Hey y'all!
Lemme talk a bit of what we think Raze is for, in a game like VALORANT.
Raze is spicy. Weirdly, she's also the very first agent (tied with Sage, I believe) for how long she's been in the game with this gameplay. Her abilities all do very high damage in a small-to-moderate area.
Initially, while everyone is getting used to the game, these will score quite a few kills. But the goal (and what we've seen in other testing, so far) is that this turns into rarely getting kills with the abilities, as players respond to the tools and into flushing players out of areas and gunning them down in disadvantageous gunfights. As the skill curve goes up, people shoot Gary more, they dodge clusters most of the time, and rush her when she throws a close range satchel pack with her weapon down - and the real impact becomes space control.
The high damage is meant to *threaten* you more than kill you, forcing you ro move positions into a disadvantaged engagement. For the small space it controls compared to something like Sova's dart, Breach's Flashpoint or Phoenix's curveball, we had to make it impossible to ignore so she could flush out predictable positions.
These abilities should still be used before or after engagements to control space, not used instead of guns in direct fights (my expectation is a player throwing a Cluster or rolling Gary directly *at* someone would get mowed down). This is part of the critical tactical loop we think is really sacred.
That all being said, I think there's some tuning we wanna watch. Back-to-back clusters might be a bit much, and things like aimpunch on the baby-nades, Ult cost of the Rocket and other numerics are totally on the table. Just wanted to clarify what Raze (and really damaging skills) are for in VALORANT.
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