If you’re Riot Games and you’re launching a new agent for VALORANT, you have to walk a tricky path. On one hand, you don’t want an agent that completely breaks the game and dominates the meta across all maps, like Chamber and Astra did soon after they first released. But you also don’t want a dud that goes largely ignored.
Looking back the recent trio of new agents, it’s almost certainly obvious that Harbor has been a dud. The water-bending controller has been pushed aside by majority of the player base across game modes, and even his slightly more frequent appearances at the pro level have not been received well.
Across the entirety of 2023, since the start of VALORANT Episode Six, Harbor has consistently been the second least-picked agent, behind only Astra according to Blitz.gg. Astra, at the very least, was considered a very powerful agent when she first launched in 2021, and was quite popular for a time, so her current status can be attributed to an overcorrection of sorts by Riot to make her less dominant. Harbor doesn’t have that to fall back on though; he started weak, and the minimal buffs he’s received haven’t made him any stronger.
This weakness has made him a complete afterthought in competitive. As of writing, during Act One of Episode Seven, he’s the least-picked agent across the majority of ranks, including Radiant and all three Immortal ranks, as well as the game’s most populated rank in Silver.
I’ll admit I liked playing Harbor when he first released, especially on Haven and Pearl, because he was relatively easy to use and he could place a ton of cover between his water walls and Cove abilities. But there was no punch to his kit, nothing that helped clear out defenders hiding on sites during executes like an Omen’s Paranoia or Brimstone’s molly or Viper’s Snakebite. And his ultimate feels more like a nuisance than a powerful ability that could alter a round.
Don’t just take my word for it though; when Harbor first released in October 2022, several pro players noted the same weaknesses. NAVI in-game leader ANGE1 pointed out that he was the only controller without any sort of stopping power, and Sentinels analyst DrewSpark claimed his biggest flaw is that his utility always gives away his position.
Even with these shortcomings, Harbor has seen some usage on the pro level during 2023, primarily in a double-wall controller duo with Viper. Commonly referred to as the “pizza slice” strategy, the two agents use their walls to divide sites into smaller sections that the attackers can clear out easier. But it’s not the most popular; NRG star crashies said that meta was “boring” in an on-stage interview at Masters Tokyo, claiming it just leads to more Phantom sprays through smoke. The Harbor-Viper comp can also be hard to watch, especially if both teams are running it, as the screen is dominated by green and blue walls.
Since Harbor’s release, VALORANT has launched two more agents in Gekko and Deadlock. Currently, Deadlock sits in the top half of agents in pick rate, while Gekko sits just below the halfway mark across all game modes. This is the sweet spot Riot should be aiming for with new agents, ones that are viable and fill a need but aren’t overwhelmingly dominant. If Harbor wants to eventually reach this point, a severe upgrade to his kit is needed, as he currently is incapable of making any significant splash.
