Riot Games unleashed a new patch for VALORANT yesterday that made some changes to its heroes, including some balance adjustments for Raze and Sage—and Summit1g, for one, seems to be more or less happy with the decisions.
In a conversation with Ninja on stream yesterday, the two streamers went over the changes. After reading through everything, Summit said that he believes “all their patch notes are really good.”
Both Sage and Raze have been regularly talked about by streamers for being outstandingly powerful because of their abilities, with some streamers getting frustrated or calling them overpowered at times.
One of the abilities that made Raze frustrating to play against was her Paint Shells grenade. As a way to tone down the influence that the ability can have, Riot made it so that players can only use one grenade per round, instead of two.
You can get a grenade back by killing enemies, however—similar to the way Phoenix’s Hothands works. The change pleased both content creators.
“She basically got toned down to what the other Agents were like, you know what I mean,” Summit said.
At the same time, Riot made some adjustments to Sage’s ability to slow down players. In the first couple of weeks after VALORANT’s beta launch, players realized that by jumping while in Sage’s Slow Orb ability, they couldn’t avoid being slowed.
Because the ability also served as a sort of tripwire that alerted Sage whenever someone went through it, players didn’t really care if jumping gave away any sort of information about where they were.
In yesterday’s patch, Riot tried to use a little bit of give and take on both sides of the Sage Slow Orb equation to help balance things out. In addition to getting rid of players’ ability to quickly hop through a Slow Orb, Riot made it so that Sage no longer knows when someone has gone through the Orb, reducing the extra information she can obtain with the ability.
“The no bunny hop is a good trade for it not making noise,” Summit said.
With 212 hours of live VALORANT streaming since the game’s beta launch earlier this month, Summit might be one of the most well-equipped influencers to dish out opinions about Riot’s attempts to balance the game. While there’s a long way to go before the game officially releases later this year, it seems like he sees this patch as a positive step forward.
