Valorant 4.08 Patch Notes (Dash Changes)

JETT POWERED

It’s crazy to think of how perception of Jett’s power has evolved from once being considered one of the weakest Agents in Beta to becoming a mainstay in most compositions. The team’s always loved what Jett brings to the roster: breaking through defenses on executions and making highlight plays with impressive mechanical skills. But some of her other impacts on the game have pushed beyond VALORANT’s core tactical cycle in worrisome ways.

In 4.08, we’ll be making an update to Jett’s Tailwind to address this concern:

• Tailwind
  • On pressing the ability key, after a short delay Jett activates a 12 second window where she is empowered to immediately dash on next button press.
  • Her Tailwind charge is lost whether she Dash’s or the window expire, but can still be regained with two kills.

With this update, we want to bring Jett back into that core loop by asking her to call her shots and then engage with a window of dash power to make those trademark explosive plays. This should create clear signals for other players to consider and understand that Jett made a deliberate call. Jett’s new dash will require an adjustment for players but we feel this is the best solution to balance maintaining Jett’s identity while increasing game health.

We developed and tested dozens of prototypes for Jett’s dash, but they came up short. Some of them avoided having to press the dash ability button twice, but ended up being less intuitive for players despite that. Some of them felt better for Jett players, but didn’t give us confidence that it solved the game health issues we set out to fix.

As players have mastered Jett, her dash has proved unhealthy to the tac cycle in a number of ways that we think are critical enough to address.

Here are the key issues we found with Jett’s dash:

• The dash had no prerequisite, so she always had access to her escape power with no intentional decision making. This freedom gave Jett the unintended capacity to continually take space or hold unusual ground without having to commit her ability. This play pattern is something that no other Agent could match, and allows Jett to exert an extreme amount of pressure on a match in a way that can be oppressive, especially at high MMRs or in professional play.
• This lack of intentional decision making made it feel like she played outside of the tactical cycle all our other Agents adhere to. Too often, she didn’t have to leverage game sense that other Agents needed to succeed, because her reactive dash could often negate her own strategic mistakes, or the great tactical calls by her opponents.
• As we talked about in the Controller Deep Dive, one of our core design philosophies is that Agents are sharp and provide both clear upsides and opportunity costs when compared to their peers. Jett’s strength as both a dash-in executor on attack and holding angles with an Op—with unrestricted access to escape—provided her broad power with little downside. We want her to retain as much aggressive power on offense as possible, but reduce her defensive Op power.
• Even in highly coordinated play, she’s proven very difficult to strategize against, and her access to an instant escape (not to mention two on demand smoke screens) marginalized most of the tools the rest of the Agents have to deal with her.

Overall, we want Jett to have her power moments and to be able to dash, but we also want viable counterplay and for Jett players to be more thoughtful when using their abilities.