Here are the notes and updates for VALORANT Patch 1.04

Riot Games is focusing on four agents in VALORANT Patch 1.04 today.

Viper is receiving extensive changes in the form of buffs to her ultimate ability, decay, and fuel. Raze and Brimstone are receiving minor nerfs, while Cypher gets a much-needed buff.

Classic, the game’s starting pistol, is also in for some changes. Riot is targetting its right-click capabilities and giving the weapon a little more consistency. Jump shots have been nerfed, but crouch and stationary accuracy have been buffed.

Here’s the full list of changes coming to VALORANT in Patch 1.04

Agent updates

Viper

Viper’s Pit

• Max time outside of her ult before it collapses changed from five to 12 seconds.
• Viper can hold the ability key to drop her ult early.
• Enemies in Viper’s Pit have their minimap obscured and do not provide minimap detection to their allies.
• Increased the brightness of the red enemy glow at the edge of Viper’s near-sight.

Decay

• Enemy decay per second increased from 10 to 15 from all sources.
• After exiting Viper’s smoke, enemy decay sustains for 2.5 seconds before starting to fade.

Fuel

• Having both Poison Cloud and Toxic Screen active does not consume additional fuel beyond the cost of having one active.

Raze

Showstopper

• Showstopper ultimate cost changed from six to seven ult points.

Brimstone

Orbital Strike

• Orbital Strike ultimate cost changed from six to seven ult points.

Stim Beacon

• Stim Beacon no longer Buffs enemies and no longer shows its effect radius to enemies.

Brimstone’s Arms Fidelity

• Riot has increased the fidelity of Brimstone’s arms to match the overall quality of the game.

Cypher

Cyber Cage

• Cyber Cage can now be picked up during the buy phase.

Weapon updates

Classic

• Fixed bug where running inaccuracy on the right-click was much higher than intended.
• running was adding a 1.5 penalty because it was referencing our generalized running error curves for pistols.
• Fixed bug where jumping had no inaccuracy penalty.
• Running spread is changed from 3.4 to 2.1, primarily a bug fix.
• Jumping spread changed from 1.9 to 2.3.
• Walking spread changed from 1.9 to 1.95.
• Added a 10 percent bonus to accuracy when crouching and stationary.
• Intent is to feel consistent with crouch providing an accuracy benefit.

HUD and UI

Riot replaced the previous Weapon Stats textbox in the pre-round shop with an easier-to-compare graphical representation of stats.

Quality of life

• Observer minimap vision cones are now colored by team.
• Replaced Reyna’s voice over for Italian and Mexican.

Elderflame skins

• Adjusted the volume on the Elderflame Operator equip animation.
• Fixed bug that would cause the volume to stack if you spam equipped the Operator.
• Enemy footsteps duck cosmetic bus properly.
• This means that enemy footsteps will always lower the volume of the skin sound effects that are not important to gameplay, like the flame whooshes, dragon roar, etc.
• Elderflame Melee inspect animation now has sound effects for level one and two.

Performance updates

• Gun pickup targeting and Sage Ultimate targeting unified with ally character highlights, saving VRam and GPU performance.
• Minor rendering performance fixes.
• Gun skin upgrade videos are now streamed instead of locally stored, reduced install size by 380MB.

Bug fixes

• Fixed requirement for Reyna to look at Soul Orbs to activate them and maintain her healing, behavior should match that of patch 1.02.
• Fixed one-way Brimstone smokes when the player’s camera was around the top of the smoke.
• Fixed Breach’s Aftershock not properly applying damage to all characters if multiple are hit by it.
• Fixed jittering when reaching the max flight height of Sova’s drone.
• Fixed Marshall bug where the weapon maintained accuracy while walking.
• Fixed issues with some translucency effects being one frame behind (such as Jett’s dash, when used by the player).
• Fixed ally highlights not showing up on some AMD GPUs when using MSAA, and some Intel GPUs.
• Fixed a bug where loading screens did not cover the entire screen when playing in certain resolution/aspect ratio combinations.
• Shortened the text on the photosensitivity warning screen.
• Fixed a bug where the “equip” button would stay grayed out when purchasing a skin variant that is being previewed.
• Fixed Brimstone smokes on Haven spawning offset of where intended.
• Fixed a typo in Brimstone’s biography (thanks mooonlimes for the report).