One VALORANT fan suggested a Yoru buff yesterday that would allow the duelist to preview an area prior to teleporting with Gatecrash. And today, a dev explained why that won’t happen.
Yoru recently got a few buffs in Patch 2.06, allowing him to flash faster and giving him a 35-second timer for Gatecrash. But he still might not be strong enough to elbow his way into the competitive meta. While some players would like Yoru to have better mobility with a quicker teleport, Riot is looking to move in a “different direction.”
“One thing we want to do is continue to push his ability to force enemies to play his mind games with deception and misinformation,” game designer Rycoux commented on a Reddit post. “We have a lot of duelists that can use their mobility to get kills in ways that create a bit of chaos at times and we want to make sure we can create duelists that can break the mold.”
Rycoux added that changes to Yoru have been “going well” in internal tests.
Agents like Jett, Raze, and Reyna use their mobility abilities to get in and out of danger, balancing aggression with the tools to escape. If some of Yoru’s abilities were tweaked a bit, he might be able to follow suit. But Riot wants to stray away from that, instead encouraging Yoru players to play mind games with their opponents.
It’s understandable that the devs want to give Yoru a more unique identity, especially since the typical chaotic-mobility strat has been done before. But his current deceptive abilities are loud and predictable, which reduces their effectiveness as opponents get more experienced.
It’s unclear what the Yoru changes are or when they’ll hit the live servers. But Rycoux hopes the devs can “share them soon.”
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