Last night, Riot Games officially unveiled Deadlock, the brand-new Agent coming to Valorant with the upcoming Episode 7. While the new Agent seems pretty solid as a Sentinel and fans sound excited about trying out her abilities, a second thought has raised concerns about certain potential line-ups with Deadlock and some other Agents, especially the ones that require you to drain a whole magazine.

Two of Deadlock's abilities, Barrier Mesh and Annihilation, require players to shoot a significant number of bullets to destroy or disable them. Barrier Mesh is a four-sided, X-shaped wall that blocks you from moving through it (though you can still shoot through the wall), and it features five different cores. In order to destroy it entirely, you need to get rid of the central core, which requires just a bit more than a full magazine of Phantom to be wiped. However, if you only need to remove one wing of the wall, you can focus your shots on its dedicated core, although even that will drain almost half of a Phantom magazine, according to the gameplay footage shared by Riot Games.



Annihilation, on the other hand, is Deadlock's Ultimate ability that traps a player inside a blue-ish material and the opponent to shoot the trap to set the trapped player free. Now, this is less of a concern as you don't get to use Ultimate every single round, but it is a bigger weight on your ammo management.

Going back to a few months earlier, Riot Games decreased the total reserved ammo for Phantom and Vandal significantly. While the change was aimed to stop players from spraying bullets and getting lucky kills through smoke or walls, it was also a point of debate among fans on how this could affect the ability to destroy blockers, gadgets, and almost everything non-opponent in the game. The biggest concern was Sage's wall, which requires a significant amount of bullets to be destroyed.

With Deadlock inbound, some players are now worried about the potential Sage-Deadlock combo, whose Wall and Barrier Mesh abilities could drain your magazines drastically when combined. "Odin/Ares meta inbound," said one Reddit user who believes that this combo could force people to move machine guns over Vandal or Phantom. "At some point you don't count living agents but remaining ammo," reads another comment on the thread from a player who expects ammo management to become a serious problem in the game.

Episode 7 patch notes are yet to be shared, which means there is still little hope that Riot Games will reduce the HP for Sage's wall, though that is nothing but an assumption for now.

Posted: Jul 13, 2023 12:02 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/valorant-agent-deadlock-drains-mags-even-more-fans-are-worried/