Here are the notes and updates for VALORANT’s Patch 1.05

Killjoy, VALORANT’s 12th agent, has finally arrived.

Patch 1.05 brings a new turret-wielding agent to the game, a fresh battle pass, a Deathmatch mode, and nerfs to Raze’s explosive ultimate and blast packs.

To coincide with the introduction of Act II, a slew of changes to the game’s competitive mode also feature extensively in the patch, focusing on quality-of-life improvements across the board.

Here’s the full list of changes for VALORANT’s Patch 1.05.

Agent updates

[New] Killjoy

A new contract has been added to unlock Killjoy and her associated rewards.

Alarmbot

• Equip a covert Alarmbot. Fire to deploy a bot that hunts down enemies that get in range. After reaching its target, the bot explodes, applying Vulnerable. Hold equip to recall a deployed bot.

Turret

• Equip a Turret. Fire to deploy a turret that fires at enemies in a 180 degree cone. Hold equip to recall the deployed turret.

Nanoswarm

• Equip a Turret. Fire to deploy a turret that fires at enemies in a 180 degree cone. Hold equip to recall the deployed turret.

Ultimate ability: Lockdown

• Equip the Lockdown device. Fire to deploy the device. After a long windup, the device detains all enemies caught in the radius. The device can be destroyed by enemies.

Raze

Showstopper

• Equip Time increased from 1.1 to 1.4
• Quick Equip Time increased from 0.5 to 0.7
• VFX reduced when firing rocket
• VFX on rocket’s trail slightly reduced

Blast Pack

• Damage decreased from 75 to 50
• Damage to objects now consistently does 600

Competitive

• Act Ranks have been added to the game
• Patch 1.05 marks the end of Competitive Act I—Competitive Act II starts
• If you earned a rank in Act I, play three more games to show your rank again in Act II. If you are a new player you will still need to play five initial placement matches
• Expect a conservative initial placement, two tiers lower than your prior Act I rank,
• Competitive matchmaking now will have a higher chance to match solo and solo/duo players against similarly sized premade groups at the cost of queue times being slightly longer
• Regardless of premade sizes, match balance is sitting fairly close to 50 / 50 for which team wins, but there is often a larger skill disparity between the best and worst players in the games with large premade sizes. This change should reduce the chance of solo players getting into games where there is high skill disparity.
• Rank indicators have been modified on a loss to provide more granularity into how your rank was changed— You can now receive:
• Rating decreased slightly (one down arrow)
• Rating decreased (two down arrows)
• Rating greatly decreased (three down arrows)
• Riot is also looking into ways to give additional transparency around rank changes in future patches
• Match History will now show the rank you went into the match with for that game, versus the rank you ended the game with
• You can now view your friends career tab via the context menu in the social panel. This means you can see your friends rank, Act Rank, and Match History
• You can now see how awesome your friends have been doing in their matches and their rank gains
• Custom Games now allow the leader to select your target game pod location and see players ping to that game pod
• For custom games, when all players are opting into the game, Riot wanted to allow the leader more agency around what latency players will have. Hopefully, your custom game leader will try and find the best DC for the game for all players, but if they are greedy you can always leave without penalty

Game modes

• Deathmatch is here
• 10-player free-for-all
• First to 30 kills with a time limit of 6 minutes
• No abilities
• You’ll load in as a random Agent that you own
• Buy whatever weapons you want; heavy armor is given to you automatically
• Killing enemies drops health kits: picking one up fully restores your health/armor and automatically reloads your weapon.
• All enemies are periodically revealed on the minimap
• Deathmatch is in beta as Riot continues to evaluate game performance and stability. Availability will be limited to specific windows upon deployment of 1.05, with the first window starting Wednesday, Aug. 5.

Quality of life

• Players who report other disruptive players will now receive an email if the reported player has been punished
• Arriving mid-patch: Your rotating store offers will stop including things you already own

Bug fixes

• Fixed issue causing Sova’s Owl Drone to rotate slower
• Fixed issue where Reyna did not get her full heal if it began right when her overheal started to decay
• Fixed nearsight not apply properly when going through smoke parts of Viper and Phoenix’s walls
• [1.04 Hotfix] Fixed a bug where Phoenix could plant the Spike off the bomb site if he finished planting after Run it Back ended
• Fixed a bug where ping in the scoreboard would not appear for Observers
• Fixed a bug where Phoenix could in rare cases begin to auto-defuse the Spike if he was defusing the Spike when Run it Back ended
• Fixed an exploit where spamming inspect with a macro could cause server lag
• Game modifiers/cheats now notify all-chat when any player toggles them
• General fixes to moderators, tournament mode, and game modifiers
• Fixed a minimap bug, where the minimap would not correctly rotate on side swap rounds when using fixed minimap and rotate based on side settings
• Resolved inconsistencies and cleaned up UX with options present on the Match tab in the in-game settings screen
• Resolved issue with incorrect rank briefly, and possibly persisting, to show for players in Career tab
• Resolved issue where rating adjustment indicators would show on-hover in Agent Select
• Resolved issue where account # tag wasn’t correctly showing on-hover on the Match tab in the in-game settings screen
• Resolved issue where only one team was able to vote to surrender if both queued the vote at the same time
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to interact with the character selection UI through the Shooting Range loading screen
• When equipping a gun buddy, an unassigned buddy no longer gets selected
• Fixed a visual bug where the lobby would play an unwanted animation when a match is found