Here are the updates and notes for VALORANT Patch 1.01

Riot Games is going easy on the updates in VALORANT Patch 1.01. The devs are taking it slow and steady, targeting Sage and Spike Rush—the title’s alternative game mode.

Sage, once again, is having some of her innate power taken away. Spike Rush is getting a few extra orbs and some refreshing balance changes, though.

This is a tiny patch, but the quality of life changes, bug fixes, and the agent, map, and game mode adjustments are welcomed.

Here are the updates and notes for VALORANT Patch 1.01

Gameplay and balance

Sage

Barrier Orb

• Cast range reduced from 20 to 10 meters.
• Sage is supposed to be most effective when defending territory that she already controls. The 20m cast range was allowing Sage to aggressively take control of neutral territory in a way that was inappropriate for her role. This change aims to keep her strong while defending territory but reduce her efficacy at taking ground, according to Riot.

Map updates

Ascent

• Fixed several spots where weapons were falling through the world and issues with wall penetration.

All maps

• Modified several call out names to better match player terms.

Spike Rush update

• Each game of Spike Rush now features a set of five randomly selected orbs.
• The Full Ultimate orb will always be available.
• Four of the remaining seven orb types will be chosen at random.
• Chosen orb types will be shown in description widget both in character select and during pre-round.

New orb types

• Health Orb – Grants teamwide health regen (instant).
  • 20-second duration
  • 12 HP per second (Three HP per tick)
  • SFX/VFX only play while actually healing
• Deception Orb – Applies “Paranoia” to the enemy team three seconds after capture.
  • 10-second debuff
  • Vision is greatly reduced (and a small field of vision shift)
  • Fake footsteps and gunfire play for affected players
  • Minimap is disabled
• Golden Gun – Grants capturing player a Golden Gun.
  • One-shot, one-kill
  • Perfectly accurate at all times
  • Agent moves at knife speed
  • Only has a single bullet in chamber and two backup rounds
  • Kills grant an additional round

Misc.

• New pre-round HUD element that shows the weapon and potential orb types for the current round.
• Players now get one ultimate point for collecting any orb.

Performance updates

The focus on this week’s patch is on improving performance during combat and general performance improvements for high spec machines, according to Riot. The game should feel even smoother in combat and FPS should be higher on average.

• Combat perf: A number of problems causing dips during combat have been fixed.
  • Skins for 9/10 players were failing to pre-load in the game. The first time players came across these skins in-game, they’d experience a framerate drop
  • The patch has reduced frame dips that would occur when a kill callout was added or removed to the HUD, and improved the performance of the Viper specific HUD elements which had some performance issues.
• +FPS on mid to high spec:
  • Added multithreaded rendering support for high-end machines. If your machine meets the requirements to benefit from multithreaded rendering, you’ll see a new option to turn it on or off in the Graphics Quality menu.
  • Multithreaded rendering improves performance in scenes where the cost of managing objects that need to be rendered exceeds the cost of the game simulation and the cost of actually rendering the scene on the GPU. These conditions most commonly occur when moving through scenes with lots of objects visible (ex. Split attacker spawn) and in cases where the game simulation doesn’t require much work (ex. practice range, out of combat gameplay, etc.).
  • Multithreaded vision cones; minimap vision cones will now compute on another thread, if it’s able to.
  • Large VFX passes across all maps, this reduced the CPU side cost of these particles by allowing the GPU to do more of the simulation.
  • Reworked client performance Stats to include more detailed breakdown of frame times.

Quality of life

• Sova’s Recon Dart will behave more consistently and only reveal the portion of enemies behind a wall.
• Added a setting that allows the inventory to always appear.
• Pings will no longer draw over allies and enemies when placed behind them.
• Transition out of game now shows the map you just played instead of Brimstone and Sage walking into a teleporter.
• In the shooting range, changing character now uses a lightweight and more performant UI than the flow going into a match.
• Missions on the end of game screen are now sorted by completion and by type.
• Minor visual improvements to Contract and Battlepass rewards in the progression widget located at the top of the screen.

Bug fixes

• Fixed issue where translucent particles, like smoke layers, would show through Reyna’s Nearsight.
• Fixed VFX that obscured Reyna’s screen if she scoped while healing.
• Reyna’s overheal health no longer incorrectly shows 151 total when maxed.
• Cypher Spycameras placed on the teleporter door frames on Bind no longer teleport it’s view location underground.
• Cypher’s Cyber Cage no longer holds the teleporter doors on Bind open.
• The Area-of-Effect indicators for Sova’s Recon Bolt and Reyna’s Leer now only show up on the enemy’s minimap if the player or their allies are close to the affected area.
• Fixed input and other various pieces of Agent control UI showing up for spectators.
• Fixed a bug where dead player’s 1st-person arms would appear to be floating in the air.
• Fixed a bug where activating a spray could exit ADS while firing.
• Fixed a bug with the Bullet Tracers setting, having this setting active used to also disable muzzle flash on some weapons in addition to tracers.
• Fixed an issue with the mouse cursor flickering when moving it over the scoreboard.
• Fixed an issue with milliseconds in the round timer not being accurate.
• Fixed an issue with some keybindings not displaying keybinding conflicts warnings correctly.
• Fixed an Observer bug where the first person being observed in the game did not have a character portrait.
• Fixed an issue with automatic weapons rarely not displaying tracers or audio effects when fired in short bursts.
• Fixed a bug where the defuse bar was duplicated.
• Fixed voice input/output devices and settings not persisting across sessions.
• Fixed a slew of localization issues across end of game screens.
• Fixed a handful of visual issues across end of game screens.
• Fixed an issue whispering players of the same name/general DM improvements.
• Improved chat service error messaging.
• Settings menu is now letterboxed as intended.
• While on the Agents page, clicking on COLLECTION now correctly navigates back to the Arsenal page.