Valorant: Skye and Astra changes in the works following their fall in popularity

Valorant has 15 agents and all new players have access to five agents by default.

New agents like Astra, Skye, and Yoru are the least played in Valorant. Riot Games is well aware of this fact. Hence, they plan to make changes to their upcoming patches if the popularity of these agents falls further.

People prefer playing with Jett, Omen, and Sage as they are easy to grasp and the abilities are simple. Astra is an overly complicated agent, and people tend to get confused while using it in Valorant.

According to new statistical reports, in Unrated and Ranked matches, Skye, Yoru, and Astra are among the lowest played agents in Valorant.

Since receiving the 2.06 patch update, Yoru has gone through many notable changes, from flash time reduction to gate crash ability changes. It still sits at the bottom of the tier list. The entire kit was reconditioned for the Japanese duelist.

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The possible changes that could be

coming to Skye & Astra in the next Valorant act

Riot developer Coleman "Altombre" Palm recently commented on a Reddit post about Skye and Astra. He said,

“Brimstone's winrate is actually higher than Viper's across all MMR, with the exception of high elo (like, top 2%+), where Viper wins out. Good theory, just less focused on "Brim is better in low elos" and more like "Viper is good in the super high elos". It's also super close - I'd suspect Viper will probably overtake Brim in a patch or two as players master her kit even more."

He further added that,

"Regarding Skye and Astra - I can give my take, but the best person to ask would be the head of the agent team, Riot MEMEMEMEME. For purely my opinion - Skye is inherently a very supportive agent who relies on teammates to extract a lot of value from her abilities, and Astra is a big-brain agent that scales on coordination, game knowledge, and creativity, so we've always expected them to be on the more niche end for agent picks - that's okay. We're always thinking about if there are ways to improve the experiences that we have on live, though, so that doesn't mean we wouldn't explore tweaking aspects of them in the future if we think it'd make them healthier or more fun to play.”

While it was only Altombre’s opinion, the sentiment has resonated with Valorant players. He added that if they made changes to Skye and Astra, they,

“Probably wouldn’t be purely balance-driven." We also consider our design goals for the character and what type of experience we want to foster.”

This could involve simplifying their kit with quality of life changes to tempt more casual players, rather than just altering the raw numbers in Valorant.

With Episode2 Act 3, hopefully, the community will get to see some changes if the Astra and Skye trends continue. People are eagerly waiting for the developers to shed some light on the upcoming updates in Valorant.