Game-breaking VALORANT bug makes players immune to Viper’s abilities

Besides introducing a slew of new content, VALORANT’s Episode Seven unintentionally welcomed a few notorious bugs after its launch on June 27. While multiple gameplay elements were affected by patch 7.0’s flaws and are still awaiting fixes, one game-breaking glitch renders three of Viper’s abilities ineffective for the entire match. And unfortunately for Viper mains, it has yet to be fixed.

A potent controller agent in VALORANT’s roster of 22 agents, Viper comes with the potential to reduce her enemies’ health temporarily, all thanks to the Decay status effect of her Poison Cloud, Toxic Screen, and Pit. Despite receiving several nerfs over the years, Viper’s potent Decay effect makes her smokes the best at anchoring a site.

But the Episode Seven bug can nullify the effect completely for players, so they don’t have to worry about dealing with Decay from Poison Cloud, Toxic Screen, and Viper’s Pit for the entire match. To recreate this, a player, regardless of the agent, has to die in an overlapping section of their ally and enemy Viper’s ultimates, after which they will no longer take any decaying damage from her abilities. 

We recreated the bug in a custom match, as seen in our video below.

Note that you’ll need a Viper on both teams to be able to recreate the bug effectively. Both Vipers will have to deploy their ultimates, Viper’s Pit, so they overlap each other.

One may argue that in most cases, players won’t get their ultimates online in the same round, and even if they do, chances are they won’t get to use it in the same location. Viper’s Pit costs eight ult points; most players wouldn’t be able to use their pit more than two times in a match’s half. 

The bug is definitely difficult to recreate in a competitive or unrated match, because there’re too many prerequisites. If it does occur, however, the immunized player can capitalize on it to win the match unfairly.

In addition to the Viper’s Pit bug, another game-breaking bug related to the aggressive scientist causes players to take permanent decay damage, forcing them to play at one health point for an entire round. We couldn’t recreate this bug in a custom match of our own, but several players have reported being affected by it.   

Related: Eerie silence: VALORANT update accidentally deletes key agent gameplay feature

Immediately after Episode Seven’s launch—which brought VALORANT’s fifth sentinel agent, an alternate game mode, a new battlepass, and more—players began highlighting massive issues with the patch. From performance gaps, FPS drops, and packet loss, to agent voice glitches, the situation is pretty dire, begging the question, when will Riot fix its mess?