Riot confirms a Valorant Harbor rework will finally pull him out of the dumpster

A Valorant Harbor rework is finally coming soon, as the Riot shooter's least-loved agent continues to prop up its bottom tier a full three years after he first arrived. No matter what rank you play at, getting any edge over your opponents is key to the best multiplayer games. Personal skill with a given character can push them beyond their typical matchups, but Harbor's kit is so lacking that he's tough to make work in anything beyond the most niche of setups. At long last, that might be about to change.

Ever since his reveal back in October 2022, Harbor has been somewhat of a bench-warmer among the roster. Back in early 2023, regular PCGamesN contributor Fariha Bhatti called him out as "the biggest flop in Valorant controller history." Fast-forward to today, and he's the only agent sitting in the 'D' ranking at the very bottom of our Valorant tier list. The Valorant team teased back in January that they were looking at ways to make the controller feel better to play and more impactful on his team, and now it's finally been confirmed.

The Harbor rework came up during the Valorant Champions dev update panel, where product manager Tiffy Tsay and game designer Ryan Cousart discussed the plan for the FPS game's big end-of-year patches and what that means for the water-bending Indian agent. "Harbor is getting a rework," Tsay says. "He was one of the first agents that we identified to be a candidate for one."

Tsay says we'll have to wait until Valorant patch 11.10 for the rework to arrive. While we don't get exact specifics, Cousart adds, "A lot of Harbor's identity is still true, and we wanted to make sure that is still there, where he is this kind of initiator-controller hybrid. So there's a lot of stuff that we're going to be shuffling around and making it so you think about those abilities in a different way, but we also have a couple of new abilities that we wanted to add too."

"We try to strive for small balance patches throughout the year to kind of address outliers," Tsay explains, "but sometimes we do need to take a bigger swing at things in one go, and that's what the goal of our end-of-year patches is. It's to really set up the foundations for next year, so that when you come back the game is feeling fresh and we are ready for all the new content to come out too."

The Valorant Harbor rework is coming in patch 11.10. It'll be interesting to see how Riot handles keeping him as more of a hybrid, because this contributed to the 'jack of all trades, master of none' effect where he doesn't have quite enough in his toolkit to fill either role sufficiently compared to the alternative options.

While we wait to see the overhaul in action, we've got the latest details on the next Valorant Night Market dates, along with an updated list of active Valorant codes for free goodies.

What do you think Harbor needs to make his kit work? Or have you still been ardently maining him in Valorant despite everything? Let us know in the PCGamesN community Discord server, where you can share tales of your best plays with staff and readers.