Valorant has proven to be one of the biggest surprises of 2020. Riot’s 5v5 tactical shooter has amassed a huge fan following in just a few months, and the developer is pushing out new content regularly to keep the momentum going. While there have been a couple of smaller updates recently, the biggest update recently is the announcement of the new Agent 15: Astra.
The newest agent is named Astra, and her inclusion increases the Valorant roster size up from the starting 11 agents. Astra’s announcement trailer shows a lot about her in a short span of time, and from the looks of it, she could play an important role in the future meta. Hence, it’s important for fans to understand what the newest addition to the game is bringing to the table.
From what’s known at this point about the new agent, Astra is a woman from Ghana who can travel between dimensions. The controller agent uses Radiant as her source of power, and all her abilities seem to revolve around her being able to teleport herself to a heightened plane, or “Astral Form.” The Astral Form gives an overview of the map and allows Astra to place up to 5 stars, which can serve multiple purposes.
Each of these stars can be activated using any of her three abilities which all serve a different purpose. The first ability is the Gravity Well, which works a little similar to Killjoy’s Nanoswarm. The gravity well pulls the players caught in the radius towards the center and gives a fragile debuff on explosion. The fragile status will see affected players deal more damage. The exact values aren’t known, but a 10 to 15 percent increase is expected. The second ability is the Nova Pulse, which detonates a Nova Pulse from the placed star. Anyone caught in the radius gets concussed for a limited time. The last signature ability is called Nebula, which is just a simple smoke.
In addition to these 3 abilities, Astra can also use an additional mini-ability called Dissipate, which can be used to retract a placed star for further use. Lastly, Astra’s ultimate ability is called Cosmic Divide. Using this will require her to enter into the Astral Form, following which she can select 2 star-locations. This then creates an infinite Cosmic Divide in between that blocks bullets and heavily dampens audio. Astra seems to have a pretty powerful kit, and its clever use could land her a spot in Valorant‘s best agents.
Contrary to other controllers in Valorant, Astra’s kit seems to be a little aggressive in nature. Gravity Well and Nova Pulse require some solid information to use efficiently, which encourages aggressive scouting. This makes an initiator like Sova and Astra a perfect pair, which is also shown in the trailer as well.
Her ultimate ability favors aggression, and duelists like Phoenix seem to be the perfect fit in accompanying her in battle. Another interesting composition could be using Astra’s Gravity Well to make enemies fragile, and then lob a Raze grenade to deal huge damage. Astra could very well shine in controlling choke spots with her signatures, with clever usage of abilities in Ascent’s tunnels or Bind’s Hookah.
Recent agent additions like Yoru seem to be in the spirit of making Valorant a bit more fast-paced than something like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Rainbow Six Siege. This could very well turn out to be a great thing, as playing the game more aggressively could benefit the meta. Fans are particularly delighted to see the absence of abilities that could potentially net easy frags, and a recent Reyna nerf indicates that to be the direction of choice for Valorant‘s balance changes. Fans are also a bit concerned about the game balance with this agent addition, which remains to be seen when Astra drops on March 2.
Valorant is available now on PC.
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