The Knife in Valorant is the most useless weapon, in more ways than one. As player frustration around the melee weapon increases, Riot are looking at tackling those concerns with a series of buffs in Valorant Episode 2 and beyond.
In Valorant, the knife only serves one purpose to players right now — to run fast. The game’s only melee weapon is the worst in the game. It’s clunky to use, doesn’t do much damage, and doesn’t even give bonus Creds for a kill like CS:GO’s knife.
There’s basically no reason to pull out the knife unless you’re looking to move around the map fast. Even Riot is aware of these problems, addressing them in a February 24 blog post.
This week, we address the Rank Rating penalty for queue dodge, and look at the knife hit detection. https://t.co/b5s0zyIRH3 pic.twitter.com/1LHdTSFwq3
— VALORANT (@VALORANT) February 24, 2021
“Our knife is a bit of a meme right now. It’s serving the purpose of either psychological-driven kills on unaware opponents or a last resort when out of ammo—but it’s rarely a decent (or reliable) choice to use in any other situation,” weapons designer Nicholas Smith admitted.
“The hitbox is static, unintuitive, and only active for a very brief period of time. This leads to frustration and confusion when combined with visuals that imply the knife does damage during the entire slash motion.”
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However, the devs are looking at ways to bring the Knife up to scratch, such as cleaning up the animation and the hitbox. However, they believe the Knife shouldn’t be a “critical part” of the game.
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“We don’t think it should ever be the best choice in a fight, but we would like to make it feel better to use by improving its reliability and hit satisfaction, as well as allowing it to be a viable (but not necessary) weapon choice in some situations.”
Buffs were initially planned for when Escalation was released, but they were delayed due to time constraints. Instead, the devs are now looking into the future to give the Knife a buff. That could be in Episode 2, or perhaps a little further down the line.
“We hope to come back in the future and give the knife a closer look and the love it deserves—we just need to figure out when it makes the most sense.”
