Valorant update 1.0 patch notes prepare for launch

Published June 1, 2020 3:55 PM, by Ozzie Mejia

One of the most anticipated games of the year is about to exit beta this week. Riot Games is ready to release the full version of Valorant and that means one last round of balance changes and bug fixes. Prior to the 1.0 launch, Riot released the official patch notes outlining all adjustments that players can expect to see.

Changes include some noteworthy nerfs for Sage and Raze, a few buffs for Jett and Phoenix, and some significant adjustments for Omen. Players can also check out an all-new map called Ascent. Those who have played through the beta will likely feel a few differences. Those who have waited for Valorant's launch, well, these will be the norm when Valorant's 1.0 goes live.

The following patch notes are taken from the Valorant website.

Valorant update 1.0 patch notes

Gameplay and Balance

Sage

• Healing Orb cooldown increased 35 -> 45 seconds
  • We like how much Sage is able to heal in a single heal, but felt she was able to use it too frequently during a round.
• Barrier Orb segment health reduced 1000 -> 800
• Barrier Orb duration reduced 40 -> 30 seconds
• Friendly Barrier Orb walls now show on the minimap
  • Previous changes to Sage's Barrier Orb helped give it more counterplay options in pistol/early round but it's still having too much impact in any given round. Our hope is that the wall stays a powerful stalling tool, but asks you to think more about when in the round you want to use it.

Raze

• Blast Pack maximum damage radius reduced 2 -> 1 meters
  • The Blast Pack has proven to be quite strong, especially when chained back-to-back. By reducing the inner maximum damage radius, we hope to reduce the average damage output of this ability while still keeping it powerful.

Jett

• Cloud Burst smoke duration increased 4 -> 7 seconds
  • We feel like Jett has a strong, irreplaceable value in terms of her ability to deny trades. But we think her team-oriented output is a little too low. This should give her and her team a little more time to work off of her smokes.
• Tailwind automatically breaks Cypher's Trapwires after being briefly revealed
  • Tailwind force is powerful enough that Jett should easily be able to break free of any leash. This should allow her a little more freedom to make that aggressive, but risky play that creates space for her team.

Phoenix

• Blaze duration increased 6 -> 8 seconds
  • We felt like the short wall duration, combined with the long cast time and short range, was forcing Phoenix to play a little too predictably around his wall. We're bumping this up slightly to give him some more time to work with.
• Blaze damage: 15 every 0.25s -> 1 every 0.033 seconds
• Blaze healing: 3 every 0.25s -> 1 every 0.16 seconds
  • These Damage over Time/Healing over Time models are updated to match the recent changes to our other DoT abilities. Additionally, we've matched the damage/healing values to be half as effective as Hot Hands, primarily so that the total healing output of these two abilities is at parity (50 health each). We're also doing this so that Blaze doesn't become the de-facto "healing" ability compared to Hot Hands.
• Hot Hands healing: 3 every 0.25s -> 1 every 0.08s.
  • Updated the HoT model to match recent changes to the DoT abilities.
• Curveball max flash duration increased 0.8 -> 1.1 second
  • The flash duration is short given how quickly he can get his curveball out on an enemy caught out of position. Even still, it was a hair too short, especially to justify the new 200 credit price point.
• Run it Back automatically reloads all weapons on respawn
  • This is closer to a quality of life improvement. Phoenix's ult often puts him in a position to empty his clips right before getting sent back. It was very jarring for a Phoenix player to wait several seconds to respawn, only to then have to spend another second reloading—potentially under pressure. We think the several second respawn time is enough time to justify an automatic reload.

Omen

• Paranoia is now equipped instead of quickcast, and hit detection improved, especially at close range
  • Changed the cast paradigm to reward more proactive use of Paranoia over its previous reactive use case. Enemies will receive a warning when the projectile is fired rather than being in the direct path of it. This should make it hit enemies more reliably.
• Dark Cover, Omen now enters a "phaser" world where he can see through walls to place his smokes and pressing RELOAD toggles between phased and normal targeting.
  • We wanted to provide Omen with a more precise way to place his smokes, especially when verticality is at play. We've provided a toggle back to the old view mode as well to make sure we still support the quick, close range smoke playstyle many Omen players have honed.
• Dark Cover controls have been updated where Omen can now increase smoke distance with PRIMARY FIRE, decrease it with SECONDARY FIRE, and throw smoke with the ABILITY KEY.
  • Yeah, this might be a difficult control shift for players who main Omen, but in the long run—and for new players—we think it's more intuitive for the distance to be controlled by one hand on the mouse by default.
• Shrouded Step, Omen can now see his teleport location on the map and receives an in-world indicator of where he's targeting when his vision of the point is obstructed.
  • We want to help Omen understand where he is targeting his teleport, especially when he's teleporting from out of his smoke.
• From the Shadow, Omen can now cancel his teleport while in Shade form by pressing the ABILITY KEY again—Omen still loses all of his ult points if he cancels.
  • We want Omen to attempt plays and create fear for his opponents with his ultimate. Previously, the punishment for using the ult was almost certain death if caught by an enemy, and it pushed the ability into more niche use. Allowing Omen to cancel his ult if he's in danger at the cost of his ult points will hopefully open more possibilities and value, while still pushing him to try and pick the best teleport spots possible.

Sound Visualization (Audio Attenuation)

• We've brought in more sounds made by Agents under the category of sounds that display their audio distance on the mini-map via the white circle. This includes ability sounds, reloads, spike interactions and more.
  • Why? We wanted to provide players with the ability to understand when their noise can be heard by enemies and give them an idea of how far the sounds can be heard.

