Valorant 1.04 patch highlights: Viper buff, Classic changes and more

Aside from the usual bug fixes and a small tune-up of the Classic, Agent changes were the main focus of the latest Valorant build.

Viper Buff

Viper mains will be pleased to see a bunch of adjustments, resulting in a pretty significant improvement overall.

Firstly, the time that Viper can spend outside of her ult has been increased from 5 to 12 seconds. On top of this, opponents within Viper’s Pit will now have their minimap obscured and will no longer offer minimap detection to their teammates.

This new-found freedom is intended to allow Viper players to be more creative when using her ult. The minimap changes above coupled with a brighter red enemy glow at the edge of Viper’s near sight will help to give her the upper hand when fighting inside her smoke.

Viper’s decay has also been boosted in order to make her abilities a greater threat. Enemy decay per second is now 15 rather than 10, and decay sustains for 2.5 seconds after exiting Viper’s smoke.

Finally, it is now much more effective to use Poison Cloud and Toxic Screen at the same time. Having both active will not consume additional fuel meaning a longer total uptime.

Other Agents

Raze and Brimstone have each had the cost of their Ultimate Ability altered from 6 to 7 points. The developers feel that these ults are being used a little bit too frequently and having too much impact in comparison to those of other characters.

However, Brimstone’s Stim Beacon has received a nice upgrade. The beacon will no longer show its effect radius to enemies, nor will it accidentally buff them.

The only other adjustment on the Agent front is that Cypher’s Cyber Cage can now be picked up during the buy phase.

Classic

Elsewhere, the Classic has been slightly tampered with. Whilst fixing a couple of bugs with the default weapon, Riot also increased the jumping and walking spread.

On the flip side, running spread was reduced and a 10% accuracy bonus was added when crouching and stationary. These changes are aimed to make the Classic behave a bit more consistently.

You can read the full, detailed list of patch notes and bug fixes for Valorant version 1.04 here.