Riot Games is targeting Raze and Sage in VALORANT’s latest patch.
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The two agents have stood out in the game’s closed beta and have been criticized by the community. Raze’s pure and unadulterated damage has been deemed too high by some players and Sage’s Slow Orb seems too strong.
The patch addresses both agents and aims to find a fine balance alongside changes to melee damage, quality of life, and bug fixes.
Here’s the full list of changes for VALORANT version 0.47.
Gameplay and balance
Melee damage
- Melee attacks now inflict double the damage per hit to destructible, including:
- Sage’s Barrier
- Haven’s metal double doors
- Why?
- There weren’t enough options during low seconds rounds—such as the first round and right after switching sides—to combat Sage’s Barrier Orb. Riot’s 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 two to one.
- Paint Shells now have a kill reset, requiring players to get two kills to refresh its 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 Riot felt like the cluster grenades and their number were creating overly oppressive scenarios. Also, players should be supplied proper gameplay information and the Audi cues on all of Raze’s abilities didn’t match their threat, so Riot has changed the audio of each. For example, when the Showstopper is equipped or fired from distance, players should be able to clearly identify and interpret the threat.
Sage
- Slow Orb now also slows the airspeed 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. Riot wants the minimum slow amount to be a bit more consistent all movement in the zone, while still allowing for bunny hopping and walking to provide a slight benefit to traversing the zone. Also, Riot 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.
- 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 ISP’s 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 be 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.
