It’s not too often that you see patch notes for a closed beta, but in keeping with their impressive communication levels for Valorant, Riot Games have decided to keep us in the loop. The 0.47 patch was nothing crazy, but a couple of much needed changes were made.
Firstly, after outcry from fans that Raze was way too overpowered, the developers have given their input. Whilst they do predict that “savvy players will perform better against her over time”, they do concede that she was a bit too strong out the gate. Therefore they have slightly nerfed her in order to bring her offensives pressure closer to the other agents.
Another important change was the doubling of damage per hit from melee attacks onto destructibles such as Sage’s Barrier and Haven’s metal double doors. This is to make these sort of abilities more manageable in low econ rounds.
Full patch notes can be found below, and you can check out the official Riot blog post here.
GAMEPLAY AND BALANCE
MELEE DAMAGE
- Melee attacks now inflict double the damage per hit to destructibles, including
- Sage’s Barrier
- Haven’s metal double doors
- Why? There weren’t enough options during low econ rounds—such as the first round and right after switching sides—to combat Sage’s Barrier Orb. Our intent is to add a high-risk, high-reward method for players to interact with her wall, while still being able to take it down, no matter their loadout
RAZE
- Reduced Paint Shells from 2 to 1
- Paint Shells now have a kill reset, requiring players to get 2 kills to refresh cooldown
- Tuned and adjusted audio for Paint Shells, Blast Pack, and Showstopper so that they’ll be easier to hear in hectic scenarios
- Fixed an edge case where the secondary cluster of Paint Shells would explode quicker than intended. They now have a minimum duration before exploding.
- What’s up with that? Raze’s goal is to be a highly-threatening duelist that punishes enemies posted in predictable positions, but we felt like the cluster grenades and their number were creating overly oppressive scenarios. Also, players should be supplied proper gameplay information and the audio cues on all of Raze’s abilities didn’t match their threat, so we changed the audio of each. For example, when the Showstopper is equipped or fired from a distance, players should be able to clearly identify and interpret the threat.
SAGE
- Slow Orb now also slows the air speed of players in the zone
- Players can now walk through the Slow Orb without making noise
- Why though? Players were able to circumvent too much of Sage’s Slow Orb by bunny hopping through the zone. We want the minimum slow amount to be a bit more consistent with all movement in the zone, while still allowing for bunny hopping and walking to provide a slight benefit to traversing the zone. Also, we feel adding a stealthy yet slow way to move through the field brings more nuance to playing against the zone and a bit more uncertainty for Sage, since she can't necessarily hear people who move through
MAP UPDATES
- Several exploits fixed on Bind, Haven, and Split
- Split: Orb moved from B Mid to B Main
- The intent is to alleviate some pressure from mid and provide more incentive for players to control B Main.
QUALITY OF LIFE
- Reduced outbound network traffic from client for players running at high frames-per-second
- Some ISPs and network setups were throttling game traffic, impacting gameplay by causing large spikes in network latency as FPS increased.
- No impact to gameplay / responsiveness
BUG FIXES
- Fixed a rare server crash caused by packets occasionally being corrupted by some players’ networks
- Cypher’s Spycam can no longer use weapons
- Fixed a bug where footstep audible range would sometimes not appear on the minimap