Tactics-based team shooter Valorant finally listened to fan requests and made some changes to Sentinel Agent, Chamber of Commerce.
Secret Service designers Kevin Meier and Jay Watford discuss each of the Chamber’s changes, and exactly why they’re making them via press release. “We know you’ve been asking for an update from Chamber after seeing him dominate your ranked games, your pro games, and even your nightmares.”
The duo continued, “We wanted to strike the right balance between preserving his character identity and maintaining Valorant’s in-game health.” Chamber has been the go-to pick since his release as a Sentinel agent with powerful offensive abilities, which means Chamber players Easily hold your ground and dominate a round or entire match.
While discussing and testing ways the team could change Chamber, they found that “his current mechanics are shap ing the playspace in an unhealthy way, encroaching on other Agents’ identities, and breaking Valorant’s core tactical style.”
That is, patch 5.12, Premieres Tuesday (November 6)will see Chambers’ identity strengthened, while also “reducing his sphere of influence and introducing more countermeasures for opponents.”
Without further ado, here’s the difference your beloved Sentinel carry can make in just a few days:
Headhunter (Q)
- The stability curve has been updated, me aning that the spread increases when the skill is spread after the second bullet. As a result, this reduces low precision body shot spam.
Rendezvous (E)
- The room can now only place one anchor, but the radius has been increased from 15m to 26m.
- The teleport activation height restriction has been removed, meaning you can teleport to anchors of varying verticality as long as you are within 26 meters.
- After teleporting, weapon equip time increased from 0.4 seconds to 0.7 seconds, excluding headhunter skills.
- If the Rendezvous Anchor is destroyed, it will be disabled for the remainder of the round instead of being on cooldown.
- Chamber of Secrets has no additional cooldown when recalling the anchor after teleporting.
Trademark (C)
- Chamber’s trap is now range-bound, so it deactivates when Chamber goes out of range, and reactivates when he’s in range.
- Traps can now also be recalled mid-stream, and don’t require line of sight.
- There is a 30 second cooldown after the trap is recalled.
- Initial arming time increased from 2 seconds to 4 seconds, health increased from 1 to 20.
Tower of Strength (X)
- Chamber’s ultimate rate of fire is now reduced by 57.5%.
slow down
Chamber’s slowing ability works with his trademark trap ability, as well as his ultimate Tour De Force.
- Slow reduced from 50% to 40%, duration reduced from 6 seconds to 4 seconds.
- The size of the slowdown has also been reduced by 30%.
At first blush, this seems like a pretty big nerf to Chamber, and one that would make a lot of Chamber’s main players unimpressed. However, there are reasons behind these changes.
The goal of this update is to “achieve a clear balance between his first-angle power and counter-attack approach”, while pushing “more thoughtful ideas into the setup”. So, Chamber is arguably still a strong agent, but those who play him will have to think more carefully about their strategy.
Ultimately, he’s still a very strong agent at long range, but things get a lot more difficult and risky in close games. That said, Valorant’s team says, “we’re always ready to make adjustments.”
How do you think these changes will affect competitive play? Will we end up seeing fewer players pick Chamber? I’m not so sure, but I’m glad the Viper isn’t affected, at least. For more on Valorant, check out Secretlab’s newest Valorant-themed chair to help my posture, and Valorant likely coming to consoles soon.
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