Riot Games announces new Valorant Agent ‘Killjoy’ + Act 2 updates

When the game launched in June, Valorant had 10 Agents to choose from; soon, there will be eleven!

Riot Games has finally announced the first new Valorant Agent, and her name is Killjoy. The new Agent is a “genius inventor” from Germany that packs killer defensive tech. Check out the Killjoy reveal trailer here:

Killjoy’s abilities include

• Alarmbot – can be deployed to hunt down enemies, damaging them and leaving them vulnerable to double damage.
• Turret – can be placed down to secure an area as it fires at enemies in a 180-degree cone.
• Nanoswarm – a grenade that releases a swarm of nanobots that damages enemies.
• Ultimate: Lockdown – a device that “detains” enemies in a radius for 8 seconds.

While Riot has not yet announced a release date for Killjoy, we expect her to launch alongside the upcoming Act II update.

Valorant Act II Changes

Aside from the new Agent, Valorant’s Act II will also feature a host a number of changes to Ranks and Competitive mode.

Firstly, you will get an Act Rank triangle in Act II. This is filled with smaller triangles, each representing your ranked match wins throughout an Act. As you win more high-rank matches, lower ranked wins will be replaced. This new system aims to solve the player frustration of sliding to a lower rank and/or stopping competitive as soon as a certain rank has been reached (for fear of sliding back down).

Another new addition is the Act Rank Badge. This will show of the your best ranked match wins for the Act based on his/her top nine ranked wins.

Finally, Riot has announced what will happen at the end of every Act in Competitive:

• Your prior Act Rank will be saved and locked in your Career tab
  • Act 1 Competitive data will be saved
• You will be put back into abridged placements.
  • It will take 3 games to display your rank instead of the initial 5
  • These placements are quicker as we will reference your MMR from the prior Act, so we can quickly assess your skill for the current Act.
• Your rank will be a conservative placement where we are confident you are able to compete at that skill level—or higher.
  • Typically, your rank will land a couple of tiers below where you ended the prior Act, but we’ll be increasing how heavily we weigh performance in your early games so you can quickly improve your rank if you play well and win
• Placement games don’t count toward earning your Act Rank.

Riot has yet to announced the release of Valorant Act II, though we expect the second Act to go live sometime next week.