Map Updates

INTRODUCING A NEW MAP: ASCENT

• Ascent is a map set in Italy that features a large, open middle area that both teams can skirmish over. Mid is a playground for diverse ability use and successfully controlling the area opens additional routes for Attackers to both Spike sites.
• As our new map for launch, Ascent will be slightly more common in our Matchmaking rotation for the first few days so that you can get more opportunities to play on the map.

Split

• Restructured mid chokepoint
  • We felt like Defenders were able to effectively plug up the main choke point in mid for a large percentage of the round. The new layout hopes to alleviate this issue. These changes open up the space quite a bit and provides an additional path to get around stalling abilities on the stairs. It also gives Attackers a few different angles to help siege B Tower and Vents.
• The train station maintenance crew was able to replace the burned out speaker system
• A certain frog's head is now a little warmer

Haven/Bind/Split/Ascent

• Expanded our new system that combats map exploits to all other maps—this will eradicate anyone trying to escape the playspace
• Continued to fix level collision in order to enhance the smoothness of the gameplay space
• Completed draw call optimizations
• Also continued to block spots for Cypher's Spycam that prevented counter-play; as always, huge thanks to everyone who helps us find these!

Competitive Mode Update

• Competitive mode will not be on at launch
• Similar to our closed beta launch, our initial focus is making sure our service is stable before activating competitive matchmaking. This is also a way to give new players the same courtesy that closed beta players had to learn the game ahead of turning on Competitive. We'll also make some adjustments to Competitive based on remaining closed beta player feedback. Our plan is to turn on Competitive a few patches into our launch.

Performance Updates

• Combat Performance: Addressed multiple causes of framerate dips in combat. These improvements should help the game feel smoother, especially in combat situations on higher-end PCs.
  • Effect pooling added for impacts, gunshots and footsteps. This should reduce frame drops when these events occur.
  • Disabled bullet casings from calculating physics + audio bounces. We're looking to bring a more optimized version of this feature back in a future patch.
  • Reduce cost of z-pings and death pings by 10x
  • Fixed bug causing 90 raycasts per second when pinging
  • Fixed a bug where NOT opening the options menu every game would cause framerate to drop on a regular cadence
• +FPS for mid to high specs: Sped up calculations on the CPU for game and render threads. These improvements will be felt the most on machines with powerful GPUs bottlenecked by their CPU speeds.
  • Optimized minimap for visible elements
  • Fixed bug where minimap would calculate twice per frame
  • Fixed bounding boxes on a variety of VFX, reducing the number of VFX updating at any given time
  • Reduce cost of updating transform on render thread
  • Reworked a variety of HUD elements that were previously built on a particularly slow component
• +FPS for low to mid specs: Content improvements that will primarily help low to mid tier specs when rendering the world.
  • Reduced draw calls on all maps
  • Removed non-gameplay impacting map particles on Low and Medium Detail Quality
  • Optimized First Person Shadows to no longer consider lights that do not impact final shadows
  • Removed unintentionally large textures across gun buddies, scopes, silencers
  • Optimized VFX for Characters
    • Omen : ALL ABILITIES
    • Sage : ALL ABILITIES
    • Viper: ALL ABILITIES
• Closed exploit where Nvidia Inspector could be used to see through Viper and Phoenix wall abilities
• Added a setting for speaker configuration
• Additional tooltip clarity around what graphics quality settings actually do
• GPU Time stat now correctly excludes idle time

Quality of Life

• Dying to a non-enemy player will no longer grant ultimate points. This includes dying to the spike, fall damage, a teammate's ability, or your own ability.
  • Context: This should eliminate some of the weird optimization around farming ultimate points when a death doesn't have enough economic impact (e.g., self-killing at the end of the pistol round, or team kill at the start of a save round. We'll continue to monitor to see if we need to further dissuade these "save round self-kills."
• Added VALORANT Community Code pop-up for new players
• Added chat and voice restrictions for repeat offenders of our Community Code
  • Chat and Voice restrictions last 72 hours
  • Getting a restriction will require you to log out. Please take a moment to cool down and reflect before logging back in to play VALORANT :)
  • Chat restrictions will be enforced for ‘all' and ‘team' chat, but your ‘party' chat will still be available.
  • Voice restrictions will be enforced for ‘team' chat, but your ‘party' voice will still be available.
• Reporting categories updated to cover a wider range of Community Code violations
• Transition screens added before Character Select and In Game
• The button to upgrade a gun skin now indicates what type of improvement (variant, animation, etc.) will be granted by the upgrade
• Visual updates to collection and contract pages
• Adjusted ping calculation to be more accurate
• Added a setting to disable the spectator count widget on the HUD
• Updated the death camera to avoid obscuring the screen immediately after death
• Added a build version watermark
• Observer Updates
  • Added team-specific 1st-person fresnel highlighting for observers
  • Adjusted consistent coloring for Attackers/Defenders on the HUD
  • Attackers and Defenders don't swap in HUD on side swap rounds
  • Keybinds are consistent from round to round for swapping between players
  • Fixed scoreboard not showing the correct score
• Removed the 'freeze time' that would trigger when waiting for a player to reconnect at the start of the buy phase
• Updated shop icons

HUD & UI

• Added VFX to abilities, killfeed, and ceremonies (e.g., Ace or Clutch)
• Updated Spike visuals in the inventory
• Updated Armor icons in the shop
• Updated character portraits
• Added chat message regulation so that only send one chat message is sent when multiples of the same ping or VO command are used in rapid succession

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Visit the Valorant website for the full list of bug fixes to the game and the client, as well. Valorant is set to release on PC this Tuesday, June 1. We'll have much more to say about this game in the weeks ahead, so be sure to follow our Valorant coverage and guides for more.