Riot reveals huge Jett dash nerfs in Valorant patch 4.08

Jett’s Tailwind will now have to be “activated” before use, in patch 4.08.

Tailwind

• On pressing the ability key, after a short delay Jett activates a 12 second window where she is empowered to immediately dash on next button press.
• Her Tailwind charge is lost whether she Dash’s or the window expires, but can still be regained with two kills.

The developers have further described the key issues that they found with Jett’s dash. These are:

• The dash had no prerequisite, so she always had access to her escape power with no intentional decision making. This freedom gave Jett the unintended capacity to continually take space or hold unusual ground without having to commit her ability to her. This play pattern is something that no other Agent could match, and allows Jett to exert an extreme amount of pressure on a match in a way that can be oppressive, especially at high MMRs or in professional play.
• This lack of intentional decision-making made it feel like she played outside of the tactical cycle all our other Agents adhere to. Too often, she did n’t have to leverage game sense that other Agents needed to succeed, because her reactive dash from her could often negate her own strategic mistakes or the great tactical calls by her opponents from her.
• As we talked about in the Controller Deep Dive, one of our core design philosophies is that Agents are sharp and provide both clear upsides and opportunity costs when compared to their peers. Jett’s strength from her as both a dash-in executor on attack and holding angles with an Op—with unrestricted access to escape—provided her broad power with little downside. We want her to retain as much aggressive power on offense as possible but reduce her defensive Op power.
• Even in highly coordinated play, she’s proven very difficult to strategize against, and her access to an instant escape (not to mention two on-demand smoke screens) marginalized most of the tools the rest of the Agents have to deal with her.

Having said all of that, Alexander Mistakidis, Agent Designer on Valorant along with Jay WatfordAgent Designerand Sal Garozzo, Game Designer, went on to explain why they took this approach for Jett’s changes. they said,

“We want Jett to have her power moments and to be able to dash, but we also want viable counterplay and for Jett players to be more thoughtful when using their abilities.”

They further went on to add:

“Jett’s reactive power crowded out the competition for other Agents and pressured the core tactical promise of the game to a degree that we think it would be dangerous for the roster to try and match.”