with all due respect, the valorant balance team has to genuinely be some of the worst to ever do it when it comes to agent balance ngl it’s almost impossible to even try to understand some of their decisions. what pisses me off most is that they will OFTEN go back and essentially break their initial philosophies on a character instead of tackling the actual issues at hand
for example: when waylay came out, she had very slow pullout time on her dash because it would be too broken if she had fast pullout. Their solution? give her fast pullout time on dash.
same with neon. slow pullout on slide when she was released for very clear reasons of things like shotguns being too broken. their solution? fast pullout time that made her broken and unfun to interact against 90% of the time.
and obviously it’s not like you can just nail a perfectly balanced agent on release, so changes are expected, but man it’s like at a certain point they just send a guy in a room that doesn’t really play the game to just deal with whatever character the community is complaining about
what gets me most is that their final solution has been to almost always kill a characters identity instead of applying real, meaningful changes. does their balance philosophy change over time? or do they lose sight of it? I have no idea, but hearing from top players that slide+ judge is still very strong is the cherry on top for this one
anyway thank god for deadlock rn otherwise I’d be trippin out daily over this change
Nah Burger Jokes aside tho, I genuinely wonder if @VALORANT ever thought about asking pros / creators who main specific agents for thousands of hours about their own opinions before Buffing / Nerfing? Like i‘m sure we could find a strong Middle ground for Neon and many more Agents…
Like I might be not speaking for everyone here, but if i was a Neon main and they literally hard nerfed her like this… i‘d genuinely lose my will to create content on the agent…
They actually killed Neon movement with this update its so sad. Her core mechanics should not have been touched at all it feels awful to play her now its so slow. Her entire identity as an agent has been destroyed and it feels like a very rushed/quick fix to make the community stop complaining about Neon. I understand that Neon did need a nerf but this was overkill. Not only was her in-air movement nerfed you don't even get a refresh on your fuel with kills. All of these nerfs with no re-work or adding utility back i.e slide/stun. Furthermore, Sentinels are getting a buff which would fix most of the problems with Neon. Also other duelists getting nerfed like Yoru/Waylay made her pickrate go up and made her look like a bigger problem. Instead of nerfing her movement speed, its already a good balance not getting your fuel back on kills. That was the main issue in my opinion. I would also prefer to go back to pre-buff neon slide if it meant I could keep the air-speed. Neons slide is what people complain about the most when it comes to her utility. The shotguns are also still not nerfed enough with Neon. An easy improvement would be to make the pullout time after sliding the same as operator so you can't instantly shoot mid slide. Her slide is still very good post-nerf and so is her ult. I'd like to see a nerf to her ult to balance out her kit more and that would make adding her air-speed back make more sense. I know it's hard to balance agents in VALORANT especially Neon. I just hope that we could find a good balance that isn't just cutting her legs off.