Riot confirm changes coming to Valorant health & damage feedback

With Valorant’s Patch 0.47 tweaking some Agents and fixing necessary bugs, Riot has pledged to tackle health and damage feedback in a bid to “find the best balance.”

There’s no doubt that Valorant’s gameplay mechanics are second to none. By incorporating 128-tick servers and mitigating peeker’s advantage, Riot’s tactical shooter boasts high fidelity matches, which rewards strategy and skill above all.

Although, while Agent balancing has been the hot topic of conversation for the most part, there have also been some complaints surrounding the level of feedback players are getting when either taking or giving damage to opponents.

As it stands, players dishing out the damage in Valorant are reliant on audio cues to understand whether bullets are landing or not — as opposed to visually seeing a hitmarker of sorts, since splatters of blood from a character are the only real visual representation of damage being dealt.

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Moreover, there is no distinct difference in a player’s HUD who has 100 HP compared with a player who has 1HP, which is why one Reddit user made their case for more visual input in the game.

This caught the attention of a Riot developer, who shed some light on the matter, explaining that an upcoming patch will be tweaking damage feedback and a player’s health status.

The dev also expressed that this would be a case of trial and error to avoid the effects slipping into the “annoying/distracting territory” as these effects can often be off-putting in certain scenarios.

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Take Call of Duty, for example. When a player’s health is significantly reduced, their HUD glows red from all angles, and it’s this sort of visual stimuli which could distract a player from seeing a key visual cue that could be the difference between life and death.

Of course, a red glow which engulfs a large portion of your screen isn’t ideal, which is why it will be a process of fine-tuning the forms of visual feedback for both health status and damage output to determine exactly what works for Valorant.

How Riot plan on providing players with immediate feedback on their health during a gunfight without diverting a player’s attention from the gunfight remains unknown, so stay tuned for potential changes in the game’s forthcoming patch.