It has only been a week since the official launch of VALORANT, and Riot has already come up with a new patch for their competitive shooter. The patch focuses on performance improvements and tweaks to the Spike Rush game mode, along with a nerf for the healer of the game, Sage.
The Spike Rush game mode will now feature a set of three new orbs to make the mode more exciting. “Our new mode, Spike Rush, gets an injection of new Orb types to play with. For example, a Golden Gun Orb that lets you one-shot anybody with the quickness,” Riot mentions in their official blog post.
Also Read: How To Play Sage In Valorant
Here are the changes to the Spike Rush mode as stated in the patch notes:
- Each game of Spike Rush now features a set of 5 randomly selected orbs
- The Full Ultimate orb will always be available
- 4 of the remaining 7 orb types will be chosen at random
- Chosen orb types will be shown in a description widget both in character select and during pre-round
The three new orb types which are introduced through this update include:
Health Orb – Grants teamwide health regen (instant)
- 20 second duration
- 12 HP per second (3HP per tick)
- SFX/VFX only play while actually healing
Deception Orb – Applies “Paranoia” to the enemy team 3 seconds after capture
- 10 second debuff
- Vision is greatly reduced (and a small Field of Vision shift)
- Fake footsteps and gunfire play for affected players
- Minimap is disabled
Golden Gun – Grants capturing player a Golden Gun
- One-shot, one-kill
- Perfectly accurate at all times
- Agent moves at knife speed
- Only has a single bullet in chamber and 2 backup rounds
- Kills grant an additional round
Besides the change to this game mode, another notable change is the nerf to Sage. The VALORANT support character had already experienced significant nerfs previously and this time, the cast range of her Barrier orb was halved from 20 meters to 10 meters.
“As a Sentinel, Sage is supposed to be most effective when defending territory that she already controls. The 20m cast range was allowing Sage to aggressively take control of neutral territory in a way that was inappropriate for her role in Valorant. This range reduction aims to keep her strong while defending territory but reduce her efficacy at taking ground.”
Patch 1.01 also witnessed some changes to the callouts of the maps and major performance improvements on mid and high tier computers. “The game should feel even smoother in combat and many scenes will likely have higher average FPS depending on your spec,” Riot said. They also added multithreaded rendering support for high end machines, which can now be toggled from the Graphics Quality menu.
As usual, this update also made several QoL changes and bug fixes which can
