Valorant Patch 4.05 Notes Reveal Brimstone Stim Nerf & Better Map Rotation System

The rise of Brimmy with the stimmy has been halted somewhat today following the launch of Valorant’s latest patch 4.05. The nerf sees his Stim Pack, which was buffed at the start of Act II to increase movement speed, reduced to just a single usage, and it’s also more expensive.

Elsewhere in the patch, a new Deterministic map rotation system is launching after its test run in the LATAM region. The system is designed to improve map rotation. Also, there’s a new setting offers players the option to pick up primary weapons automatically. There are also one or two bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Here’s the full overview of patch notes:

Agent Changes (Brimstone)

• Stim Beacon
  • Charges reduced 2 >>> 1
  • Cost increased 100 >>> 200

Game System Updates

• Reworked ‘Prioritize Strongest Weapon’ setting
  • Renamed setting to Auto-Equip Prioritizes: Most Recent | Strongest
  • Updated the priority system to support weapon-like abilities (previous priority: Primary > Secondary > Melee)
    • New priority: (Ultimate & Primary) > (Secondary & Chamber Pistol) > Melee
    • Resolve priority ties by selecting the more recently equipped weapon
• Added a new setting: Don’t Auto-Equip Melee
  • Skips past the melee when finding the most recent weapon to auto-equip.
  • Prevents pulling the melee back out after channeling or casting abilities, without changing any other auto-equip behavior.

Note that you can still queue up ‘equip’ inputs (e.g., pressing ‘1’ mid-dash to equip your primary once the dash completes). When you didn’t queue up a specific equip action, the default auto-equip behavior was to pull out the most recently equipped weapon. The new settings are meant to allow you to modify that behavior based on preference.

Competitive Update

• Deterministic Map System enabled for all regions
  •  As explained in Patch Notes 4.04, this rollout should increase the variety of maps in your queue based on a system we tested in the LATAM region.

Bugs

Competitive

• Fixed a bug that was causing the Leave Match button to function incorrectly for PBE players

Agents

• Fixed issue where Sova’s Recon Bolt was destroyed by Brimstone’s Orbital Strike even if the Recon Bolt was well out of the area

Social

• Fixed a bug where the mic icon on the scoreboard could not be interacted with after hovering over it with the mouse

KNOWN ISSUES

Icebox

• There are a handful of bug fixes prepped for Icebox, but the team ran into an issue that blocked us from shipping them right at 4.05 launch. We hope to ship these before the next patch and will list them here as soon as we do.