The launch of VALORANT, Riot Games’ upcoming first-person shooter, is almost here.
Before the game’s release tomorrow, Riot has shared the patch notes for the release. The developer has made several changes since the end of the closed beta on May 28, including the introduction of a new map and a game mode. While Riot hasn’t provided many specific details about the new mode, they have given players a glimpse of what to expect.
Here are the patch notes for VALORANT Patch 1.0:
Agent Changes
Jett
- Increased Cloud Burst smoke duration from 4 to 7 seconds.
- Tailwind now breaks Cypher’s Trapwires after being briefly revealed.
Omen
- Updated Dark Cover controls to allow Omen to increase smoke distance with the primary fire key, decrease it with the secondary fire key, and throw smoke with the ability key.
- Dark Cover now enables Omen to see through walls when in a “phaser” world and pressing reload toggles between phased and normal targeting.
- From the Shadow now allows Omen to cancel teleportation in Shade form by pressing the ability key again, but Omen loses all ult points if he cancels.
- Improved hit detection for Paranoia, especially at close range. Paranoia is now equipped instead of quickcast.
- Shrouded Step allows Omen to see the teleport location on the map and receive in-world indicator when vision is obstructed.
Phoenix
- Increased Blaze duration from 6 to 8 seconds.
- Decreased Blaze damage from 15 every 0.25 seconds to 1 every 0.033 seconds.
- Decreased Blaze healing from 3 every 0.25 seconds to 1 every 0.16 seconds.
- Increased Curveball max flash duration from 0.8 to 1.1 seconds.
- Decreased Hot Hands healing from 3 every 0.25 seconds to 1 every 0.08 seconds.
- Run it Back now reloads all weapons on respawn.
Raze
- Reduced Blast Pack maximum damage radius from 2 to 1 meter.
Sage
- Reduced Barrier Orb segment health from 1,000 to 800.
- Reduced Barrier Orb duration from 40 to 30 seconds.
- Barrier Orb by teammates now appears on the minimap.
- Increased Healing Orb cooldown from 35 to 45 seconds.
For the full patch notes and more information, visit the VALORANT website.
Map Changes
- Introducing Ascent, a new map set in Italy. It features a large, open middle area that both teams can battle over. Successfully controlling the middle area opens up additional routes for the Attackers to both Spike sites.
- Ascent will be more common in matchmaking rotation for the first few days to give players more opportunities to play on the map.
- Restructured the Split mid chokepoint to make it more open.
- Addressed exploits and collisions on all maps.
Performance Improvements
- Addressed framerate dips during combat to make the game feel smoother, especially on higher-end PCs.
- Added effect pooling for impacts, gunshots, and footsteps to reduce frame drops.
- Disabled bullet casings from calculating physics and audio bounces. This feature will be optimized in a future patch.
- Reduced cost of z-pings and death pings.
- Fixed bugs causing unnecessary raycasts and framerate drops.
- Improved CPU calculations for higher FPS on mid to high-spec machines.
- Optimized minimap for better performance.
- Fixed bounding boxes on various VFX to reduce the number of VFX updates.
- Optimized VFX for characters.
- Fixed an exploit that allowed seeing through certain wall abilities.
- Added a setting for speaker configuration.
- Improved tooltip clarity for graphics quality settings.
- Corrected GPU Time stat to exclude idle time.
For more details and the complete list of changes, check the VALORANT website.