Valorant patch 2.03 added a hefty list of updates and changes to the competitive title. Among them, a long-awaited Stinger nerf, and a rework to Reyna’s ability kit. More specificially, Reyna saw her Soul Orb count drop to two from four, and double in price. As a trade-off, a Soul Orb appears when a teammate kills an enemy that Reyna dealt damage to in the last 3 seconds (assist). We already highlighted the community’s reaction to the changes. This time around, however, we managed to get an exclusive chance to ask the Valorant professionals on the changes and what’s their stance on them.

Ivan “Johnta” Shevtsov, Yaroslav “Jady” Nikolaev, Niels “Lucker” Jasiek, Ruben “RUBINO” Villarroel, and Robertas “Carcass” Mikuckis have all contributed to this piece with their piece of mind on the topic.

Pros on Reyna Changes

Johnta: I think it should be interesting. Actually, we played some Reyna during our test periods when we would just try out every agent for some time and see how it goes. We definitely tried her. We have two very strong players on Reyna to be honest, Zyppan and Dimasick. Every time I watch them from observer, the coach view, it was just so enjoyable to watch because they have awesome mechanics. Probably from them playing pugs and wrecking everybody *laughs*. So Reyna is pretty cool on some maps. Like on Icebox she can be used very well. It’s hard to say about how it will change after the update. I don’t think she was strongly nerfed nor buffed. It’s just going to be a bit different. On the one side you only have two orbs, but still, you can get the orbs off of assists so that’s pretty cool.

Jady: I think it’s not a big difference between now and before. But I think it’s a good way to fix it. I think four orbs to heal yourself was too much. Now I think they fixed it how they should have fixed it before maybe. It’s a good change when you just need to put one shot at someone and in three seconds someone else kills them, and you can take the soul. I think these are good changes. I think she’s still good. I played a lot against Reynas so I know how they play. Their role is to kill one, playing in an aggressive spot, use invis [Dismiss], and just fall back. They’re not using more than two souls every round. So I think that’s good.

Lucker: Actually when I played Reyna, I noticed that it’s quite a nerf. Normally, whenever you’d get a kill, you’d always take that orb. But now, you sometimes maybe need to think about whether you should use that ghost [Dismiss]. But I think overall, for the gamestyle, it’s not that big of a deal. And in a team, I think it’s even better. A lot of times when you play in a team and execute together onto a site, you may just hit one guy, and your mate trades him. And you still get an orb. So that can be very valuable I think, on attack site especially or on double peeks. So I think it’s not a big nerf, it’s maybe just a balance. They just want to change how Reyna works a bit. I like that approach.

RUBINO: So, yeah, I think it’s a good nerf slash buff. In terms of teamplay, I think she’s actually better now than before. Mainly because, before, if you took Reyna, it’s a wildcard. You take Reyna because you’re dependent on killing. You need to be on fire, you need to kill everyone to kill yourself or Dismiss. But now with the assist mechanic, I think she’s more viable in terms of teamplay, she can actually do something in the team. And also, they nerfed her in ranked, which is really good. It was annoying playing against Reynas in ranked and they would Dismiss after every kill. So I think it’s a good buff slash nerf.

Carcass: We need to rethink if we still want to use Reyna [at Wave Esports]. I think Reyna is not that nerfed in a competitive way because of the assist orbs. So sometimes, as a Reyna, you don’t get a kill but an assist. That actually helps Reyna quite a bit. In a competitive way, there’s no chance to use all the four orbs because people are trading usually. So I think it’s also going to be viable [Reyna]. But yeah, it’s on us whether we’re still going to use Reyna or not.

*Note: Answers may have been altered slightly for the sake of clarity and brevity.

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