Through a blog post released by Riot earlier today, the devs mentioned how they had grown familiar with the community feedback on Raze ranging from “Raze is fine” to “pls delete now.” The abilities of Raze can be lethal to enemies, which is in contrast to what Riot CEO Nicolo Laurent had said in October 2019, “To be clear, in Project A, shooting matters. You don’t kill with abilities.”
After the closed beta of VALORANT was released on April 7th, the game gained a massive surge in popularity. At the same time, fans and streams started saying in unison about Raze being overpowered and against the game’s ideal of abilities creating “tactical opportunities to take the right shot.” Summit1g had also said earlier that the abilities in VALORANT would “make or break the game.”
Tuesday’s patch notes on VALORANT proved that they had indeed listened to the community. The patch heavily nerfed Raze, not by decreasing her kill potential but by providing her opponents with sufficient visual and audio cues of her abilities. Sage also received a minor nerf – players can now walk through her slow orb without making any noise.
The update also included map changes, QoL improvements and minor fixes. Here’s the detailed list of changes as mentioned in the blog post by Riot:
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 the 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 airspeed of players in the zone
- Players can now walk through the Slow Orb without making noise
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
