Astra Rant

Have I lost my damn mind?
TLDR: Dissipate combos to solve the issue of less total utility, Astra has a super high tactical ceiling.

Looking at a couple different coaches SUPER early tier lists and some of them have Astra in the S tier while others have her in B/C, with the latter being the general community perception I hear as well. (yes ik Tier 1 Valorant next year will be played a likely a different patch so things could change). Ranking Astra that high really makes no sense as she was obviously weaker than Omen before, and while this patch took some of his power he is still easier to get value out of than Astra (big blind and tps vs super weak stun and suck). But then why is Astra rated over Omen in these tier lists if she also got nerfed? There could be some higher value especially on paper comparing Astra and Omen's ults, however the flexibility of the Omen ult is valuable as well. I think the answer is not in smoke cooldown times, full smoke instances, or even the supplementary utility. I think the answer will be in new creative util combos with the Dissipate feature (yes those tiny 1 second smokes).

Hold on let me cook here: 100 seconds in round with no plant and each Astra star goes on a 25* second (a little more with placement time) CD after you use it in a dissipate. This amounts to quite a few possible instances, 20 if you are testing in a custom and don't plant, reliably 10+ uses if you don't full use 2 stars in the first game phase/default or 6+ after using two stars. Obviously you won't use the maximum amount of dissipates possible, you need to actually smoke or even use one of those other horrible abilities. A foreseeable issue with this is the question of just how much value can you get from these 1 second smokes? I concede that these are pretty weak abilities, which is why I think an exceptional amount of coordination will be needed to get consistent value from util combos. Some of the use cases for the dissipate have been demonstrated by pros or Astra specialists in ranked such as caterpillar execs, dissipates to break scope angles, dissipates used to obscure the travel of other utility like drones or flashes, dissipates to cover dashes/gap close abilities, as well as more situational uses like fakes.

Some potential downsides to Astra/maybe these coaches are wrong:

1. As I said it takes a ton of coordination and prep to fully utilize the flexibility of her star cooldown
2. Her other two abilities are relatively weak with long CDs that burn a star
3. Her identity outside of her smokes duties is not as well formed as the other orb smokes: Omen has lots of flexibility to be aggressive and abuse verticality, Clove is not completely punished for aggression and has stream roll potential, Brimstone has stall/post plant denial with molly and ult. Astra is not subject to range restrictions? But neither is Omen really and on many maps Clove and Brim are fine as well. The one identifiable trait and possible advantage Astra has over the other orb smokers is an abundance of possible actions in a round by using dissipate.

So tell me have I lost my mind or does Astra have more layers than an onion?

allat can you tldr

Allat got overstimulated after the first sentence

I mean I've seen supposedly serious people claim omen is fucking dead which is literally insane so people really can say anything tbh

viper astra omen triple smokes meta

omen is still better in like 90% of cases, if they kept astras smoke cooldown how it was before the new patch then i could she her getting a lot more play but since they nerfed that too there isnt really a reason to play astra unless your also already running omen like on abyss where you can play both

i tried reading,
got lost
but i agree with the tldr

I'm really confuse about this analysis, I understand the "Less CD, mean dissipate is stronger", but I'm not sure of that I always thought the dissipate isn't that good, and they are really few map where dissipate can be useful because the dissipate timing is too sort

The main reason omen was picked over astra was the flash, now that flash is nerfed they are a lot closer. Also astra's nerfs don't really change how she is going to be played which is mainly for post plant and global support. I also think there will be synergy with veto's interceptor and astra's recall that can be used to entry, which people might be rating highly given veto looks pretty insane right now

She was always very good, and one of, the most technical agents in the game which is why she hasnt seen more play, and has the best NMWR parity with viper in existing metas. and the best NMWR matchup historically vs 2 initiator comps.

The reason we have seen "more" omen, is paranoia has always felt better to players to use and convert on because it just was more intuitive to paranoia then it was to set up an astra stun/dissipate to self act apon. The reason Astra is in S tier in so many tier lists is because in the world we are in where utility is reduced across the board, agents that inherently have more at base are usually better. Along with as you said, being able to dissipate/global placement/contact where CD's are mostly irrelevant becomes VERY good at handling problems teams will face on attack side.

Even in a world astra got hit with these changes on her own, her base playstyle did not change. Its no different then when viper's gas management added more complexities to it. There's a lot of missed perception with Omen, where his paranoia being both faster/shorter distance actually removes a lot of the key use he used to have on most maps. Retakes on C lotus for example are significantly worse with Omen now due to this paranoia change.

Teams will prob still play omen. The perception is always ease of use = best, but that isnt always the case when assessing competitive power. Its this same thought process that kept Yoru benched on teams in all of 2024, even though he vastly outperformed jett on every map, teams stuck with "ease of use" over adjusting.