Valorant update nerfs Raze, Prism scope fix on the way

As pointed out on the subreddit, one of Valorant's premium skins, Prism, removes the black field around sniper scopes, giving its users a big advantage. Riot quickly confirmed that, no, this is not an intentional, 'premium' bonus—just your standard bug.

 "This is a bug which will be fixed in an upcoming patch, sorry about that!" Riot developer Fancypmgee—quality assurance manager Nathan Tiras, according to Kotaku UK—explained. "Competitive integrity is really important, and we test to make sure that we aren't selling power with our cosmetic content. Sorry this one escape[d] :("

In a followup post, Riot developer Nickwu added that the bug "only happens when material quality is set to LOW."

Valorant players have also taken issue with the cost of the Prism skin pack, which isn't bugged but is extremely high. The pack goes for 6,375 Valorant Points, which will cost you $70 in real-world money to purchase—$50 for a bundle of 5,350 VP, and then another $20 for a bundle of 2,050 VP. I know CS:GO skins can get up there pretty high, but that seems awfully steep for a game that's still in very limited closed beta.

Riot also rolled out a Valorant patch today that doesn't fix the Prism scope bug, but does nerf Raze and Sage.

"Raze is lethal, no doubt, and we predict savvy players will perform better against her over time. Still, we made some light changes that should bring Raze's offensive pressure closer to the other agents," Riot explained. "We’re also buffing melee to give players in the early rounds a better way to deal with Sage’s Barrier Orb—while still making it a calculated risk. Don’t worry Sage mains, your Slow Orb now slows those bunny hoppers, too."

Here's the full rundown of what's changed:

Gameplay and balance

Melee Damage

• Melee attacks now inflict double the damage per hit to destructibles, including Sage’s Barrier and 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 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 air speed of players in the zone
• Players can now walk through the Slow Orb without making noise
• Why though? Players were able to circumvent too much of Sage’s Slow Orb by bunny hopping through the zone. We want the minimum slow amount to be a bit more consistent with all movement in the zone, while still allowing for bunny hopping and walking to provide a slight benefit to traversing the zone. Also, we feel adding a stealthy yet slow way to move through the field brings more nuance to playing against the zone and a bit more uncertainty for Sage, since she can't necessarily hear people who move through

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