Ring the bell and round up the troops, because Valorant has received a major update and it’s time you learned what changed. Following a small hotfix last week, today’s Valorant patch brings the first big changes to the game, including some balancing adjustments to one of the most controversial Agents. Read on for the full Valorant patch notes for April 22, bringing the game to version 0.47+.
Valorant patch notes - April 22
© Riot Games
Riot has generously give out detailed patch notes for Valorant’s 0.47+ update, letting us know everything that’s changed. The biggest news in the April 22 Valorant patch notes is a slight nerf/adjustment to Raze, reducing her signature Paint Shells ability to one charge and requiring two kills to earn it back. In addition, the audio on her moves and ultimate have been tweaked to give players a better idea of where she’s throwing those lethal explosives. Other exciting tweaks in the 0.47+ update include improved melee damage against Sage’s Barrier, letting players risk chipping away with their blades instead of spraying the wall down. Right, let’s get to it with the full Valorant patch notes for April 22, coming directly from Riot Games.
Gameplay and balance
- Melee attacks now inflict double the damage per hit to destructibles, including
- Sage’s Barrier
- 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 fixes
- 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
And that’s all she wrote! Now that you know the full Valorant patch notes for April 22, head over to our game hub for more useful tips and tricks about the game.