Valorant: State of the Agents, Meta, Balancing, and Roles

Patch 3.0 for Valorant this year made some big changes to the hugely popular Riot Games FPS game.

Because of this, the dev teams have been looking at any balancing issues and the current meta in Valorant.

Riot is always proactive with its content and seeks to keep its players happy, so this development is great for any adjustments that need to be made.

So, let’s take a look at what Riot Games have noticed with the current State of the Agents in Valorant with their balancing and meta.

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How does Riot approach Valorant agent balancing?

Before we go into the details of what Riot has noticed about Valorant agents, let’s look at what they analyse.

Valorant teams usually look at…

Winrate and Pickrate Data in Solo Queue

• They look at an Agent’s non-mirror winrate across multiple MMR tiers across different maps to get a high-level gauge of power. 
• Agent pick rate is split up. This establishes some understanding of what the differences and similarities are when it comes to numerically strong Agents and which Agents players are choosing to play.

Player Perception

• While they do check and value social media for Agent sentiment, a bulk of the Player Perception data they use for balance comes from what you all think!
• They send out countless surveys to players all across the world to understand how you are feeling about the game/Agents and understand those they feel are too strong, weak, frustrating, etc. in the current meta.

Pro Play

• They look closely at Pro Play pick rates and trends to understand what pro teams and players perceive as the most valuable Agents, comps and utility in the game in different contexts.

Our Design Principles

• Assessing how the Agents are fitting into the design principles the team holds. An Agent’s sharpness, meaning they have clearly defined strengths and weaknesses compared to their peers.

Key Agents meta

Riot has seen a bit of movement within the role diversity of certain Agents. Especially the initiator role.

This is especially true with the move from Sova to Fade being the more popular choice.

Chamber has also been a big talking point for the team as he barged his way into the most popular agent in 2022.

Despite big changes to the agent, more is scheduled to balance him in the competitive arena.

Player perception

Alexander Mistakidis spoke about balancing perception in this key information about the current state of the agents in Valorant.

Their key sentiment is how players view the balancing of agents in the game.

As the meta is a living culture which constantly shifts, this can change constantly.

Agent 21 updates

We now have even more official information about the new Agent 21 too.

The dev team spoke about the new agent and mentioned the lack of controllers in the game. So it is highly likely that this new agent will be a controller type.

“We’ve let this soak long enough, and Agent 21 is almost ready to go out. I don’t want to flood you with too much information in this blurb here, so I’ll hold off on saying much more.”

This quote seems to also confirm that the new agent will have some water-related abilities.

The message ended with

“Jald hi milte hain.”

Which translates to ‘See you Soon’ in Hindi.