VALORANT Patch Notes 1.05

Your newest VALORANT Act has arrived! It’s true, it’s true. That means this patch comes with a new Agent (have you met?), a fresh Battlepass, and our new Deathmatch (beta) mode.

Act Ranks go live—and you can dive into our dedicated post for more—but competitive changes also include matchmaking adjustments that hope to better pair solo and solo/duo players against similar groups. You’ll get more info on how your rank was affected after a loss, too.

Raze’s Showstopper gets tuned and the Blast Pack damage drops.

Killjoy brings her killer robot buddies and round spectacles to VALORANT

A new contract has been added to unlock Killjoy and her associated rewards

Showstopper Equip Time increased 1.1 >>> 1.4

Quick Equip Time increased 0.5 >>> 0.7

VFX on rocket’s trail slightly reduced

With the lethality of Raze’s Showstopper, we wanted to make some changes that will provide enemies more time to plan and acquire Raze when hearing “Fire in the Hole!” Additionally, we have adjusted her VFX so that players are able to notice Raze as she fires, increasing their ability to shoot a Raze that takes riskier plays.

Blast Pack Damage decreased 75 >>> 50

Damage to objects now consistently does 600

Raze’s Blast Pack has been hitting players a bit too hard, able to kill a fully armored enemy in certain situations. We want to reduce this ability’s efficacy at damaging players while sharpening its ability at clearing enemy utility and obstacles.

Act Ranks have been added to the game; read our deep dive for more info.

Patch 1.05 marks the end of Competitive Act I—Competitive Act II starts If you earned a rank in Act I, play 3 more games to show your rank again in Act II. If you are a new player you will still need to play 5 initial placement matches so we have more time to calibrate to your skill Expect a conservative initial placement, ~2 rank tiers lower than your prior Act I rank, so we are confident you are at or above that skill in Act II. Performance will have a larger impact in your early games , so you will be able to quickly gain rank if you play well and win

Competitive matchmaking now will have a higher chance to match solo and solo/duo players against similarly sized premade groups at the cost of queue times being slightly longer Regardless of premade sizes, match balance is sitting fairly close to 50 / 50 for which team wins, but there is often a larger skill disparity between the best and worst players in the games with large premade sizes. This change should reduce the chance of solo players getting into games where there is high skill disparity.

Rank indicators have been modified on a loss to provide more granularity into how your rank was changed— You can now receive: Rating decreased slightly (1 down arrow) Rating decreased (2 down arrows) Rating greatly decreased (3 down arrows) Previously we showed very little info around how much rank you lost on a loss to limit the already painful experience of a loss. However, this was leading to issues where a player may have had a really rough game (think decisively lost the game and played poorly) and then would win several games and not rank up. This should help alleviate this problem somewhat by providing more transparency on a loss and your amount of rank lost. We are also looking into ways to give additional transparency around rank changes in future patches

Match History will now show the rank you went into the match with for that game, versus the rank you ended the game with

You can now view your friends career tab via the context menu in the social panel. This means you can see your friends rank, Act Rank, and Match History. You can now see how awesome your friends have been doing in their matches and their rank gains...or reach out and console them if they have had some rough games.

Custom Games now allow the leader to select your target game pod location and see players ping to that game pod. For custom games, when all players are opting in to the game, we wanted to allow the leader more agency around what latency players will have.Hopefully your custom game leader will try and find the best DC for the game for all players, but if they are greedy you can always leave without penalty.

Deathmatch drops! Hop in to hone your gunplay mechanics or warm up before you hit ranked 10-player free-for-all First to 30 kills with a time limit of 6 minutes No abilities You’ll load in as a random Agent that you own Buy whatever weapons you want; heavy armor is given to you automatically Killing enemies drops health kits: picking one up fully restores your health/armor AND automatically reloads your weapon. All enemies are periodically revealed on the minimap

Deathmatch is in beta as we continue to evaluate game performance and stability. Availability will be limited to specific windows upon deployment of 1.05, with the first window starting Wednesday, August 5.

Players who report other disruptive players will now receive an email if the reported player has been punished

Arriving mid-patch: Your rotating store offers will stop including things you already own!