Riot Games’ first-person shooter has found a way to a new patch. Being early in closed beta, this is kind of amazing to see already the development rush through a couple of game-breaking bugs and updates, balance, and more. Well, guess what, Raze is no longer you’re most viable damage dealer due to this slight nerf of her abilities.
Entitled as patch 0.47+, Riot Games has enumerated all of the player-discovered flaws. The game had a couple of issues, such as Cypher’s spycam using weapons, Raze being slightly overturned, and more. Even Sage has been buffed to slow bunny hoppers as well.
We’re kind of excited to seeing Valorant pumping up refreshing content, encountering each and every change within its era. But, let’s be honest. In the patch notes below, you will notice the difference in SPLIT. It is the map in which the middle area is heavily anticipated, not because of the Orb (even though the devs think the Orb is an incentive here) but because of the map design. The thing is that you have only one entrance to any bomb site.
On SPLIT, having more people cover multiple bomb sites is kind of dubious, simply because the only connection to any Bomb Site is through the mid area. Which again, doesn’t really add the Orb as an incentive, but instead, the map pathing.
Regarding Raze, I feel like the devs have listened to me, and they have lowered the stacks of Paint Shells from 2 to 1. However, they have now kill reset, such as other characters do, requiring two kills for a recharge. It’s not too bad. The cluster of grenades has been exploding a lot faster than the initial explosion, leading to oppressive scenarios. Well, I cannot wait to hop into a game and see how many people are picking Raze now.
For more detailed patch notes, you can check the section below:
GAMEPLAY AND BALANCE
MELEE DAMAGE
- Melee attacks now inflict double the damage per hit to destructibles, including
- Sage’s Barrier
- Haven’s metal double doors
- Why?
- There weren’t enough options during low econ rounds—such as the first round and right after switching sides—to combat Sage’s Barrier Orb. Our intent is to add a high-risk, high-reward method for players to interact with her wall, while still being able to take it down, no matter their loadout
RAZE
- Reduced Paint Shells from 2 to 1
- Paint Shells now have a kill reset, requiring players to get 2 kills to refresh cooldown
- Tuned and adjusted audio for Paint Shells, Blast Pack, and Showstopper so that they’ll be easier to hear in hectic scenarios
- Fixed an edge case where the secondary cluster of Paint Shells would explode quicker than intended. They now have a minimum duration before exploding.
- What’s up with that?
- Raze’s goal is to be a highly-threatening duelist that punishes enemies posted in predictable positions, but we felt like the cluster grenades and their number were creating overly oppressive scenarios. Also, players should be supplied proper gameplay information and the audio cues on all of Raze’s abilities didn’t match their threat, so we changed the audio of each. For example, when the Showstopper is equipped or fired from a distance, players should be able to clearly identify and interpret the threat.
SAGE
- Slow Orb now also slows the air speed of players in the zone
- Players can now walk through the Slow Orb without making noise
- Why though?
- Players were able to circumvent too much of Sage’s Slow Orb by bunny hopping through the zone. We want the minimum slow amount to be a bit more consistent with all movement in the zone, while still allowing for bunny hopping and walking to provide a slight benefit to traversing the zone. Also, we feel adding a stealthy yet slow way to move through the field brings more nuance to playing against the zone and a bit more uncertainty for Sage, since she can’t necessarily hear people who move through
MAP UPDATES
- Several exploits fixed on Bind, Haven, and Split
- Split: Orb moved from B Mid to B Main
- The intent is to alleviate some pressure from mid and provide more incentive for players to control B Main.
QUALITY OF LIFE
- Reduced outbound network traffic from client for players running at high frames-per-second
- Some ISPs and network setups were throttling game traffic, impacting gameplay by causing large spikes in network latency as FPS increased.
- No impact to gameplay / responsiveness
BUG FIXES
- Fixed a rare server crash caused by packets occasionally being corrupted by some players’ networks
- Cypher’s Spycam can no longer use weapons
- Fixed a bug where footstep audible range would sometimes not appear on the minimap
