Valorant players want a nerf to “exploitable mechanic” after jumping

The Valorant community wants a fix for a mechanic that gives players a reset to their aim accuracy after landing from a jump – something they say is exploitable.

In a lot of competitive shooters, there is a logic to recoil being affected during a jump seeing as your character is continually being displaced. Developers make shots extremely errant while in the air to give the game more of structure among other things.

While this is also true for Valorant, people are finding that once you finally make touchdown on the ground, there seems to be an almost instant effect taking place on the accuracy of the first shot.

Breaking down their findings, user ‘EarthlingKira’ saw that a reproducible effect with the Vandal and Phantom can make instant headshots easy to pull off.

“In high Elo games it happens more and more often that people exploit the accuracy after jumping and landing,” EarthlingKira said. “The recovery time is too fast with Vandal/Phantom. After landing you can insta-headshot.”

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Their clip showed them landing a few shots on the enemy Cypher while in mid-air, but when they completed their landing he instantly returned a quick headshot.

The first-bullet accuracy takes some skill from the person firing it, but landing a shot like that could have been attributed to the mechanic. This is something EarthlingKira thinks could get out: “As soon as this knowledge spreads it will be abused more and more.”

“I really fear this will be exploited more and more in the future to peek angles. You have a hard time hitting while the person jumping can use the flying time to aim properly,” they said.

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They believe a 300-500 milliseconds time to recover after a jump would be enough to prevent this from running rampant in Ranked.

EarthlingKira argues that this kind of thing can throw off the competitive integrity of a tactical shooter like Valorant, although there were other players who believed that a mechanic like this is fine.

“It’s exactly like it was in [Counter-Strike]1.6,” user ‘Row21Coulmn7’ explained. “It’s a competitive shooter. Strafe jumping out from hiding and hitting the other strafe key mid air, to land and then shoot, is a very normal thing to do. When he is jumping you can shoot him mid air.”

It’s unclear if the Valorant devs intended to implement this, but after initial feature updates in their new game, Riot could look into the mechanic as well.