Valorant’s latest patch might finally make Viper worth playing

Valorant’s latest patch is here and Riot’s still on a quest to make Viper a viable character. Along with Viper’s fresh new buffs, this patch also brings small nerfs to Raze and Brimstone, as well as a nerf and slight rework to the Classic default pistol.

Viper’s change is the biggest adjustment this patch, and the biggest change Riot has brought to the character so far. Viper’s Ultimate ability creates a massive cloud of toxic smoke that occupies a large area and obscures the vision of every player that enters. It’s also the ability that got the most attention this patch.

As long as Viper’s in the smoke cloud, it will stay up and now she has an even longer grace period to leave the smoke and come back before it disappears. This patch increases the grace period from five seconds to 12. She now also has the option to drop the Pit whenever she wants. Viper can also have her wall and her Poison Cloud up at the same time without using additional fuel.

Smaller changes also impacted Raze and Brimstone, whose Ultimate abilities now cost seven points to earn instead of six. The Classic pistol also got a major rework, including the removal of jump-shooting at long range — which is probably for the best. To help balance that out, the pistol is now slightly more accurate when running, crouching, or standing still.

For a look at everything that changed in Valorant patch 1.04 you can check out the full patch notes.

Valorant patch 1.04 notes

Agent Updates

Viper

Viper’s Pit

• Max time outside of her ult before it collapses changed from 5>>>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

With Viper being allowed out of her ult for such a short period of time, we felt that she was not only limited in the plays she could make, but also gave too much continuous information to her enemies. The ability to move outside the ult smoke more freely should provide some new and interesting mind games for Viper to play—and hopefully puts the strategic pressure back on the enemy. The other improvements should push Viper’s advantage in her own smoke and help her avoid getting traded by enemies using minimap vision to target her.

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

Viper’s decay depleting so quickly from enemies was limiting the advantage it provided and wasn’t creating the threat we had hoped for as a result. Adding a delay before it fades will hopefully widen the window where Viper and her team can capitalize and pair with the Viper’s Pit updates (above) to provide fresh ways to play around her ult.

Fuel

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

The reduction in total uptime when both her vision blockers were active was making it difficult for Viper to use both tools together. Since Viper’s smoke has so much commitment and makes up so much of her kit, we want to free her to use them in tandem to create powerful options for her team to take sites.

Raze

Showstopper

• Ultimate Cost changed from 6 to 7 Ult points

Raze’s ultimate is one of the most impactful in the game and useful in almost any situation. As a result, it is being used a bit too often. So we’re upping the cost by 1, which should help reduce how often players have to face her Showstopper.

Brimstone

Orbital Strike

• Ultimate cost changed from 6 to 7 Ult points

Much like Raze’s Ultimate, Brimstone’s Ult is very impactful and useful in a wide variety of situations. We feel like it was impacting rounds a little too frequently, so decided to up the cost slightly.

Stim Beacon

• No longer Buffs enemies and no longer shows its effect radius to enemies

The Stim beacon is meant to be a pretty situational ability but we felt that revealing Brimstone’s location and having the potential to accidentally buff enemies was making this ability significantly weaker than we’d like.

Brimstone’s Arms Fidelity

When you really think about an FPS, you’ll notice you spend an awful amount of time looking at your arms...like all the time. Before launch, we intended to increase the fidelity of Brimstone’s arms to match the overall quality of the game. We did it—now look at those guns!

Cypher

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 >>> 2.1

primarily a bug fix

• Jumping spread changed from 1.9 >>> 2.3
• Walking spread changed from 1.9 >>> 1.95
• Added a 10% bonus to accuracy when crouching and stationary

Intent is to feel consistent with crouch providing an accuracy benefit

The Classic right-click was the primary bug fix here, but we saw an opportunity to make the weapon behave a bit more consistently. We slightly tuned efficacy of jump right-clicks, but (hopefully) haven’t taken away their viability in close-range scenarios

HUD and UI

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

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 the talents we identified for the role were not able to record due to regional restrictions. You can now find in-game, the voices we originally intended for Italian and Mexican Reyna!

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 1 and 2

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 greyed 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)