VALORANT’s newest character might be its most exciting, and judging by the amount of grousing online, also its most broken. Welcome to the Raze experience, which looks like VALORANT’s first balancing headache.
Raze, the graffiti artist and demolitions savant, is extremely fun to watch. Her abilities are loud, colorful, and have a quirky personality all their own.
The Boom Bot is easily the funniest ability in the game. It’s a small, puttering robot that bounces off surfaces on a timer, only to home in on any enemies it spots and blow up in their face. It took approximately three seconds before streamers began calling it “roomba” in their callouts.
Her ultimate, a rocket launcher called Showstopper, has multi-kill potential every single time it’s used. Her Paint Shell cluster grenade can deal out big splash damage, while her Blast Packs even give her interesting movement options since she can use them to boost up and over boxes, enemy abilities, and anything else in her way. All rolled into one, Raze is a highlight reel waiting to happen. And in a game like VALORANT, that might be a bit of a problem.
Riot has been clear on what it sees VALORANT as. It’s a tactical shooter with hero abilities. Yes, those abilities change the meaning of what “tactical shooter” actually means, but for the most part, the baseline of success in the game is how well you can aim and how you coordinate with your teammates while shooting a gun. The agent abilities, then, should be thought about as utilities and the goal of team compositions should be to pick heroes whose abilities can play off each other well.
To drive that point home, VALORANT’s agents are all given classes. Sentinels have abilities that make defending and controlling the flow of the game easy, Initiators have strong utilities for gathering information and pushing forward, Controllers tend to use their utility to block sightlines and mask movement, and Duelists have classic lone wolf abilities that make them good in one-vs-one situations, if not capable of hitting an ace at any given moment. None of these classes determine how you must play an agent, per se, they just give you an idea of what a character might be good at.
Raze is a Duelist, so it makes sense that her abilities make her a high-damage dealing character that can clutch a round all by herself. But compared to the other Duelists in the game (Jett and Phoenix), Raze stands out because, well, all of her abilities seem to be able to kill you with a low risk to the player and a low skill floor to using the abilities as well. Jett, whose kit is almost all movement-based, still has to be able to click heads, either with her gun or her Blade Storm ult. Phoenix has a bit more utility that can damage others and an ult that grants him a second life, but again, he still has to be able to shoot people accurately.
Raze? Raze blows you up. Raze blows you up with her ultimate. Raze blows you up with her paint shells. Raze blows you up with her roomba. Raze can even blow you up with her Blast Packs, which don’t damage her and only give her more movement options (not unlike a certain psychotic Australian demolitions expert in Overwatch). Literally every single thing in Raze’s kit has the potential to kill you just by being tossed in your general direction. The Boom Bot even gives her a strong tool that can be used to gain information on where enemy agents are set up without actually peeking around corners and into rooms, thanks to the Bot’s ability to bounce off of walls at predictable angles. Whether the Bot actually finds someone and blows them up or an enemy shoots the Bot before it can get to them, it still gives Raze Initiator-esque information on where enemies might be hiding.
None of this is to say that Raze requires no skill. Players who master the movement options afforded by the Blast Pack, in particular, can gain the ability to move places on the map quickly, unexpectedly, and with their gun already out when they land, unlike Jett’s Tailwind and Updraft abilities or Omen’s From the Shadows teleportation ultimate. XQc showed off as much when he triple-jumped over an enemy Sage’s Slow Orb and turned around 180 degrees to spray down the hiding Sage as he landed.
But the character design philosophy at work with Raze seems to go against all of the other agent’s abilities. Sure, a few characters have ultimates with multi-kill potential that don’t rely on aim, like Sova and Brimstone. But those ultimates are easier to dodge than Raze’s and no one else has a kit that seems so deadly across the board like Raze’s does. Most character voice lines announcing an enemy player has used their ultimate usually lead to players methodically outmaneuvering the ult. But when you hear the enemy Raze bring out the Showstopper, you just run.
While it seems Raze might be in line for a nerf before the game officially launches this summer, Riot also needs to be mindful of the fact that all of Raze’s abilities are incredibly fun to use and exciting to watch, if not so much to play against. As much as former Counter-Strike players might complain about a Quake character being in the game, they’re not playing CS anymore. And, a few days into the game’s developing meta, everyone has to admit that no one really knows anything when it comes to the game, at least yet. As players understand abilities and gain more map knowledge, Raze might wind up being in a completely fine place within the meta—or at least just a strong-but-not-broken one.
Ultimately, the question of Raze rests with Riot and what type of game it wants VALORANT to be. Does it want to fully lean into being a hardcore tactical shooter, rewarding technical skill? Raze needs a nerf. Does Riot want to separate itself more fully from CS and explore what an ability-centric tactical shooter looks like? Maybe she stays the same. Either way, for Raze to retain what makes her special and exciting as an agent, she still needs to be able to blow you up.
Just maybe not with every single ability she has.
