Was reyna really an issue? Sheesh
She was particularly strong in lower elo, but was still quite strong across the board. This change was aimed to make her a bit less pubstompy and increase her decision making, so you don’t have Reyna’s just popping dismiss to move a bit faster for kicks.
This should also hopefully help keep Reyna viable in higher mmrs or more coordinated settings, as she doesn’t need to get the finishing blow, so she can play a bit better with allies.
They said they would do one next patch as they are looking into some more meaningful changes to viper to make her fully viable
Next patch is master’s - we won’t be shipping many balance changes at all as to not disrupt that tournament. AFTER that we have a few open patches to go a bit more wild in without worrying about tournament play.
We have additional number tweaks for the Stinger and Frenzy shipping alongside these price changes. I don't want to just straight up paste patch notes in here, it'll all ship out tomorrow, just wanted to set expectations!
I will say that Frenzy is just getting the price tag moved up, though. We're keeping an eye on it after this change to see if it needs more nerfs and will follow up if need be, but just starting with the price for now.
Nitr0 is right, which really shouldn’t be surprising. I’m also not surprised to see this, since the whole point in the price change seems to be to make it so you can’t buy armor. But in pro matches most players weren’t buying frenzy + armor, they are buying frenzy + util. Some jetts and omens ran frenzy + armor but it wasn’t the dominant meta. This just makes it so your team get less utility when everyone on your team buys frenzys. You can’t get paranoia armor either, but I feel like this might just push those Jett and omen players that we’re doing frenzy + armor into just buying a sheriff.
We're still going to be keeping an eye on the Frenzy after this change, this was just the easiest change that we could ship quickly and confidently on the timelines we were working under. If the gun continues to need nerfs after this point, rest assured we'll adjust it.
That being said - those changes almost certainly will not take place during this master's tournament. We're front-loading changes here so we can step back and not be disruptive while master's is going on.
But I think the high commitment part of her is whats holding her back. You can solo control with Brim and Omen because of their versatility to smoke whenever, wherever. I'm fine with having to change playstyles with agents. But with the new controller agent coming out (before viper changes?!), its gonna be tough to see her become meta.
You're not wrong, high commitment is proving to be harder to work around than we initially anticipated for controllers. We're exploring lots of options right now, there's not much that's off the table, just want to take our time and be sure we're confident in the direction we end up going forward with.
Has your perception of Viper changed since she has now a high pick rate in EU pro matches and we are seeing her in come out in NA proplay as well?
It's definitely been cool to see Viper start to get more love in the pro scene, but it doesn't change that we think there's an opportunity to improve her experience for the average player. We approach balance for pro and standard play pretty differently, and the changes we're investigating for Viper would be primarily focused on improving Viper's viability and overall experience in matchmaking.
https://playvalorant.com/en-us/news/dev/state-of-the-agents-dec-2020/
!! ETA on Viper updates?
Still further out. We've tested lots of changes but are trying to find the right ones that maintain Viper's identity (high commitment + high control) while pushing her into viability. We're not shipping anything too wild after this for a patch or two since masters will be going on regardless, so Viper changes will be at least a few more patches out, if not more. We are listening, but we don't want to rush larger scale agent changes like this!
So a smoker that can gain info like Sova/Cypher? That would be perfect for flex players.
Also no comments on duelists. I do hope they didnt mention it because we'll see some duelist tweaks next patch.
We're thinking about the relationship between duelists/initiators more, but nothing major at the role level in this next patch. Don't want to go too crazy before masters comes around.
I kinda hope he's a humanoid animal hybrid or something. We've got cypher as a robot, breach as an android hybrid, omen as a demon phantom, and a bunch of homo sapiens. Let's get freaky with it
Cypher's a guy from Morocco he's not a robot LOL
I don't blame yall for thinking this though since he covers up his face and uses a ton of gadgets and such
I'm waiting on another movement based agent like Jett and Raze
Passive: fully accurate while moving 😎
That's actually intentional, because they don't see her as a healer, and she's not labeled as a healer. She's a Sentinel, and her primary role is to stop & slow pushes, which she does an incredible job at. The healing is a nice bonus, but honestly, I never thought her heal was that important to her kit. Its the wall, slow orbs, and resurrection that really define her imo, and with just those abilities, she's already super strong. Think about this: she's the only character in the game that can place a barrier down or slow movement, literally no other character can do that. And yet people, at least in Beta, just chose her because she was a heal bot and healing is always good.
I actually like the fact that they nerfed her heal, because that helped to reinforce the fact that's she not a healer or a support, she's a Sentinel.
You hit a lot of points right on the head, great insight. Skye cannot heal herself, but instead actually has a much higher healing-per-round potential than Sage because she's an Initiator, who's meant to play with her teammates and help them break open areas. She's very supportive in that way and has less personal agency to capitalize off of her utility on her own, but has more team-wide utility and healing potential as a result.
