The developers of Riot Games have constantly been working to improve the balance and fairness of their competitive shooter VALORANT. They have shipped out multiple updates to the game in only a span of a few weeks to maintain the competitive integrity of the game. The previous updates generally included hero reworks, weapon improvements, map updates, and numerous bug fixes.
Today, Riot devs announced their newest patch to VALORANT which includes a number of noticeable changes to the first-person shooter.
The first and perhaps the most important change of patch 1.03 is the revamp of the Guardian. The price of the Guardian was reduced to 2500 from its previous price tag of 2700. To balance things out, Riot also reduced the firing rate of the gun from 6.5 to 4.75 while simultaneously increasing its penetration power from Medium to Heavy.
As Riot wrote in their blog post, “We hope these changes will sharpen the Guardian’s identity as a long-range, versatile weapon, with its heavy penetration values and lower price providing some more nuanced choice competition to the rifle category of the arsenal.”
Another important aspect of the latest patch is the change in the requirements of surrendering a game. The unrated mode will no longer require 100% of the players’ votes for a surrender vote to be passed. Instead, having 80% of the players voting yes will now be enough to pass the vote. However, this change is only for the unrated mode. Ranked mode would still require the surrender vote to be unanimously passed by 100% of the players.
In addition to this, the surrender option will now be available from round 5 instead of round 8, enabling players to opt out of a game sooner than before if they believe they had a terrible start. However, it’s important to remember that surrendering in ranked mode will count losses for all the remaining rounds in the game. So, surrendering should ideally be avoided unless absolutely necessary.
Other changes in this update include some small adjustments to the maps, several bug fixes, multiple quality of life changes and the addition of a new orb in the Spike Rush game mode.
The full details of the patch can be read here.
