Bucky actually wasn’t overpowered, believe it or not. We made the changes primarily to make the weapon’s identity more clear and understandable (left click focused instead of right click sweet spot focused).

We strive to have our agents be in a healthy spot both in matchmaking and pro play though, for sure.

Unfortunately I don’t know anything on that front! I work on core gameplay and balance, alternate game modes are actually handled by a separate team entirely.

Yeah this is true. Breach’s winrate is pretty low, but better than Yoru. Player surveys also have him as the most frequently selected “overpowered” agent, so it’s an interesting dichotomy.

I don’t think he’s the weakest by a long shot. Brim could definitely use some help in pro play, but for our entire matchmaking playerbase he’s actually quite strong rn.

That’s not to say there aren’t room for improvements, but looking at the rest of the roster we probably have higher value opportunities to invest in. Brim is doing alright.

It impacted her winrate fairly in line with our hopes - reduced her winrate in lower MMRs while keeping it fairly similar at high MMRs.

Yeah, sage is still the top agent in terms of winrate and playrate by a pretty good margin. Publicly available data is more of a comms thing than a data thing, but it’s something we’ve talked about!

Astra’s looking pretty healthy winrate-wise. Below 50%, but not too far!

Brimstone's winrate is actually higher than Viper's across all MMR, with the exception of high elo (like, top 2%+), where Viper wins out. Good theory, just less focused on "Brim is better in low elos" and more like "Viper is good in the super high elos". It's also super close - I'd suspect Viper will probably overtake Brim in a patch or two as players master her kit even more.

Regarding Skye and Astra - I can give my take, but the best person to ask would be the head of the agent team, Riot MEMEMEMEME. For purely my opinion - Skye is inherently a very supportive agent who relies on teammates to extract a lot of value from her abilities, and Astra is a big-brain agent that scales on coordination, game knowledge, and creativity, so we've always expected them to be on the more niche end for agent picks - that's okay. We're always thinking about if there are ways to improve the experiences that we have on live, though, so that doesn't mean we wouldn't explore tweaking aspects o...

The data on most of these 3rd party sites looks very different than the data we use internally - often times due to sample sizes, incomplete sample populations (like opting in to share your stats via some collector app), or data biases (like not controlling for mirror matches). I'd take a lot of this stuff with a grain of salt for now until the ecosystem gets built out a bit more - it just takes awhile to get all the tools online and accurate.

Happy to go more into details around some of this stuff, but wanted to drop a few anecdotes from our internal environment:

• Viper is actually 50% winrate now for the first time - that's correct!
• Viper isn't the highest winrate Controller - Brimstone is, actually, but it's very close.
• Viper's pickrate is a good bit lower than 50%. It's gone up since the buffs, but she's still more of a niche pick overall.

We're looking into additional Yoru changes now. No definitive timeline, but we think he could still use some help.

Oh yeah, I definitely don't think we want to do that either. We mostly just want to be more proactive in addressing agents that have clear issues and feel more comfortable moving quickly and adjusting, rather than making yall wait for such a long time for updates.

In general though, we want our balance updates to feel natural, not hyper disruptive. I don't think that'll change.

It's less that we want to intentionally disrupt things and more that we want to be more confident in shipping changes to move the needle. Yoru and Viper are good examples; Yoru's been out for over 2 months now and the entire community has generally come to the agreement that he's really bad and not worth playing.

That's a failure on our part, in my opinion. An agent shouldn't feel like a trap to play for that long without us intervening. Viper is a more difficult case, since she's just very complex, but we've wanted to ship some improvements for her for awhile now and have been playing more conservatively than we should have been.

Like always, we'll gather feedback on this approach and continue to iterate forward - but more than anything this is about doing the types of changes we want to do more consistently and holding ourselves accountable to those outcomes.

Yeah, it's something that we consider a good amount. Normally, buffs take awhile to settle in because whenever we buff an agent, we see an influx of new players who aren't as good at the agent trying them out - so typically we see the opposite effect (agent's winrate starts off as low or unmoving, then gradually climbs up as players learn/newer players transition back onto their main agents).

We also have the capability of looking at experienced players on a certain agents' winrate, as well. For example, with the Viper buffs, we'll want to see her winrate on average, but also what her winrate looks like within the group of players who've already dedicated a lot of time to Viper.

Yeah totally, I hope I didn't come across as trying to invalidate your opinion - the way you feel is pretty common and it's something we talk about a good amount!

I think a big aspect of Breach's lower success in matchmaking is also the burden of coordination he places on the team; since it's hard for him to capitalize off of his own utility, he tends to need to work with teammates more than other agents. We often see agents that require more coordination (Skye, Breach, Astra) have lower matchmaking winrates, but that doesn't mean their utility isn't objectively powerful or feel tough to play against. This is why you see some pretty damn powerful Breach plays in pro, but he's not quite as successful out in the wild.

Keep sharing your feedback with us, it's super valuable to understand our players' perspectives. Whenever you can frame your grievances as a balance issue (I genuinely think this character is too strong) vs. an experiential issue (regardless of power, I ...

This was largely the intent. Shift the Bucky's power profile more in line with expectations for a shotgun - the left click should be a lot more reliable now, with the right click being more of a dedicated chip damage option that's a lot harder to actually one-shot with.

We're opting to be more aggressive, but also line up resources ahead of time and draft out contingency plans so we can react quickly if we overstep on something. For example, on this set of Viper changes, we have a changelist ready to implement if she ends up being way too strong and we need to dial it back. We have this for launch agents too, our agents have just historically launched pretty weak and needed buffs more than nerfs!

Breach is actually the second lowest winrate agent in the game (Yoru is lower, but we'll see if that remains true after the 2.06 buffs). However, your sentiment is pretty common - in our patch surveying, we see a good chunk of players feeling that Breach is overpowered as well as frustrating to play against, namely because his utility robs agency from enemies (can't see, can't shoot well).

It's something we're talking about. Having an agent who's objectively weak in matchmaking but also frustrating to play against isn't ideal, and we have some ideas for things we may want to try in the future. Just wanted to hop in to call out that changes to effect game balance/winrate and changes to effect the experience/enjoyment of playing around an agent are very different, and we like to talk about both.

Yeah the Bucky’s left click should be a lot more reliable now. We’ve talked about it internally as a largely power-neutral shift - left click is better now, but the right click isn’t really lethal anymore. It’s used primarily for chip damage or as a last resort, you ideally want to set yourself up to use the left click though.