Alex Gibson
Moving forward, Jett’s dash will operate via a double button press system; the first opens a 12-second window, while the second initiates the dash itself. The change is designed to make her ability less oppressive to play against, which up until now has acted as a get-out-of-jail-free card throughout each round.
Here’s the full overview from Riot:
TailwindOn 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 expires, but can still be regained with two kills.
Riot has explained that “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.” You can see a video of the new Tailwind system in action: Here’s a breakdown of the reasoning Riot has stated for Jett’s nerf:
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.
Patch 4.08 follows on from 4.07, which you can read about here if you aren’t up to speed with the changes. Since it only launched last week you can expect 4.08 to arrive next week with the launch of Valorant’s Act III of Episode 4.
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