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Lead agent designer, Jay Watford, and game designer, Kevin Meier from Riot Games to to a blog post today to discuss an incoming update for Valoront. Titled as patch 5.12, players will be receiving a slew of changes coming to agent Chamber.
The blogpost goes into detail discussing trying to find the perfect balance between Chamber’s hero identities while trying to make him play without so many advantages. It seems that players are starting to take advantage of his playstyle and its causing some issues in the community. This is Chamber’s second nerf so the balance is still trying to be figured out at Riot Games. They don’t want to compromise Chamber as a hero, but want him to remain true so other players don’t feel like they are been cheated. Patch 5.12 hopes to fix the communities issues with a significant amount of changes.
The patch is set to release next week and it will hopefully help ease the situation. Chamber’s headhunter ability has been nerfed, his teleportation skill has changed, and general attritrbrutes as been lowered to keep the character in balance. Hopefully Riot Games have found that sweet spot for Chamber, but we won’t truly find out until the patch is live and the community reacts to all the nerfed changes.
Check out the full set of changes coming to Chamber down below:
CHAMBER CHANGES
In Patch 5.12, we’ll be making a number of changes to address these concerns. With this update, we want to sharpen Chamber’s identity as a precision-focused Sentinel that puts his body on the line to hold areas, while significantly reducing his sphere of influence and introducing more counterplay for opponents.
Headhunter (Q)
- Updated Stability Curve
- Spread increased after 2nd bullet, when spamming. This is explicitly meant to reduce low-precision body-shot spam as an effective combat measure.
Rendezvous (E)
- Chamber now places a single anchor that can be teleported to while inside its range
- Radius increased 7.5m >>> 13m
- Removed teleport activation height restriction
- You can teleport to the Anchor while on different verticality so long as you are within its radius.
- Increased weapon equip time after teleporting 0.4s >>> 0.7s
- Headhunter is unaffected by this change
- Destroying Rendezvous teleport anchor now disables it for the remainder of the round, instead of being placed on a cooldown.
- Chamber no longer incurs an additional cooldown when recalling his Anchor after teleporting.
Trademark (C)
- The trap is now range restricted
- Trademark will disable when Chamber moves out of range, and reactivate once he is inside.
- Can now be recalled mid-round
- Does not require line of sight
- 30s cooldown on recall
- Destruction remains permanent
- Initial Arm Time increased 2s >> 4s
- Health Increased 1 >> 20
Tour De Force (X)
- Fire rate decreased by 57.5%
Slow
- This applies to both Trademark and Tour De Force
- Reduced duration 6s >> 4s
Similar to our approach with Jett’s tailwind updates, we believe there is a healthy way for combat escapes to exist in VALORANT’s gameplay ecosystem, as long as they are counterbalanced to offset their strength.
OUR GOALS
There were a number of goals we established when looking at Chamber, but two largely stuck out:
- Strike an appreciable balance between his first angle power and counterplay avenues
- Drive more deliberate thought into setup
“Counterplay” and “Deliberate” are foundational principles to VALORANT Agent design that the team discusses quite often. Chamber’s mechanics took the place of counterplay in many cases, and the small number of restrictions on his abilities meant he was not required to be deliberate in thinking about setup. This made Chamber deadly at any angle.
Here are a few examples of how these changes have shifted Chamber in testing:
- The distance traveled when teleporting has been greatly reduced. This gives opponents more precise information about Chambers’ new location, and puts him at greater risk of getting closed in. Chamber will still excel at longer angles where opponents cannot close the gap quick enough without the appropriate tools, but holding shorter angles comes at a much higher risk for him.
- The long distance of Chamber’s teleport also provided strong rotational power that infringed on other Agents’ core strengths. This makes gaining information about Chamber’s location more beneficial because his rotation from one site to another across the map will be slower. More so if he elected to hold an aggressive angle.
- Range restricting Trademark allows opponents to deduce where Chamber could be playing based on Trademark status. This information can be used to better plan site hits or identify which angles are more important to break. Flank watch is meant to be a strength of Cypher, not a standard across all Sentinels. This should more sharply define the Sentinel space and Cypher and Chamber’s strength profiles within it.
- Chamber requires more deliberate setup and decision making, balancing his first angle location and trap placement. Chambers who elect to lurk or push for more information will have to balance that against Trademark value in the current game state. With this version, Chamber should have to make a call between playing aggressive first angles with less safety, or playing back and anchoring a site.
- Managing anchor placement has become less burdensome in this version, reducing the time spent planning mid-round teleports, thus creating a smoother gameplay flow.
WHY THIS APPROACH?
Agent abilities have varying degrees of impact on each part of the tactical cycle, but should be sharp in their delivery and offer compromises (to/for) the enemies’ advantage. This is key to ensuring the tactical promise of VALORANT, keeps design space open, and curbs potential power creep as new Agents try to compete against powerful outputs.
Our approach was built around retaining Chamber’s combat strength and fantasy, while narrowing the span of his impact across any given map. Giving opponents more agency to outwit or outplay, and giving Chamber players a deliberate mastery curve. Players who invest the time should still find success as they learn how these new mechanics excel or fail across maps, locations, and play styles.
In related Valorant news, there is rumors circulating that the hit shooter title might be making its way to consoles soon. There has been some job postings at Riot that have us believing that the epic hero first-person-shooter title is coming our way. However, take the news as a grain of salt as there is no hard confirmation if it will or not. Learn more about the speculation rumors for Valorant coming to consoles right here!
Valorant is currently available to download for free on PC. How do you feel about the sudden changes coming for Chamber? Let us know your thoughts down below!