Sage, on the other hand, has supportive capabilities with her heal and rez, but is also very self-sufficient at locking down sites on her own with her slow orbs and wall - she doesn't need allies to extract value from those abilities. She's also allowed to self-heal whereas Skye isn't, in part because she's a sentinel and is empowered to be more self-sufficient in order to lock down and control areas.
Healing is an output that both of these agents provide to a team, just like trade denial is an output that both Jett and Reyna provide to a t...
Read moreDid this go over everyone's head for over a year since the Beta? if so it kind of deserved a bigger place in the Patch notes because it's a pretty major change and pros on twitter are discussing this as well.
I'd have to defer to a designer on the balance team specifically for your first question - I work on the balance team, but I'm in insights, not design, so it's harder for me to say. We've been testing this change internally for awhile though and it was very much an intentional change to ship, that much I can confidently say.
I have started a discussion with the balance team on us being better at raising stuff like this in the patch notes themselves, though - this and the flash VFX changes were in the bugfixes section this time around, and could have probably used some more explanation around our philosophies behind them, similar to the "normal" balance changes we shipped (like the Rifle accuracy changes last patch). Hopefully y'all won't get surprised by meaningful bug fixes with no context like this in the future - we'll do better on explaining our thought process here.
Not 100% sure but I think the dart will only scan you if you’re inside the smoke with the dart
This is correct. These abilities don't completely negate the smoke, they just see the same way a player does inside the smoke (instead of the smoke completely blinding them). A sonar dart inside of a smoke will not reveal you if you are outside it, and vice versa, but if you are both inside of the smoke together, it can reveal you.
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I want to be more transparent than I am, but I'm afraid of setting the wrong expectations. What I will say is that we've playtested a ton of the buff ideas for Viper I've seen posted on the subreddit already - we didn't get them from the subreddit, I just see people pitch ideas we've tested already pretty often. All in all, it seems like a lot of us are on the same wavelength. It's all about tuning and finding the right mixture to keep her identity, not make her oppressive, and get her to be more powerful at the same time.
Must say, as a player who stopped playing my main game because a severe lack in communication. It's so awesome to see Riot presence in this sub. It's great to feel that my time spent on a game is being respected and to know that the devs are hearing us.
I appreciate it! All of us were players far before we were devs, and still are players for plenty of games in our free time. We won't be going anywhere anytime soon!
It’s about Riot hinting Viper buffs in the next patch only for it to take 2+ months instead of 2 weeks or even a month. They’ve done this multiple times. I would be completely fine if they gave a realistic release date but Viper seems like the only agent where they want to be EXTRA sure for some reason that Viper isn’t OP before releasing the changes and they end up postponing the buffs for the indefinite future.
I mean, they even buffed Jett’s smokes from like 4 seconds to 7 seconds (almost double!) and didn’t care for a long time that it made her an actual good controller along with being an amazing duelist. So clearly they aren’t as strict with agents crossing over into different roles as they want us to believe. It’s only with agents that they don’t care enough about that they preach that.
Sorry, I’m just a little frustrated as a Viper main. Some more transparency would be appreciated, especially if there’s gonna be more delays.
Hey, I'm going to paste what I posted in the patch thread here too for visibility:
I know we always say this, but we're just still iterating. We've playtested several versions of Viper buffs but are trying to tread the line between helping her into viability in solo queue, viability in compet play, and also maintaining her identity without homogenizing her compared to the other controllers.
It's actively being worked on, there are just lots of larger questions at play here, and we also have a big tournament coming up so we didn't want to ship something that would be potentially disruptive that we weren't absolutely confident in.
I totally understand the frustration - and, to be honest, that Jett change is not something we look back at fondly. We kneejerked there and reference it a lot as a learning opportunity for us as a team. We want to put out more changes than we can realistically support right now, with Viper being one of the ...
Read moreHey, thanks for the response. Sorry if I seemed ungrateful I just really want to see those Viper changes as soon as possible. Keep up the good work!
It's all good, nothing that you said in your comment was incorrect hah. We feel the same pain that y'all do on this front, we want to get that set up ASAP.
There's always some tournament going on. They need to hurry up and get them on a separate patch system and stop f**king with the other 99.999999999999999999% of the playerbase.
We're working on getting a separate patch line to help unlock this capability! Balance team feels you on this one, believe me
Juicy changes but no viper buffs oof
I know we always say this, but we're just still iterating. We've playtested several versions of Viper buffs but are trying to tread the line between helping her into viability in solo queue, viability in compet play, and also maintaining her identity without homogenizing her compared to the other controllers.
It's actively being worked on, there are just lots of larger questions at play here, and we also have a big tournament coming up so we didn't want to ship something that would be potentially disruptive that we weren't absolutely confident in.
Fixed issue with Omen’s Shrouded Step targeting that caused it to get stuck on corners at a much greater distance.
Hope this means they changed the hitbox back to what it was
Sorry this took us a few patches. The initial change was shipped to address some of the Omen/Sage glitches that could teleport Omen under the map, but the hitbox widening on corners was an unintentional side effect. Should be all cleared up now, though!
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