Valorant agent Chamber has dominated the tactical FPS game’s meta ever since his release back on patch 3.10. Having already been nerfed multiple times, developer Riot Games is stepping up its efforts to remould the Frenchman into a healthier addition to its roster. The Valorant patch 5.12 Chamber changes, it hopes, will make poor Chamber players much easier to punish.
Having dominated the Valorant ranks since his arrival – remaining on top of our Valorant tier list – agent designers Kevin Meier and Jay Watford have opened up about the hows and whys of the changes, and their hopes for where the agent will land. Below you’ll find their thoughts, as well as the full list of Chamber changes.
Valorant patch 5.12 Chamber changes
Here are the Valorant patch 5.12 Chamber changes:
Headhunter (Q)
- Updated Stability Curve
- Spread increased after 2nd bullet, when spamming. This is explicitly meant to reduce low-precision body-shot spam as an effective combat measure.
Rendezvous (E)
- Chamber now places a single anchor that can be teleported to while inside its range
- Radius increased 15m >>> 26m
- Removed teleport activation height restriction
- You can teleport to the Anchor while on different verticality so long as you are within its radius.
- Increased weapon equip time after teleporting 0.4s >>> 0.7s
- Headhunter is unaffected by this change
- Destroying Rendezvous teleport anchor now disables it for the remainder of the round, instead of being placed on a cooldown.
- Chamber no longer incurs an additional cooldown when recalling his Anchor after teleporting.
Trademark (C)
- The trap is now range restricted
- Trademark will disable when Chamber moves out of range, and reactivate once he is inside.
- Can now be recalled mid-round
- Does not require line of sight
- 30s cooldown on recall
- Destruction remains permanent
- Initial Arm Time increased 2s >> 4s
- Health Increased 1 >> 20
Tour De Force (X)
- Fire rate decreased by 57.5%
Slow
- This applies to both Trademark and Tour De Force
- Reduced 50% >> 40%
- Reduced duration 6s >> 4s
- Reduced size by 30%
“Similar to our approach with Jett’s tailwind updates, we believe there is a healthy way for combat escapes to exist in Valorant’s gameplay ecosystem,” Meier and Watford say, “as long as they are counterbalanced to offset their strength.”
According to the pair, the two main goals of the changes are to “strike an appreciable balance between his first angle power and counterplay avenues”, and “drive more deliberate thought into setup”.
The concepts of ‘counterplay’ and ‘deliberate’ are “foundational principles to Valorant agent design”, they continue. “Chamber’s mechanics took the place of counterplay in many cases, and the small number of restrictions on his abilities meant he was not required to be deliberate in thinking about setup. This made Chamber deadly at any angle.”
The change to Chamber’s trap is particularly significant, for example, as Chamber players will no longer be able to simply set it down and play on the complete opposite sides of the Valorant maps. As with Killjoy’s utility, the trap being active/inactive gives the opposing team an inkling as to where Chamber is playing – a major intel boon.
“Our approach was built around retaining Chamber’s combat strength and fantasy, while narrowing the span of his impact across any given map,” the devs state. “Giving opponents more agency to outwit or outplay, and giving Chamber players a deliberate mastery curve.”
While players – perhaps not Chamber ones – will be happy to see the debonair sharpshooter taken down a couple of pegs, it remains to be seen just how effective the changes will be.