Riot releases patch notes for VALORANT Patch 1.0

The launch of Riot Games’ first-person shooter, VALORANT, is quickly approaching.

Ahead of tomorrow’s launch, Riot has released the patch notes for the game’s release. The developer laid out the changes it has made from the end of the closed beta on May 28, including the addition of a new map and a game mode, although Riot stayed somewhat tight-lipped about the exact details of the new mode.

Here are the patch notes for VALORANT Patch 1.0, according to Riot.

Agent changes

Jett

Cloud Burst smoke duration increased from 4 to 7 seconds.
Tailwind automatically breaks Cypher’s Trapwires after being briefly revealed.

Omen

Dark Cover controls have been updated where Omen can now increase smoke distance with primary fire key, decrease it with secondary fire key, and throw smoke with the ability key.
Dark Cover allows Omen to enter a “phaser” world where he can see through walls to place his smokes and pressing RELOAD toggles between phased and normal targeting.
From the Shadow allows Omen to cancel his teleport while in Shade form by pressing the ability key again—Omen still loses all of his ult points if he cancels.
Paranoia is now equipped instead of quickcast, and hit detection improved, especially at close range.
Shrouded Step allows Omen to 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.

Phoenix

Blaze duration increased from 6 to 8 seconds.
Blaze damage decreased from 15 every 0.25 seconds to 1 every 0.033 seconds.
Blaze healing decreased from 3 every 0.25 seconds to 1 every 0.16 seconds.
Curveball max flash duration increased from 0.8 to 1.1 seconds.
Hot Hands healing decreased from 3 every 0.25 seconds to 1 every 0.08 seconds.
Run it Back automatically reloads all weapons on respawn.

Raze

Blast Pack maximum damage radius reduced from 2 to 1 meter.

Sage

Barrier Orb segment health reduced from 1,000 to 800.
Barrier Orb duration reduced from 40 to 30 seconds.
Barrier Orb by teammate now appears on the minimap.
Healing Orb cooldown increased from 35 to 45 seconds.

Map changes

Ascent, the new map, is set in Italy and 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.
Ascent will be slightly more common in our Matchmaking rotation for the first few days so that you can get more opportunities to play on the map.
Split mid chokepoint has been restructured so that it is more open.
Exploits and collisions have been addressed on all maps.

Performance

Addressed multiple causes of framerate dips in combat. These improvements should help the game feel smoother, especially in combat situations on higher-end PCs.
Effect pooling added for impacts, gunshots, and footsteps. This should reduce frame drops when these events occur.
Disabled bullet casings from calculating physics + audio bounces. We’re looking to bring a more optimized version of this feature back in a future patch.
Reduced cost of z-pings and death pings by 10x
Fixed bug causing 90 raycasts per second when pinging
Fixed a bug where NOT opening the options menu every game would cause framerate to drop on a regular cadence
+FPS for mid to high specs: Sped up calculations on the CPU for game and render threads. These improvements will be felt the most on machines with powerful GPUs bottlenecked by their CPU speeds.
Optimized minimap for visible elements
Fixed bug where minimap would calculate twice per frame
Fixed bounding boxes on a variety of VFX, reducing the number of VFX updating at any given time
Reduce cost of updating transform on render thread
Reworked a variety of HUD elements that were previously built on a particularly slow component
+FPS for low to mid specs: Content improvements that will primarily help low to mid tier specs when rendering the world.
Reduced draw calls on all maps
Removed non-gameplay impacting map particles on Low and Medium Detail Quality
Optimized First Person Shadows to no longer consider lights that do not impact final shadows
Removed unintentionally large textures across gun buddies, scopes, silencers
Optimized VFX for Characters
Closed exploit where Nvidia Inspector could be used to see through Viper and Phoenix wall abilities
Added a setting for speaker configuration
Additional tooltip clarity around what graphics quality settings actually do
GPU Time stat now correctly excludes idle time

Full patch notes are available on VALORANT’s website.

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