Valorant is officially out of closed beta as the game is currently live. Patch 1.0 arrived along and brought plenty of changes, but are they enough?
If you wanted to try Valorant during the closed beta, it’s too late, the game has officially launched. Anyone who wants to try it out can do so, by just making an account and downloading it. With the release, Riot also posted all the changes coming with patch 1.0. So what changed? Let’s find out.
The obvious ones
Reyna is the latest agent to join the roster of playable characters. As described by Ryan “Morello” Scott, “she’s a feast or famine” agent that’ll either dominate the field or remain irrelevant. The new map Ascent is also playable.
Ascent is a map set in Italy that features a large, open middle area that both teams can skirmish over. Mid is a playground for diverse ability use and successfully controlling the area opens additional routes for Attackers to both Spike sites.
There's also the Spike Rush mode which gives every attacker a Spike and makes things quite interesting. Everyone plays with the same loadout and the first team to take four rounds wins. There are also various power-ups scattered across the map. It's certainly not the warm-up (Deathmatch) everyone was hoping for, but we get what we get. A deathmatch mode was also hinted so it's surely on the way.
Sage
- Healing Orb cooldown increased 35 >>> 45 seconds
- Barrier Orb segment health reduced 1000 >>> 800
- Barrier Orb duration reduced 40 >>> 30 seconds
- Friendly Barrier Orb walls now show on the minimap
Raze
- Blast Pack maximum damage radius reduced 2 >>> 1 meters
Jett
- Cloud Burst smoke duration increased 4 >>> 7 seconds
- Tailwind automatically breaks Cypher’s Trapwires after being briefly revealed
Phoenix
- Blaze duration increased 6>>>8 seconds
- Blaze damage: 15 every 0.25s >>> 1 every 0.033 seconds
- Blaze healing: 3 every 0.25s >>> 1 every 0.16 seconds
- Hot Hands healing: 3 every 0.25s >>> 1 every 0.08s.
- Curveball max flash duration increased 0.8 >>> 1.1 second
- Run it Back automatically reloads all weapons on respawn
Omen
- Paranoia is now equipped instead of quickcast, and hit detection improved, especially at close range
- Dark Cover, Omen now enters a “phaser” world where he can see through walls to place his smokes and pressing RELOAD toggles between phased and normal targeting.
- Dark Cover controls have been updated where Omen can now increase smoke distance with PRIMARY FIRE, decrease it with SECONDARY FIRE, and throw smoke with the ABILITY KEY.
- Shrouded Step, Omen can now see his teleport location on the map and receives an in-world indicator of where he’s targeting when his vision of the point is obstructed.
- From the Shadows Omen can now cancel his teleport while in Shade form by pressing the ABILITY KEY again—Omen still loses all of his ult points if he cancels.
Sage was without the best agent that was guaranteed to be in every team. These slight nerfs won’t change that. Phoenix gets some decent buffs to his flash and ultimate along with a tweak on how healing over time and damage over time work. Just as we expected Omen received the most tweaks which will greatly improve the playing experience. Jett has been considered a bottom of the barrel pick, but at least now her smokes will last a decent amount of time.
Sounds are now visualized
We’ve brought in more sounds made by Agents under the category of sounds that display their audio distance on the mini-map via the white circle. This includes ability sounds, reloads, spike interactions and more.
Expect to see some white circles on your map which will give you a good idea when you're making sound and where it can be heard from.
Maps
Split
- Restructured mid chokepoint
We felt like Defenders were able to effectively plug up the main choke point in mid for a large percentage of the round. The new layout hopes to alleviate this issue. These changes open up the space quite a bit and provides an additional path to get around stalling abilities on the stairs. It also gives Attackers a few different angles to help siege B Tower and Vents.
Aside from these, there are various bug fixes, quality of life updates, and performance optimization for both high and low-end computers. (Note that we covered the most notable changes, for the full notes check the official Valorant website)
- READ MORE: Reyna is the new agent coming to Valorant
Stay tuned for more Valorant news and check our EarlyGame for more content.
