Riot developers were open in today’s patch notes about the effectiveness or lack thereof, machine guns have in VALORANT relative to how many credits they cost.
Admitting that they don’t do as well as other weapons relative to their price, Riot has given some buffs to the Ares and Odin machine guns and even reduced the cost of the Ares to 1,600 credits, down from 1,700.
The primary change with both machine guns in today’s patch is a reduction in the “amount and intensity” of left-to-right recoil after eight shots have been fired.
In addition, they changed some statistics for the Ares “Firing Error” that look to make the gun a little bit more accurate across the board.
“Machine Guns are significantly underperforming other weapons at their price points,” the patch notes read. “Machine Guns are meant to be bullet hoses—powerful once they get going. This is a difficult balance to strike in a game where a single bullet from the Vandal will put you down. Our hope here is to make Machine Guns better at what they do (shoot lots and lots of bullets) while also increasing the power of the Ares relative to weapons at a similar price point.”
Machine guns are largely ignored by VALORANT’s player base of gamers who tend to veer toward assault rifles and occasionally snipers.
While making machine guns too powerful could be problematic in maintaining an ideal skill cap that will make VALORANT players happy, these changes aim to give machine guns a slight nudge toward more usability.
In addition to buffs machine guns, Riot made a number of other changes to rifles that can be found here.
