I don't understand how people are calling these nerfs a good change when Riot is clearly trying to please pro players and ruin the experience for the entire player base. Instead of balancing a game that was already in a great-state for ranked and tweaking slected agents, they decided to destroy the entire eco-system players have come accustom to for 5 years. It would've been better if slowly rolled out the nerfs and not touch on agent utility themselves, apply a ridiculous cd time, and severly nerf ultimates of some agents.
Valorant is basically signaling that there is too much utility in the game, when there isn’t. Normally it’s very difficult to coordinate utility with randoms anyways, and a lot of the times people just throw default darts just to be shot out. The entire novelty of Valorant was that players could use abilities and play around them instead of just trying to out-aim enemies. But now, if players are having a bad day aim-wise, they can’t rely on util to swing out and have a higher chance of winning a duel.
For the foreseeable future, ranked is going to be a nightmare. With less utility, no one’s going to know what’s happening on the map. Attackers are incentivized to just rush a site instead of defaulting. Defending will be a nightmare too, since the agent cooldown times are so long. If you gather info, you don’t have retake util, but if you save it, you don’t have any information on the enemies. Holding site is also a lot harder now since before Cypher and Vyse were strong enough to be able to anchor sites and allow us to set up 3-4 people on the other sites. Also now without utility theres so much risk on both sides trying to take space, and it pretty much just comes down more gun-fights and aim.
Duelist players have just been indirectly buffed, since the core Duelists Raze Jett and Reyna have not been touched, and it’s much easier to hit a site now. Some agents were nerfed way too hard, like Cypher and Neon. Like did Riot even think it through? Smoke cooldown times shouldn’t have gone from 30 to 40 seconds. Smokes are a fundamental part of the game and don’t even contribute to the so-called “excessive utility” pro players are complaining about. Some ultimates like Vyse ultimate players can easily run out in 4.4 seconds. Breach ultimate nerf to 4 seconds means that by the time the team scales onto the site, the enemies would be un-stunned.
Can't comment on the weapons update but should be good.
Map updates are egregious as always. Instead of changing the map, devs just like to add random boxes and carve ins and think it's going to funamentally change how the map is going to be played. Like there's legit barely effort put into it. Noone of the maps have undergone changes where maybe the bombsites and the path leading to the bombsite have been completely changed.
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