Valorant, the free-to-play game by Riot Games, received a big update yesterday. Update 3.05 brought balancing changes to four heroes and introduced a new map. Changes to competitive mode and progression were made as well. Plus, the Nvidia Reflex feature has been improved.
The newly added map is Fracture, however, you can’t play the map in Ranked mode just yet. The developer has added a Fracture-only queue which will be active for two weeks. This should allow the majority of players to learn the map.
Breach’s Aftershock attack has been buffed. Now, it will deal damage to Killjoy’s Alarm bot, Nanoswarm, and Lockdown. Several other gadgets of multiple heroes will be affected by Aftershock. Brimstone’s Orbital Strike now also does damage to multiple gadgets of several heroes. These have been mentioned in great detail below.
- Now deals damage to the following:
- Killjoy Alarm Bot
- Killjoy Nanoswarm
- Killjoy Lockdown
- Cypher Tripwire
- Reyna Leer
- Sage Barrier Orb
- Sova Recon Bolt
- KAY/O Zero/Point
- Now deals damage to the following:
- Killjoy Nanoswarm
- Cypher Trapwire
- Sage Barrier Orb
- Sova Recon Bolt
- KAY/O Zero/Point
- Bullet tagging reduced 72.5% slow to 29.5% slow
- Max damage reduced 125 to 80
- Min damage reduced 50 to 30
- Cost reduced 400 to 300
- Immortal 1/2/3 rank tiers are back!
- The Leaderboard will update to distinguish between those of you in each Immortal tier.
- Updated Ranked grouping restrictions to accommodate return of Immortal 1/2/3:
- Diamond 1 - Immortal 1
- Diamond 2 - Immortal 2
- Diamond 3 - Immortal 3
- Adjusted Competitive ranked distribution as detailed in a previous article
- Fracture-only queue!
- This queue is a standard, Unrated mode that will give players a chance to practice the new map before they see it in Competitive play.
- Fracture-only queue will be available for 2 weeks, afterwards, Fracture will enter other modes, including Competitive.
- Upgrading to the Premium Battlepass will grant a 3% XP boost toward Battlepass tier progression for all matchmade games until the end of Act II
- This is not retroactive, so upgrading early will give you access to the most amount of XP
- The XP boost does not apply toward Daily or Weekly Missions
- Updated AFK detection logic to deter players from farming Battlepass/Account Levels by AFKing in-game modes like Deathmatch and Snowball Fight
- Updated the ping calculation to exclude the server frame time.
- Updated markers used by NVIDIA Reflex
- NVIDIA Reflex is used to reduce and measure rendering latency. This update should allow Reflex to better pace frames by adding present markers as well as fixes on some older markers.
As mentioned above, the update also squashed multiple bugs. You can read about them along with the complete patch notes from the official site.
