Anyone who’s been fortunate enough to land a beta key code for Valorant has probably been enjoying the hell out of the game. It has been received very positively by both fans of Riot Games and those looking to switch things up from Counter-Strike every once in a while. Yet if you are one of the lucky ones you’ll probably have come into contact with Raze, an Agent in Valorant that’s very clearly a lot more powerful than her peers. See, while every other Agent in the game can only kill an enemy with their equipped firearms, their abilities relegated to purely tactical advantages, Raze’s rockets and grenades can decimate the enemy. Which has certainly made her more than a little frustrating to play against. Apparently Riot is listening to their players and in an interview has confirmed that they’re looking into the problem.
Speaking to Polygon, Valorant’s lead game designer Trevor Romleski, explained that Raze has garnered so much criticism because her abilities are far more high-profile than the other characters. Comparing Raze to Cypher, Romleski said:
When an opponent is playing a particularly good game as Cypher, you may not notice how often you’re getting trapped or being spotted on cameras, even though those moments can be the difference between winning and losing a round…But when Raze is super high-impact and powerful, she’s just killing a bunch of people. So it’s definitely more impactful and more obvious when balance is off with someone like Raze.
So while Riot is looking into possibly reducing the damage of Raze’s kit they’ll also be finding ways to make her abilities more clear to players. “If you look at something like Brimstone’s Ultimate or Sova’s Ultimate,” Romleski said, “those both can be lethal as well.
But you get the right set of cues and information provided to you to plan around those abilities and react to them in the moment…For someone like Raze, those abilities are faster, and if you’re not responding very quickly, [they] can be a lot more punishing.
So it looks like Raze players will have to make some adjustments to their playstyles in future. When in the future? Well, we don’t actually know yet. There’s no specific date for when the patch will be released and considering Riot is still looking into how to implement changes to the game it might be a little longer than you expect. So I guess enjoy those grenade kills while you can!
Last Updated: April 21, 2020
