Valorant's Neon is "curbed" for now, but Riot says "balancing her is definitely challenging"

Balance will always be the primary talking point when it comes to online multiplayer games. There's never a silver-bullet solution: someone somewhere is going to hate that 0.1% nerf, or that 10% buff. Valorant is a game that's seen myriad OP characters come and go: remember Chamber on release, and even the original version of Jett. One of the most frustrating Agents to deal with, however, has always been Neon. Give her a Bucky or a Judge and away she goes, tearing down anyone in her path and planting the Spike before you even know she's on-site. She's always been a menace, but in 2026, she's been absolutely disgusting.

The issue with Neon is, perhaps unsurprisingly, her raw speed. Using her High Gear she can zip across the map, with her slide allowing her to duck out of harm's way, while her Fast Lane walls obscure her. Then there's the bunny hopping. With Neon's High Gear, she was able to bhop around the map popping heads with ease. 2026 has been a rough one for non-Neon enjoyers like me.

Following a brief period on the bench, the Filipina Duelist has (thankfully) been hit with the nerf hammer; High Gear's jump speed now matches every other Agent's, and her fuel gauge can only be replenished when she scores kills with her ultimate. She's taken a little bit of a tumble down the Valorant tier list as a result, replaced by the ever-dominant Clove, but generally, these changes have been for the better.

On the ground at Valorant Masters London - where Neon had a pick rate of just 32% compared to 45% in Santiago - I asked Lead Agent Designer Dan 'penguin' Hardison and Agents & Live Product Manager Tiffy 'TiffyMunchsnax' Tsay about the Neon saga, and if they're happy with where she's landed.

"Balancing Neon is definitely challenging," Hardison says. "I think Duelists are some of our harder characters to balance because our internal expectation for them is that they that go forward, take space, and take risks for their team. That can obviously come with challenges, and over time as we've balance the game, we've found that getting players to move off of Jett and Raze - the mobility Duelists that can fly over setups or take space really quickly - is really challenging."

Patch 8.11 marked the team's "first experimental design swing to get characters who are grounded to take space in the same, effective ways." Said update was accompanied by the controversial Neon and Iso buffs, with Hardison admitting that there were some "tuning challenges as a result of those changes" but notes that he believes "[the game] ended up in a decent spot."

"The recent changes for Neon were mostly what we call game health-oriented changes; it wasn't strictly like we just wanted a bar graph of Neon's power to go down," he continues. "We wanted to improve the 'playing against' experience for Neon's opponents. The hypothesis was that she could take too much space without expending abilities or having to use similar tools compared to other characters because of her bunnyhopping while sprinting.

"That was the change we ended up making, and I think we've done a decent job curbing some of her power. She's still really, really powerful, but we've seen a much more spread out set out Duelists at this tournament so far, so from my lens I think the changes were successful in the short term. We'll have to see if she crops back up, but in general, every time we do a game-health-oriented list and it seems to curb some player frustration and make the ecosystem more varied, we consider that a win on the dev side."

Tsay agrees, noting that it's all about "what is the right way to have the player playing as a Duelist, but also give the players playing against it a reasonable expectation. This is where we thought the new fuel system with Neon might be the best swing of it for now." She stresses that the team doesn't want to hamper Neon's "expressive movement," but acknowledges that the bunnyhopping needed a "hit."

While Neon's reign of terror is somewhat over, she's an Agent that'll always either feel completely broken, or completely useless. It's a balancing dance that I don't envy, but for now at least I'm just glad she's not obliterating me a minute into the round.