How about those Elderflame weapon skins? At least they weren’t cake. Hope you caught some of that VALORANT fan art, too.
On to this patch. Four Agents get some polish, with Viper coming away with a series of buffs, including a per second increase of her decay against enemies. You’re also gonna have to work a bit extra now if you wanna use those powerful Brimstone and Raze ults.
A bug fix for the Classic gave us an opportunity to go in and tune the weapon’s behaviour. Hey while you’re in the pre-round buy menu, take a look at those new easier-to-compare stats!
Viper's Pit
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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
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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
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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.
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.
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!
Cyber Cage can now be picked up during the buy phase |
Classic
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
Replaced the previous Weapon Stats textbox in the pre-round shop with an easier-to-compare graphical representation of stats