EsportsValorant

Valorant April 21 patch finally nerfs Raze, buffs Sage & more

Bill Cooney
Riot Games

A new Valorant patch finally delivers on one of beta players’ biggest requests so far: nerfing Raze’s ability to deal massive amounts of damage and control the map.

Valorant beta patch 0.47 dropped on April 21, and undoubtedly the highlight of this latest update are “light changes that should bring Raze’s offensive pressure closer to the other agents,” according to Riot.

Raze has probably been the most-complained about agent in Riot’s new FPS, but the latest update significantly nerfs her Paint Shell grenades.

Riot Games
Raze debuted in Valorant on April 7, and quickly became the game’s most divisive character.

She’s now limited to only one grenade instead of two, and a new kill reset for the ability has been added, requiring players to get two kills to refresh its cooldown.

The audio queues for Raze’s abilities have also been “tweaked,” which Riot says should allow players to hear her abilities being used in hectic situations.

Riot Games
Sage sees a nice buff in the April 21 update.

On the other side of things, everyone’s favorite healing agent Sage sees a nice buff to her Slow Orbs, which will now affect enemies in the airspace above them, like a flying Jett.

Sage’s changes are a bit of a double-edged sword though, since players can now slow walk through the area affected by the orb without making any noise, greatly reducing the abilities effectiveness as detecting enemies.

Riot Games
Sage’s Slow Orbs will work a little differently following the April 21 patch.

This patch also officially fixes the bug that allowed Cypher’s Spycam to use weapons, which was definitely not how the ability is supposed to work.

The full April 21 Valorant patch notes are listed below:

VALORANT PATCH NOTES 0.47

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

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