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So our gun is instantly out now? Can flash for ourselves?
So our gun is instantly out now? Can flash for ourselves?
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.
Look at how they massacred my girl
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.
Great, 2 nerfs for Yoru and 0 buffs, not even a note saying they are looking for a way to buff his footsteps. Just delete him already.
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.
Surprised they didn't touch the Guardian, would've thought it'd get a price decrease too
Its price IS actually decreased this patch, we just missed it in the notes. Following up on that now…
I appreciate your proactive response! It will be interesting to see how she performs in the context of all these gameplay tweaks
(Using this as an excuse to finally give Skye a shot because her changes are intriguing)
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!
Really confused, is the guardian price being changed to 2250? I don't see it in the patch notes but in custom/range it is 2250
yea its changed! My fault, I forgot to add it to the notes, 2400 >>> 2250 is correct
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.
"Bending the bird" will now be my go-to expression for basically everything.
The CD changes to Killjoy only revert her back to where she was before she had to remain in range of her turret and alarmbot, but I'm personally very concerned about the CD changes across the board, or rather the utility nerf across the board. I don't know what direction you guys are planning to move in in the near future but a big part of why people are playing Valorant over CS:GO is the abilities. Even discounting the feelings of random players, the utility and economy nerfs are likely also going to result in more save/eco rounds in pro play, which is way worse for the viewing experience. Pro Valorant up to this point has been (in my opinion) much more engaging to watch than Pro CS because unlike CS, where the economy is brutally expensive and so you will often see when a single CT drops while anchoring a site the remaining 4 just give up the round not even one minute in and save on the other side of the map, Valorant allows for the spike to be planted constantly and the defenders will still stage retakes, resulting in explosive and immensely entertaining highlight moments. Retakestrike is 100x better to watch than Savestrike. As far as I can tell this patch threatens that. Players will have one smoke/flash/whatever on pistol. Conversion will be a full save with classics so everyone can kit out on next buy. In pro play we might sometimes see the attackers save if they lose even one player early because they were already short on util.
I'm just some random on reddit and I'm not even immortal or anything, but I just felt the need to put in my two cents and say that this is possibly my least favorite patch going by what I've read in the notes. I am 100% behind some of the gameplay changes like accuracy while moving and the Judge nerf but the economy and ability changes make the patch feel like this is a step away from the tactical potential that makes this game unique and a move towards Pure Gunplay Deathmatch. I sincerely hope I'm wrong and that this is a healthy change for the game.
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 is part of what makes Valorant special.
Where is volume slider fix? Guys come on..
Unfortunately this isn't a gameplay thing, so I have no visibility on progress here. I can only speak to gameplay changes :(
Its price IS actually decreased this patch, we just missed it in the notes. Following up on that now…
Now the patch notes say
GUARDIAN Price increased from 2250 >>> 2400
Oh man. Going to reach out to our editor now, it's the other way around. Guardian costs 2250 now!
Another thought process would be instead of nerfing KJ to match Cypher, thoughts on buffing Cypher instead? His cages used to slow down enemies on contact, might be worth reintroducing to see how it plays out with the current agent pool?
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
As a Viper player, I can attest to the fact that I buy full util on round one and nothing else to save as much money in early game as possible. Util is dead cheap in this game except for a few agents. The slight uptick in costs is probably warranted, since full util is pretty common these days for every round. The weapon cost decreases should help mitigate this, as well as drive interest towards other weapons.
That said, as a Viper main, I do have a question, Rito Altombre. The notes say that Viper’s Snakebite is losing 1.5 seconds of duration (which I support since I don’t like Viper’s boring postplant meta), but I do have to ask: Does this duration nerf impact the damage of Snakebite, or does the Snakebite simply do its damage faster to compensate?
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.