Valorant Patch 1.02 Notes Reveal Competitive Ranked Mode, Buffs, Fixes, & More

Valorant’s next patch is about to add its anticipated ranked mode; following yesterday’s developer update from the team at Riot, the full list of patch notes has now been revealed. In addition to Competitive mode, Patch 1.02 is set to make changes to hero abilities, tweak several areas of all maps, boost performance, and add quality of life improvements.

Unfortunately, there’s no release date yet, but we expect Patch 1.02 to launch later this week.

Here’s a summary of what you need to know:

Tagging – the slowing effect you feel when hit by bullets, has been adjusted, in part to up your chances of escape if you’re near cover. We can’t help you much if you’re dancing in the open.

Agent Updates– Viper, Reyna, and Jett have all been buffed slightly, while fixes to some of Cypher’s have been issued.

VIPER

“Viper Toxic screen is a potentially-strong vision slicing tool, but its access was well…terrible, making it only useful in a few spots on most maps. This should allow Viper to cut up sights, maps, and other unique areas to either fake or help take ground.”

“With Viper applying decay on her smokes, but only providing moderate chip damage on her area-damage skill, pushing through it was hard to punish. With Fragile, Viper’s team should have a big advantage on anyone if they fire on pushing enemies.”

W”e like Viper’s unique ability to do “one-way” smokes, but some of the locations could create places where it was suicide to push through. An increased window should keep this viable without eliminating the strategy.”

JETT

REYNA

CYPHER

Smoke tuning – The previous tuning for smokes made it far too punishing for players to push through and take a calculated risk—really encouraging them to be used as a powerful defensive stall tool. Pushing through a smoke will still be risky, just more reasonable.

Bucky weapon update:

• Crouch-walking accuracy: 3.45 >>> 4.1
• Walk accuracy 6.4 >>> 4.4
•  Run Accuracy 3.5 >>> 6.4

Competitive mode added; changes from beta:

• Updated rank iconography.
• New name for top rank: Radiant
• Expanded skill disparity range for playing with friends in rank placements

Map updates

“We’re peeling back a bit on the amount of locations that require ability usage, thorough angle checking or teamwork to clear safely.

The intention is that angles that are more difficult to clear are most commonly found in areas meant to reinforce existing territory control. This is to emphasize ability usage and teamwork in order to reliably gain control of these locations. An added benefit is that this encourages ability usage and combat engagements to be spread out across the map which can help prevent the frequency of scenarios where all of the players expend all of their abilities and ultimates in the same place at the same time.

We’ll continue monitoring how the maps are playing and make adjustments as necessary.”

Adjusted numerous locations to allow clearing angles to be a bit more straightforward in the following places:

Haven

• Garage Doors
• Entrance to C Long on Attacker Side
• Cover in A Lobby restructured to open up the space which allows for additional sight lines and traversal options
• C Link
• A Link
• The Entrance to A Sewer and the bottom of A Sewer

Ascent

• Defender spawn entrance
• Attacker side of A Main (Including a self-boost to gain an additional angle to peek A Main as an attacker)
• Garden entrance

Bind

• A Bath entrance
• B Teleporter Exit and B Window entrance

Split

• Defender Spawn

Fixes, Performance Improvements, Quality of Life, Battle Pass

Finally, Riot has issued a number of updates to Valorant’s perfomance, HUD, battle pass, and more. Here’s the full list:

HUD & UI

“We’ve included a set of menu UI changes as part of our ongoing work to clarify the client experience coming out of Closed Beta. This is only a small portion of the improvements, but should push overall usability in a positive direction.Navigation and UI changes are disruptive, so we appreciate your patience adjusting to the new approach and we hope you find the changes to be upgrades after you settle in.

As always, thank you for your continued feedback. We have a long way to go, but we’ll keep hammering on the client UI until it’s a stellar experience for everyone.”

• All main sections views now have a “back” button in the upper left to return to the Home view (pressing Escape is also supported)
• All details views (gun details, players cards, match details, etc.) have been converted to use the same back button in the upper left instead of a close button in the upper right
• Small popup dialogs still use the close button in the upper right where appropriate
• Slide-out options menu removed from the logo button in upper left
• New options button added to upper right, which opens the menu with Settings, Support, About, Leave Match, and Exit to Desktop buttons
• Circle progress elements for Battlepass and active contract removed from navigation; missions element remains throughout the experience
• Navigation reordered to accommodate the changes
• Exit to desktop flow converted to a single button with a popup that allows a player to exit or sign out and exit.
•  Note that the Leave Match button is now displayed all the time, but will be locked in cases where leaving a match is not allowed. Previously the button was missing completely when leaving was not allowed, which looked like a bug rather than a restriction.
• Added a setting that allows players to always display the inventory in the lower right of the HUD
• Added a new HUD element that tells you when you haven’t been spawned in due to being AFK

BATTLEPASS

• Added Battlepass text button in the nav to make it easier to find
• Added small progress bar below text that shows progress for current level of the pass
• Hovering Battlepass in the nav shows a “peek” flyout of upcoming pass rewards
• Clicking either goes to a new Battlepass section

CONTRACT & AGENTS SECTION

• Moved Agents section out from under Collection to make it easier to find and to provide a home for contract progress in the nav
• Added small progress bar below text that shows progress for current level of the active contract
• Hovering Agents in the nav shows a “peek” of upcoming contract rewards
• Clicking Agents goes to the Agents section, and clicking the contract flyout navigates to Agents and opens the associated contract details
• Removed secondary navigation from Collection view since Agents no longer lives there and the navigation is no longer needed

