Valorant’s latest episode went live last week with a new Duelist, Yoru, being added to the game. However, Riot Games has dropped a new patch which provides some fixes and improvements while heavily revamping Split, one of the more contentious maps. The idea is to improve opportunities for attackers while lowering any 50/50 checks.
Certain choke-points have had their widths adjusted while corners had had their depth reduced. A few new assets, like a material stack in B Site, allows for better handling angles. It’s worth checking out the comparisons in the full notes here to get a better idea of how the new Split stacks up with the old.
As for Jett, her Smoke duration has been reduced from 7 seconds to 4.5 seconds. The reasoning for this is simple – the ability was allowing Jett to take the Controller role over actual Controller characters. Riot Games noted that it will look into other Duelists that have been superseding the more “utility-focused” Agents in the future. In the meantime, you’ll need to time your Smokes efficiently.
Check out some of the other changes from patch 2.01 below.
COMPETITIVE UPDATES
- Added ability to hide custom game results from Match History: Many of you, especially pros, have asked for the ability to not show custom game Match History results, so that they can practice without other players scouting their strategies. We wanted to ship this feature ahead of Challengers so you can practice without this concern.
SOCIAL UPDATES
- The Add Friend button now exists for teammates only, and the option of adding enemy players has been removed
- Any teammates with privacy/streamer mode enabled will not have the Add Friend button near their name.
- Queue restrictions for AFK-ing in-game and during pre-game have changed
- We want to make sure that folks having connectivity issues aren’t harshly penalized, but those who are purposefully AFK-ing receive harsher penalties.
- With that, we will be adding AFK forgiveness for a certain number of rounds, but repeated/extended occurrences will be penalized with higher queue restrictions.
BUGS
- Fixed an issue with rank promotion and demotion indicators overlapping players rank on the Career page
- Fixed a bug that would cause either a Radiant icon or an error message to show during the End of Game screen instead of the correct rank details
- Fixed a bug where Reyna’s Leer would not display on the mini-map correctly
