Last week, Riot Games released a new patch for Valorant that introduced a new agent to the tactical shooter. Patch 1.11 also included some balance changes and the addition of Icebox, the new map, to the competitive map pool.
All of these changes were made before the Valorant First Strike Qualifiers to give teams a chance to prepare and ensure the game balance would result in some exciting matches for viewers.
Valorant patch 1.11 was live for several hours, but some strange things were going on. Occasionally, players affected by nearsightedness would see some interesting visuals – clearly not the ones they were supposed to be seeing. Check out this clip from 100 Thieves player, Joshua “steel” Nissan.
New live patch for first strike
Killjoy > nerfbuff
Cypher > nerf
Skye > w/e
Sova > nerfed……………………………. watch: pic.twitter.com/4UbFNe2Ern— steel (@JoshNissan) October 27, 2020
Take it back
Riot quickly decided to roll back the patch and revert to the previously stable 1.10. This allowed the developer to delve into the issue and find the root cause of the issue. All in all, it took a week to resolve, although, Riot may have decided to wait a little longer for the sake of the First Strike Qualifiers.
If you’d like to know exactly what went wrong with patch 1.11, you can have a read through this Twitter thread by the Principal Software Engineer on Valorant. However, if you just want to jump into the new patch, here’s a quick refresher.
You can now use the new agent Skye – here are her abilities in action. Breach can now flash for a little longer, plus he has a few undocumented changes that players have already uncovered and Riot has confirmed are not bugs. Fault Line charges 20% faster. It also casts eight meters away from Breach, as does Rolling Thunder.
Cypher’s Trapwires and Camera are disabled and revealed when he dies. Killjoy received the biggest nerfs, with her bots being disabled if she is more than 40 meters away from them. To counter this massive nerf, the cooldowns of her Alarmbot and Turret were reduced. Killjoy’s Alarmbot and Nanoswarm grenades detection ranges were alsoreduced. Finally, Killjoy’s Nanoswarm now deals 45 damage per second, which is five more than before.
You can check out the complete Valorant patch notes for update 1.11 on the game’s website.
