Riot Games continues its support of Valorant today with a new patch that finally sees the introduction of the hotly anticipated new Agent Skye. The Aussie huntress will now be able to unleash her powers across Valorant’s new maps, including Icebox, which joins Competitive for the first time.
The patch notes reveal other notable changes, too, such as tweaks to both Sentinel Agents, Cypher and Killjoy. Cypher’s cameras and tripwires are now disabled and revealed when he dies,.
Killjoy, meanwhile, now needs to be within 40 meters for her turrets to function, though the cooldown for turret redeployment has been reduced from 20 to 10 seconds. There are similar changes to both her Alarmbot and Nanoswarm abilities, too, which are harder to detect and do more damage.
Elsewhere, Breach gets a small buff as his flash duration is increased from 1.75 to 2 seconds.
Here are some of the smaller but equally important tweaks to the economy, quality of life features, and bug fixes:
Games Systems
Updates to Economy Ruleset
- Attackers who lose but survive the entire round without planting the Spike receive a reduced number of credits (1,000)
- Defenders who lose but survive the entire round after the Spike has detonated also receive reduced credits (1,000)
- Dying to the Spike will no longer count as a death in KDA statistics
- Additional economic information added as a tooltip when hovering over the exclamation mark next to “Min Next Round” in the shop
Quality of Life
- Left-handed view model is now available for players. Players can swap their first person view-model to lefthanded by going to the settings menu and swapping their view model to “Left-Handed”. Changing this will also show all other players as left-handed when spectating.
- You can now send a direct message by clicking a friend’s name in chat instead of having to type their name out
- Players that have been AFK or alt-tabbed for more than 5 minutes will now appear as ‘Away’ in the Social Panel
- Adjusted team colors to remain fixed for the full duration of a game for observers instead of having the Attacking side always appear as red, and the defending side always appear as green
- The experience of having teams switch colors at the half from a viewer perspective was a bit confusing, and also led to some difficulties for broadcasters to match their overlays to this behavior. This change will allow the viewers and tournament organizers to have a more consistent experience for the entirety of a game.
- [BETA] Experimental Sharpening
Bug Fixes
- Fixed one source of combat hitches we’ve seen from player reports
- We’re continuing to investigate the combat hitches that players have been reporting in recent patches. This patch includes a fix for one of the most common hitches that we’ve seen during combat. While we hope that this will resolve the issue for many of you, we’re still actively tracking down a couple other hitches that we’ve seen from your clips.
- Jett now can’t rope dash lel
- Fixed a bug where incoming Party invites would remain active in the Social Panel after being declined
- Players no longer see the spike location when reconnecting to a game
- Fixed issue where player corpses could cause collision issues
- Sage wall segments no longer breaks if a player dies on top of them
- Fixed a bug that would disable queueing for any mode if a player closed the client during the Match Found countdown.
- Fixed a bug that was displaying Act Rank badge on the MVP screen outside of Competitive Queue.
For Valorant’s Patch 1.0 notes, it’s here.
