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.

Related: VALORANT’s 1.0 update makes changes to 5 agents

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.

Related: VALORANT 1.0 update adds new map Ascent, map changes

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.