New Valorant Patch Brings Major Changes to Split, & a Minor Tweak to Jett

It’s only been a week since Valorant’s Episode 2 introduced a brand new Agent, battle pass season, and a bunch more content, but developer Riot Games is already rolling out a new patch. Patch 2.1 is a pretty substantial one, too, completely overhauling one of the game’s most defender-heavy maps.

Split is known for its tight hallways and sharp corners, which makes it a tricky map to control as an attacking team. That’s prompted Riot to redesign several different areas in the hope of rebalancing its dynamic to reduce the defending advantage.

Riot explains:

“This Split update is focused around improving attacker options on the map, as well as reducing 50/50 checks, the depth of certain corners, and opening specific areas on the map by increasing chokepoint widths.”

Here’s a slide-show highlighting all the new changes:

Patch 2.1’s other notable change is a small tweak to Jett’s Cloudburst which is actually likely to prove fairly consequential. Previously, the utility had the potential to turn Jett into a controller-type Agent given how effective the smoke was at obscuring lines of sight. With its time now reduce from 7 to 4.5 seconds, there’s more incentive for teams to pick a proper control Agent, such as Brimstone.

Players might well remember that Jett’s Cloudburst was originally just 4 seconds and was actually buffed in Patch 1.0 to 7, so we’re more or less resetting those changes here.

Finally, Valorant Patch 2.0 makes some quality of life improvements and fixes a bunch of bugs. Here’s the breakdown:

Competitive Updates

• Added ability to hide custom game results from Match History
  • Many of you, especially pros, have asked for the ability to not show custom game Match History results, so that they can practice without other players scouting their strategies. We wanted to ship this feature ahead of Challengers so you can practice without this concern.

Social Updates

• The Add Friend button now exists for teammates only, and the option of adding enemy players has been removed
  • Any teammates with privacy/streamer mode enabled will not have the Add Friend button near their name.
• Queue restrictions for AFK-ing in-game and during pre-game have changed
  • We want to make sure that folks having connectivity issues aren’t harshly penalized, but those who are purposefully AFK-ing receive harsher penalties.
  • With that, we will be adding AFK forgiveness for a certain number of rounds, but repeated/extended occurrences will be penalized with higher queue restrictions.

Bugs

• Fixed an issue with rank promotion and demotion indicators overlapping players rank on the Career page
• Fixed a bug that would cause either a Radiant icon or an error message to show during the End of Game screen instead of the correct rank details
• Fixed a bug where Reyna’s Leer would not display on the minimap correctly
• Fixed a bug where credits wouldn’t be properly refunded after selling a gun that a teammate bought
  • Thanks to this post, as well as many previous reports on reddit!
• Fixed a bug where offscreen flash VFX would display incorrectly
• Fixed a bug where Phoenix’s starting location would briefly be displayed on the minimap after being killed in Run it Back
• Fixed issue where Omen’s reforming VFX didn’t line up with where he actually appeared when using Shrouded Step
• Fixed Jett being able to trigger the defuse sound while dashing
• Fixed Omen being able to trigger the defuse sound while teleporting
• Fixed issue that caused Yoru’s Fakeout decoy to persist in the world after his death
• Fixed issue where Raze’s Boom Bot could be placed through some walls
• Fixed issue where Omen could have his gun equipped while forming during From the Shadows
• Resolved Regrowth’s number UI not updating as Skye used the ability
• Fixed fire rate stacking issue when a player is in one Brimstone Stim Pack while another ends
• Fixed Skye not properly showing the callout region she’s in