With the Valorant closed beta in full-swing, a number of balance issues have started to crop up and no Agent has come under-fire more than Raze.

Many players have felt Raze is overpowered with her Showstopper and Paint Shell abilities - which can gift users with easy kills.

However, fans of the shooter can rest easy because according to Ryan “Morello” Scott, lead character designer at Riot Games, the controversial agent is set for a nerf.

The revelations came when he dropped into Twitch user A_Seagull’s stream to discuss the state of the game and plans for the future.

Describing the potential changes to Raze as a “tweak” rather than an outright nerf, Morello feels “there are a couple of problems” in regards to the agent.

“It’s kinda hard to hear the audio in a lot of cases, you need to use the audio cues to actually read the grenade,” Morello said.

“We are doing some audio tweaking on the grenade and ULT, which we think have some problems on being heard. If there is a response, we need to make sure that signal actually exists so you can actually respond to the damn thing. That’s something we want to do.”

Morello explained how he hoped it would be in the next patch while stating the developers are also looking into changing her signature ability - Paint Shells - from two grenades to one.

“I think one of the changes is removing the second grenade, but providing a kill reset, to get grenades,” he added.

Morello also suggested they will take a similar approach to Jett’s Dash where “every time you kill two people you get a free grenade”.

The grenades are also set to get a damage reduction with Morello suggesting the second round of cluster grenades will have a smaller area of effect.

“We want to do a little bit of tuning on the area of effect. The cluster grenades will do less damage on the edge, so if you dodge the thing, you will take less chip damage and that will overall reduce the lethal area of effect, and that’s it.”

Speaking about the overall philosophy for making changes, Morello suggested some of the issues players are facing are “temporary problems” saying he wanted players “to try and figure stuff out”.

“We also want to give you the tools to figure it out,” he added. “Players are smart, we don’t want to be like ‘somethings a little out of line’ let's go slam it.

“We kind of want to let the environment determine this kind of stuff, we also don’t want to be waiting months to make changes, like this Raze thing we don’t think it’s a balance problem and we don’t think she’s ‘appropriateness for the game problem’. We know the counter exists, we have tested the hell out of it.”

Valorant is only in closed beta but has already received its first patch, which fixed a bug with Cypher’s spycam which allowed players to attach their secondary gun to the device giving it an unintended lethality. There were also a number of fixes to map exploits which saw players able to gain access to areas they shouldn’t have been able to get to.

If anyone was worried about Riot’s plans for the game, it seems that the developers are listening and their new tactical shooter is going to go from strength to strength.