In the opinion of most Valorant players, teleporting trickster Yoru has been the most neglected and disappointing agent in the entire roster. When Yoru released in Patch 2.0, fans were excited to see what he could bring to the game’s lineup of Duelists. However, as you can see by the fact he has not been picked by any team competing at the currently ongoing VCT Champions, and his pathetic pick and win rates in Valorant ranked games, he’s rather lacklustre.
Valorant’s developers have been promising that a Yoru rework would be coming eventually, and today Riot Games has revealed that the rework will drop “early next year” and has even shown off some of the changes that are coming.
In a State of the Agents development blog, game and character designer Ryan ‘Rycoux’ Cousart confirms that Yoru will be made more viable by giving him “better tools to trick opponents, a stronger baseline value across his kit, and higher impact per round.”
While these details are subject to change and are not comprehensive of everything we’ll see in the Yoru rework, Rycoux lifts the lid on some of the tweaks being made to the agent’s Fakeout and Gatecrash abilities.
Fakeout, used as a decoy to distract enemy players with rogue footstep audio, is being improved to now also send out a “a carbon copy of Yoru that runs forward, and upon getting shot, will wind up and explode, debuffing enemies.” This definitely sounds similar to the bamboozling kit used by Mirage in Apex Legends – just without the exploding.
With Gatecrash, Riot has “lowered the range at which enemies can see and hear the tether on the map while it travels. We’ve also increased its travel speed by 20%.” Moreover, Yoru can further deceive opponents by “triggering a fake teleport” remotely once a tether has been placed.
While this is all the info Rycoux could share today, there is more to Yoru’s rework that is yet to be announced. Riot says you can expect more details in a future blog post.
News of Yoru’s much-needed rework – and a rough time frame of when to expect it – will certainly be encouraging for players who’ve wanted to use the deceptive Duelist without being heavily disadvantaged. Who knows, maybe we’ll see him climb on our Valorant tier list.