In response to the massive adjustments made to two of the most contended agents, Jett and Skye, pros have come to share what they think of these changes in patch 3.06.
Riot posted in the official Valorant website a rundown on the patch and the big changes it brought to the two agents who have shown to have dominant performances in both solo queue and the pro scene.
Among the agents to be hit with the changes was Skye. After her rework over a while ago, she has slowly risen to the top of the tier list with a win rate of 48.4% in Valorbuff as well as being in the top 3 agents picked during the recent Valorant Masters Tournament in Berlin with a rate of 73.5%.
According to Riot’s official notes, they have felt that her role as an initiator has been overshadowed by her ability to selfishly capitalize on her own flashes thus resulting in the state of being played more often as a semi-duelist. As such, Riot went to give a higher unequip and windup time on Guiding Light in the hopes of emphasizing a supportive playstyle around her teammates. The increased windup time of her flash served as a way to give opponents more ways to play around them without removing too much of its power. Riot also commented on the immense power that her ultimate ability, Seekers, provides in a round thus warranting an increased cost to it.
“The increased activation time aims to give prepared enemies a slightly larger window to react, without trivializing her main Initiator tool. Also, we’ve seen both the frequency of Skye’s ult and its effectiveness increase as players have become more skilled with the Agent. Looking at the recon and impact it can provide, it now seems more appropriate amongst the ults that cost seven points.”
The second agent to receive the listed changes was Jett, who has been a staple agent for almost all competitive matches. Jett’s dominance was attributed to her high records of pick rates of around 50 – 60% in previous patches for solo queue and has always remained as a solid duelist pick in tournaments. To prevent any drastic alteration to her power level, Riot’s changes to Jett were then carefully centered around her basic ability, Cloudburst, and her ultimate ability, Bladestorm.
“Simply put, these changes are about getting the most out of Blade Storm’s primary fire and creating matching damage rules for the alternate fire. In the same vein, there is one less smoke to work with, so choose wisely.” Riot explained in their notes.
The adjustments were specifically targeted to the parts that gave her relative safety and abusable mechanics in her kit. They decreased charges on her Cloudburst as they had felt, “one too many smokes, and it’s contributed to a sense that she could get away with using them at any time, have more to spare, or spam them without much thought.” Secondly, they have removed the reset on kill feature in the alternate fire of Bladestorm as Riot intended to incentivize players to use the primary fire more instead.
“We hope Jett mains will optimize for the single kunai kills in order to keep the Bladestorm going and really play into the high precision fantasy Jett is all about.” Riot added.
These changes were met with the most vocal feedback from the player base. The reaction of the community to these changes ranged from frustration to indifference.
A number of Jett mains spoke forward with their reactions on social media, particularly on Twitter, about the changes to their beloved character. Stefan from KDM tweeted, “Are you kidding me @PlayVALORANT? While u are perfectly fine with most broken agents eg. Killjoy, Breach and Skye, you are nerfing Jett for no reason? Like cmon hopefully u will see ur mistake cuz it’s soooo retarded to nerf Jett like this, you are basically making her unplayable.”
While other reactions to the changes ran the opposite direction, with Team Secret’s Dubstep who jokingly tweeted, “Nice try @PlayVALORANT still playing Jett”, and TSM FTX Matt “Wardell” Yu also poked fun with his tweet, “my right-click never worked anyways.” Team Secret’s Witz even went on saying “oh noes 1 tap knives incoming” in response to the changes.
FPX’s ANGE1 shared his thoughts on the matter via tweet, “This Jett nerf looks weird. Those skills arent why shes OP. I think all the players need to create a petition or something to only change dash mechanics so Jett can dash only towards direction she looks at and we are gucci.”
The 3.06 patch is currently live since launching last Tuesday on September 21 and for more details, the official patch notes are available on the official Valorant website.
