Valorant Patch Nerfs Raze's Grenades, Adjusts Sage's Abilities

Riot Games' Valorant has become the hottest shooter of the moment even in its closed beta, but some fans have voiced complaints about the balance of certain characters, particularly the explosive Raze. A new update dubbed 0.47+ takes aim at some of Raze's more powerful abilities, reducing her number of Paint Shell grenades from 2 to 1, and forcing her to get two kills before she can use the ability again. The patch also adjusts the sound effects on all of Raze's powers to make them easier to hear in a chaotic match.

The patch affects several of Sage's abilities too, though mostly indirectly. Melee attacks against Sage's barrier will now deal double damage, and players will no longer be able to bunny-hop their way through her Slow Orb. However, if you walk through her Slow Orb, you no longer make noise, which makes it less useful as an enemy-finding tool. The update also fixes a well-documented bug that allows Cypher's spycam to fire weapons.

If you still haven't had a chance to play Valorant, you can get a beta key by watching participating Twitch streams, among other things. If you're the kind of player who delights in finding ways to break the game, Riot is offering bounties up to $100,000 for players who can find and identify exploits in the game.

Full patch notes below:

Gameplay and Balance

Melee damage

• Melee attacks now inflict double the damage per hit to destructibles, including
  • Sage’s Barrier
  • Haven’s metal double doors
• Why?
  • There weren’t enough options during low econ rounds—such as the first round and right after switching sides—to combat Sage’s Barrier Orb. Our intent is to add a high-risk, high-reward method for players to interact with her wall, while still being able to take it down, no matter their loadout

Raze

• Reduced Paint Shells from 2 to 1
• Paint Shells now have a kill reset, requiring players to get 2 kills to refresh cooldown
• Tuned and adjusted audio for Paint Shells, Blast Pack, and Showstopper so that they’ll be easier to hear in hectic scenarios
• Fixed an edge case where the secondary cluster of Paint Shells would explode quicker than intended. They now have a minimum duration before exploding.
• What’s up with that?
  • Raze’s goal is to be a highly-threatening duelist that punishes enemies posted in predictable positions, but we felt like the cluster grenades and their number were creating overly oppressive scenarios. Also, players should be supplied proper gameplay information and the audio cues on all of Raze’s abilities didn’t match their threat, so we changed the audio of each. For example, when the Showstopper is equipped or fired from a distance, players should be able to clearly identify and interpret the threat.

Sage

• Slow Orb now also slows the air speed of players in the zone
• Players can now walk through the Slow Orb without making noise
• Why though?
  • Players were able to circumvent too much of Sage’s Slow Orb by bunny hopping through the zone. We want the minimum slow amount to be a bit more consistent with all movement in the zone, while still allowing for bunny hopping and walking to provide a slight benefit to traversing the zone. Also, we feel adding a stealthy yet slow way to move through the field brings more nuance to playing against the zone and a bit more uncertainty for Sage, since she can't necessarily hear people who move through

Map Updates

• Several exploits fixed on Bind, Haven, and Split
• Split: Orb moved from B Mid to B Main
  • The intent is to alleviate some pressure from mid and provide more incentive for players to control B Main.

Quality of Life

• Reduced outbound network traffic from client for players running at high frames-per-second
  • Some ISPs and network setups were throttling game traffic, impacting gameplay by causing large spikes in network latency as FPS increased.
  • No impact to gameplay / responsiveness

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a rare server crash caused by packets occasionally being corrupted by some players’ networks
• Cypher’s Spycam can no longer use weapons
• Fixed a bug where footstep audible range would sometimes not appear on the minimap