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Viper - (Source: Valorant)
A few days ago, the Valorant community started noticing some changes to one of the playable characters, Viper. The character has been a popular pick in competitive tournaments due to how versatile Controller she is for the team.
After multiple balance changes, the character has seen many nerfs but is still very popular due to her utilities. During the recent VCT Masters Madrid, Viper had the highest pick rate than any other character, further telling us about her popularity in the pro scene.
Players recently saw that the character had a small Nerf, mostly due to her poison abilities like the wall and smoke orb. Comparing the character after patch 8.05, both abilities had their duration reduced. This led players to believe that the character has been silently nerfed by Riot without any information.
Riot responds to the rumours
With a community outcry for the secret Nerf, the official Valorant account on X (Twitter) clarified that there was no recent silent nerf, but the changes have been there since the 7.09 update. This update was released back in October 2023 and had some changes to other characters.
As per Riot Games, the changes to Viper were unintentional and were not meant to get out at that time. However, the developers themselves have admitted that the character is still very powerful, so they will be keeping the current changes.
As expected, the community was baffled that they were only realizing the changes just now. Not only these nerfs are from almost half a year ago, but despite that, the character had the highest pick rate in esports events.
“We’d never intentionally make balance changes without messaging. But since Viper has proven such a dominant force in the meta even with her smoke duration reduction, we will not be reverting the change before the next update,” they further added.
Riot did say these changes were meant for the 8.08 update, so players can expect further tweaks. Especially now when the devs are aware of how powerful the character still is.