Largely absent in professional play, Yoru and Viper may see a comeback with assistance from the most recent patch.
Though VALORANT has firmly combatted the issue of mirror matchups that character-based shooters commonly face, some Agents have still largely been left out of pro play. Patch 2.06 stands to improve composition diversity by buffing these absent agents. Coming just before Stage 2 Challengers, this patch may have serious ramifications on most team’s compositions.
Yoru and Viper buffed
In Masters events across North America, Europe, and South Korea, Yoru had a 0% pick rate while Viper averaged a miniscule 6.3% pick rate. These low pick rates result from the presence of much better alternatives, the most recent patch however may change this.
Viper’s Toxin passive was significantly upgraded, as now enemies in the area of effect of Poison Cloud, Toxin Screen, and Viper Pit will be hit with a crippling decay effect. Immediately facing a 50 decay on health and shields, health regeneration upon leaving the AoE was decreased to 1.5 seconds in order to balance this. In addition, Poison Cloud can be deployed immediately after pick with pick up range and Snake Bite equip time seeing decreases.
This will incredibly improve Viper’s ability to lock down points given the extreme damage buffs and relatively untouched wide utility range. While still unable to provide much information like Killjoy, Viper may prove to be most useful on attacker side.
With a mixture of flash and mobile utility, Yoru has always had the potential to be an incredibly useful duelist with a unique kit though has failed to break into the meta. Blindside’s flash duration increase to 1.5 seconds and decreased activation time (0.6 seconds) could make Yoru’s utility far more viable. Gatecrash also now resets on a 35s cooldown with a decreased activation time of 0.6s, which is now also usable during Yoru’s Dimensional Drift ult which has been moved from 7 to 6 ult points. Overall, these changes make Yoru a far less selfish and resource dependent Agent that has the potential to replace duelists like Reina.
Bucky finally gets nerfed
Absolutely dominating econ rounds, the Bucky has been under constant criticism regarding its obvious close range benefits and immensely useful alternate fire. To tackle this, Patch 2.06 has reduced the overall amount of pellets in the alt fire mode with a simultaneous nerf to damage per pellet. Bullet spread on both firing modes has also decreased, downgrading from 3.4 to 2.6 on primary fire and 3.4 to 2.0 on secondary fire mode.
Overall, this may reduce the amount of Bucky plays we see in competitive and pave the way for greater weapon diversity.
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