Limited abilities? VALORANT community discusses whether utility should recharge

Many people have reacted to the amount of utility in VALORANT over the years, but with how many agents have been added to the game, along with their various abilities they have at their disposal, some players feel the game has veered more and more away from the "precise gunplay" the developers preached about when the game was first announced. Many fans have seen clips of pro play, where sites are flooded with utility before any players see each other, and people are dying to abilities and through smokes before seeing a single combatant.

Recently, the discussion was revived by retired pro player Tyson "TenZ" Ngo, who laughed at the original statement of "precise gunplay" to the current state of the game. Additionally, Timofey "Chronicle" Khromov has proposed a possible change to the game that could drastically shift the foundation of VALORANT at the pro play level all the way to solo queue.

A game changing meta shift

According to Chronicle, VALORANT is that split into three parts: shooting, utility, and teamplay. Currently, the issue with the game is that utility heavily overshadows the other parts of the game, and requires a change so that players cannot just spam utility to win rounds, such as grenades and recon abilities. To combat these issues, Chronicle suggests the idea that utility does not recharge back, or that only characters with smoke abilities have their utility recharge.

This change would revamp the entire way that VALORANT is played and would flip how strategies are set. For example, the limited utility would force players to be very picky about when they utilize their abilities, pushing good teamplay to the forefront to get the most out of their abilities, allowing shooting to become much more of a focus as well. There will be less chaotic situations caused by massive utility spam, and more structured forms of attack since players will need to time their abilities together and perfect their combos.

Some people weren't interested in the change, others proposed that certain utility shouldn't be free or to significantly increase the cooldown timers on certain abilities so that they would be less incentivized to spam out and use their abilities in random situations. Others were intrigued by the idea, while many were worried about how it would affect the impact that certain agents have in the game. Ultimately, these ideas haven't been acknowledged by Riot, but could be viable in the future if the developers decide to shake up the meta à la League of Legends, where devs make massive changes to the game every year to keep gameplay fresh and excite the player base.