Valorant Patch 4.03 Notes Reveal Deathmatch Improvements

Valorant’s latest patch, 4.03, is making long-awaited improvements to its deathmatch mode, reducing the spawn time after each death, and tweaking awkward respawn locations. That should result in a smoother and less frustrating experience moving forward. Elsewhere, performance improvements for CPU-bound players should see anything up to a 15% increase in FPS.

Here’s the full overview:

Agent Changes

Brimstone

• Brimstone’s ultimate now properly blocks gameplay visibility while active You’ll no longer see enemies on the minimap through the ultimate.
• Abilities that require line of sight (flashes, Sova recon pulses) will no longer apply through the ultimate.

Mode Updates

Deathmatch

• Removed and in some cases relocated “dangerous” spawn locations
• Improved spawn logic and spawn placement to increase the likelihood that you will be facing each other players in an encounter
• Spawning logic will now favor respawn locations farther away from where you are defeated
• Fixed an issue where the Warm-Up Phase was not using spawn logic properly
• Respawn Time Reduced: 3s >>> 1.5s

Social Updates

• Updated AFK detection in game to deter players from exploiting game modes to farm EXP

Performance Updates

Global Invalidation

• Global Invalidation provides up to 15% improvement to baseline performance for CPU-bound players
  • CPU-bound players are generally mid-to-high spec machines.
  • These numbers are based on data gathered from PBE over two weekends (Jan. 22–23, and Feb. 5–6).
  • Although we expect a large portion of the player base to benefit from these gains, your machine’s performance may vary.

Cosmetic Updates

• Updates to the color of the tile used to display sprays in your Collections
• Some sprays were too close to the color of the original tile and were hard to see properly before actually using them in-game.

Game System Updates

• Added option to return to strongest weapon
  • You can now return to the strongest weapon when pressing the “Equip Last Used Item” key or when auto-equipping a weapon.
  • To toggle ON, go to Settings >> Controls >> Equipment under “Prioritize Strongest Weapon.”
  • This was released in 4.02 but did not make it into the patch notes. My bad!

Esports Updates

• Projectile follow is now fixed for observer followers
• Added observer settings toggle to turn Agent portrait on/off

Bugs

Agents

• Fixed a bug where Chamber’s Headhunter and Tour de Force could float away
• Fixed an exploit where, using specific line-ups, it was possible to see inside Viper’s ultimate without being affected by the nearsighted debuff
• Fixed a bug where Viper’s ultimate would sometimes fail to expand through doorways

Social

Fixed a bug where pressing enter in pre-game wouldn’t focus chat
Fixed a bug where right clicking a player portrait would not bring up a context menu

Performance

• Fixed a bug where performance stats would be hidden while spectating the Spike

Known Issues

• There is a brief flash when swapping into free-cam mode as an observer follow

In other recent Valorant news, the latest weapon skin bundle celebrates Lunar New Year 2022. It’s called Enter the Tigris, and you can check out its cinematic trailer here.