Valorant 7.08 Patch Notes Revealed: Smoke Updates, Premier Queue Changes, & More

The highly anticipated Valorant 7.08 patch is here, ushering in a wave of interesting updates to Riot Games’ competitive shooter. Riot has already shared the detailed patch notes for the Valorant 7.08 update, allowing us to delve into the exciting changes introduced to the game ahead of the update’s official release.

Let’s take a look at everything you need to know about the Valorant 7.08 update.

Smoke Changes

The first and perhaps the most interesting change that the 7.08 update has brought with it is the change to smokes in Valorant. Moving forward, most smokes in the game will play a visual as well as an audio cue to inform players before they disappear. These cues are shown 1.5 seconds before the smokes fade, providing ample time for players to reposition themselves and helping them to not get caught off-guard.

Premier Updates

The Playoffs Tournament Queue time has been reduced to only 15 minutes instead of 1 hour. If players are unable to queue up and stay queued within the 15-minute window, their Premier team won’t be able to participate in the Tournament.

At the end of the waiting period, all queued teams are matched into evenly distributed brackets seeded by their Premier Scores.

Valorant 7.08 Patch Notes

Alongside the aforementioned changes, Valorant 7.08 also brings a bunch of other changes including bug fixes and QoL improvements that fans can check out in the official patch notes of the update. For your convenience, we have included the patch notes below:

GENERAL UPDATES

• We made a slight adjustment to the rows of Agents you can select from at the bottom of the screen in order to make room for future Agents.

AGENT UPDATES

• Smoke Visual Update
  • Some of the key smokes can manipulate the play space for a good chunk of time and we feel it is important to be able to make the right decisions in the moment. We’ve added audio and visual cues at the end of our longer lasting smokes to give you a bit of a heads up for when the smoke will disappear.
    • Smokes play an audio and visual cue 1.5 seconds before they are about to fade. The following Agents’ smokes have been affected:
      • Astra
      • Brimstone
      • Omen
• Ability equipping sounds are no longer audible to your Allies.
  • Previously, the sound of you equipping abilities as certain Agents could be heard by allies that were very close to you. Hearing this audio was inconsistent with equipping guns, which are silent to allies, and resulted in confusion around if enemies were able to hear these sounds. We hope this change will make the rules around equipping gun and ability audio more consistent and make what can be heard by enemies easier to learn and understand.

PREMIER UPDATES

PREMIER PLAYOFFS TOURNAMENT QUEUE CHANGES

• The Playoffs Tournament Queue is now only 15 minutes instead of 1 hour. If you don’t queue up and stay queued within the 15 minute window, your team will not be able to play in the Tournament.
• At the end of the waiting period, all teams that are still in the queue will be matched at one time into evenly distributed brackets seeded by Premier Score.
• This change ensures that having a better regular season record gives you a higher seeding in your tournament.

STORE UPDATES

• Your Level Borders and Player Card collection UI is getting an upgrade! You’ll now be able to search, navigate, and equip your Level Borders and Player Cards using our grid UI.

BUG FIXES

AGENT

• Deadlock
  • Annihilation (X) can no longer open Bind’s automatic doors from outside the teleporter rooms.
  • Annihilation (X) can no longer open Breeze’s Mid Chute trapdoor from below.
• Neon
  • Fast Lane (C) now more reliably fully extends through Fracture’s A Door when cast from the outside, behaving the same as when used from inside A Hall.

GENERAL

• Fixed a bug where the music would hitch/skip while loading into a map or the Range.
• Fixed a bug where shooting range bots would not reset their hitbox position properly when respawning.

PLAYER BEHAVIOR

• Fixed a bug so that you’ll receive the correct Ranked Rating penalties for disruptive behavior.

WEAPONS

• Fixed a bug where killbanner audio was playing too quietly.

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