QUALITY OF LIFE

•  “An Early Surrender option has been added. You can now opt to surrender out of a match ahead of the match’s completion if you do not want to continue playing. We will also be adding some light polish and functionality in future patches post 1.02.”
  • You can call an early surrender vote by typing: “/ff” “forfeit” “concede” or “surrender”
  • An early surrender vote requires all present players on the surrendering team to vote ‘yes’ to pass
  • You can vote via “/yes” or “/no” along with the settings F5 and F6 (defaults)
  • Each team can only call a vote once per half
  •  Early surrender votes cannot be called before reaching round 8.
    • Once a vote is called the vote option will be queued to vote on for the next round, or if you call the vote early enough in the buy phase you can vote immediately.
  • The winning team gets round win credit for every round necessary to bring them up to the victory condition (13 rounds). The surrendering team will get loss credit for every round necessary to bring them up to 13 rounds

• Added a setting that to allow players to permanently mute text from enemy players

Update to Tagging (slowdown effect when hit by enemy fire)

•  Effect of tagging on movement speed reduced:
  • Tagging Movement Speed Reduction (Standard) 80% >> 70%
  • Tagging Movement Speed Reduction (Wall Penetration) 35% >> 25%
• Increased the time it takes to reach desired slow amount when tagged by 100%

“Tagging is intended to reward the player with better positioning and the player that successfully lands a shot on the enemy first. When tagged, you will now more gradually transition to the reduced tagging speed. In addition, the reduced tagging speed is slightly more forgiving. If you are positioned close to cover, this should allow you to potentially escape when tagged more frequently than before. Also, the effects of being tagged should feel less jarring especially when playing with higher ping.

Tagging through walls has been further reduced which should enable reliable escapes when being shot through walls.”

MODE UPDATES

Spike Rush

• New Orb Type – Tracer Orb
  • Team-wide buff that grants 2x wall penetration and reveals enemies for .75s when they are hit
  • Duration: Entire round

• Speed Boost changed to Combat Stim
  • Movement speed and durations unchanged
  • Reload time decreased by 30%
  • Weapon draw time decreased by 30%
  • Spread recovery time decreased by 30%
  • Rate of Fire increased by 30%
  • Jump force increased by 25%

• Plague Orb now shares a pool with Paranoia Orb
  • Only one of these will be chosen per game
  • Only one Plague Orb can spawn per round
  • Health reduction decreased from 90 to 50

• Deception Orb now shares a pool with Plague Orb
  • Only one of these will be chosen per game
  • Only one Deception Orb can spawn per round
  • Duration decreased from 10s to 8s (now matches Plague Orb)
  • Tunnel vision decreased by 20% (meaning you see more on your screen)

Practice Mode

• Reyna: Killing practice bots now properly spawns Soul Orbs
• Jett: Killing practice bots now properly refreshes Blade Storm

PERFORMANCE UPDATES

“The team primarily focused on smoothing out framerates in certain scenarios. Mostly this helps out mid to high spec machines.”

• Optimized a worst case performance scenario that occurred when multiple players are moving close to one another.
• Optimized multi-kill streak banners.
• Optimized player health bars
• Optimized creation of pings (z-ping, ping wheel, when an ally dies, etc)
• Optimized Spawn Barrier audio causing periodic framerate dips.
• [1.01 Hotfix] Resolved an issue that was causing low memory systems with slow HDDs to perform especially poorly.

BUG FIXES

•  Levels 2-7 for the Sovereign Ghost skin are now fixed and unlockable
  •  As we’ve stated, we never intend for skins to be pay-to-win or pay-to-lose . In this case, the Sovereign Ghost was playing unsilenced audio in third-person on Levels 2-7, so it was totally pay-to-lose and we didn’t want any of you to experience that. It’s fixed now, so go ahead and upgrade that baby and enjoy your custom effects, finisher, kill banner, and variants!
• Fixed Toggle Walk, you can once again use this setting
• Fixed the Return from AFK message only displaying the name of the last player to rejoin
• Fixed an issue where the defuse bar would duplicate
• Fixed several localization strings and text overlaps
• Fixed several crashes
• Fixed a bug where the Spike could automatically plant when you walked onto a plant site while it was in your inventory
• Fixed a bug where the Spike would float in the air if it had been placed on a Sage wall
• Fixed a bug where the dropped Spike’s model could be invisible to defenders on while it was on the ground
• Fixed a bug where gun buddies were squished on the Arsenal page
• Fixed a bug where trying to open the Character Select UI while the megamap in the Shooting Range would result in a deadlock
• Improved GPU performance of most out of game menu screens
• Fixed a bug where sometimes players got stuck on the transition into game and never successfully transitioned into game
• Fixed a bug where the spread on the Bucky’s alt fire was higher when walking than was when running or standing still
• Fixed a bug where dead players could appear standing when you reconnect to a match
• Fixed a bug where you could get stuck grabbing orbs
• Fixed a bug where enemy players would appear on the minimap while watching the Spike, once your team was dead

KNOWN ISSUES

• Competitive match overtime on this patch will be resolved using Sudden Death, which we know is intrinsically unfair. We’re actively working on replacing this with a more fair solution.
•  We’ve discovered issues in our routing software causing some players in Sweden to be incorrectly placed on our Istanbul game servers, and this is likely causing a small number of players elsewhere to also end up on the incorrect game servers. The fix is deployed to our Stockholm networking gear and we’re deploying the fix globally this week.