New agents and important tweaks to gameplay and agents
Riot Games has officially released the latest update for Valorant, known as Episode 2.
We have seen Yoru, the new Duelist, but other agents also see updates and tweaks for their gameplay:
- Stim Beacon – will now quick cast (no equip time)
- Molotov – Cost reduced from $300 to $200
- Sky Smokes – The cast range is increased from 4200 to 5000, and smoke duration is increased from 14.25 secs to 19.25 secs
- Sound - Brimstone no longer makes a sound that enemies can hear when confirming the location of his smokes
- Paranoia – Cost increased from $200 to $400
- Dark Cover – Projectile speed is decreased from 4000 to 2800
For weapons updates, the changes are as below:
- Jumping error increased: .4 to 1.0
- Increased input queue on right-click: 0.065 to .225
- Firing consecutively now jumps in error, starting at 1.9 for the first burst, 2.5 for the second, and then the third/fourth burst will be at a 6.0
- Right-click now has a recovery curve starting at .1s
- The Classic is proving to be a master-of-none choice in pistol rounds, with the exception of jump right-clicks and spamming right-clicks. The spread changes aim to pull the effective range of the jump bursts and the firing error/recovery aim to put some more finesse into how effective you can be while spamming it out. Input queue will help shots between bursts come out more smoothly.
We are also seeing new competitive updates for the game being rolled out to the game:
- New Competitive regional leaderboards (from Jan. 12)
- Rank system updated, including rank progress bar, numerical progress, and further distribution changes to make it easier to climb out of the lower ranks
- Immortal and Radiant ranks are now capped at a premade size of two
- New ranked rewards for Episode 1 (pair of Gun Buddies based on your highest Act Rank achieved during Episode 1)
- Updated competitive changes
Bug fixes includes:
- Fixed an issue where Omen could sometimes teleport past the buy phase barriers
- Fixed an issue where Omen could plant the Spike while elevated on a Sage wall
- Fixed an issue where players on the opposing team could be seen on the minimap long after leaving line of sight
- Fixed an issue where the desktop resolution was not restored after alt-tabbing from the game when playing in fullscreen mode, at lower-than-native resolution.
- Fixed an issue introduced in the 1.14 patch that incorrectly calculated client ping by including client frametime in the calculation
