Everyone has hot takes! Share yours about Valorant whether it’s about a meta, agent, or a team. Let’s hear your controversial opinion!
Chicken jockey
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Share Your Valorant Hot Takes!
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Harbor is objectively good on almost every map in VALORANT and the reason he's so unbelievably bad in practice is a combination of people not learning how to play him effectively in the pro levels (high skill floor + small mistakes are easily exploitable) and people not willing to play him in ranked because of his lack of selfish utility (kind of like KAY/O and Astra), which results in him seeing almost no play (and whatever play he does see is very unpolished)
My goat Saadhak can't even play Harbor that well 😢 he made several mistakes in Kickoff that contributed to losing them rounds (there was one Abyss round where there was a small gap between his cascade and the corner of a wall and he got shot through it, giving the attackers the site almost for free and forcing KC to save)
KC's comps aren't bad. The clear primary reason why they're losing games is because there's massive flaws in their teamplay and mental, flaws that have shown themselves in every loss this year (other than Vitality) and that have nothing to do with the agents they're playing
Riot did say Harbor was in a rough spot right now but they're looking at almost exclusively ranked data and content creator feedback, and Harbor is statistically the worst agent in ranked in almost every single aspect. However, I already gave reasoning as to why this is the case, both for lower ranks and higher ones. They don't really look at pro play unless an agent is dominating like Viper was last year... the fact that they just buffed KAY/O is enough proof of that
If that is really the reason why they are losing and it has nothing to do with the comp then there should be a reason why other teams are not running him though. The insta breakable orb/smoke, inconvenient placing of his wall, and ult that should in my opinion stun faster or just last longer. He is just out of meta in almost every aspect. Riot wants to have a balance between ranked and pro play hence Reyna. But if the skill floor is just that high like you said it is still an issue if even pros can't figure out how to use the util.
There's a difference between "can't figure out" and "can't be bothered to". Tier 1 teams have the analysts to figure him out; that's not a question. Top tier analysts are how the pros learn optimal ways to play their agents. There's just no reason for pro teams to look into Harbor yet. If there's a meta idea that works better than anything else out there, what's the point in trying to switch things up? This has long been the mentality of top teams in VALORANT—stick to what's safe, stick to what works. The few teams that played Harbor last year are teams like Karmine Corp, FunPlus Phoenix, and Nova Esports... teams that generally care less about what's meta and try to go for something unique. Teams would never borrow comp ideas from teams like that unless they just happen to align with future meta ideas (such as KC's Split comp last year).
In any case, Harbor wouldn't in this current meta anyway. Not because he's a good or bad agent, but because the meta relies so heavily on certain agents meshing together. Harbor works well with Yoru, but there's practically no synergy with Breach or Tejo—hence why you would practically never see them in the same comp.
I'm not arguing that he's a perfect 1-to-1 replacement for currently meta controllers (e.g. Omen, Astra). Every agent has its strengths and weaknesses and every comp with said agent has its pros and cons. Subbing out a traditional dome smoker for Harbor isn't very different than subbing out a recon initiator for a Tejo or Breach... you lose some things, you gain others
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