Riot Games just released VALORANT’s new patch 1.11 that introduces new agent Skye alongside a plethora of new changes to Sentinel and Initiator agents.
Since VALORANT’s first strike tournaments are down the horizon Riot Games decided to make some massive changes to agents like Breach, Killjoy, and Cypher. Since these agents were sometimes a little too effective at certain points of the game, Riot Games decided to make some solid changes before all the big teams start duking it out.
- More Related: VALORANT patch notes 1.11: Skye finally enters the ring
However, Riot Games don’t want to make any major changes during the tournament as that might affect tier-1 teams’ strategies in the middle of the tournament. Although they might make some slight changes if needed. Following the recent trends that showcased the difficulties surrounding breaking through some entrenched defenders, Riot Games decided to target Sentinel and Initiators in this patch 1.11.
AGENT UPDATES
INITIATORS
Flash Tuning: The fade out of the flash debuff remains the same duration but now fades slower at the start.
Initiators create concentrated windows of extremely high threat to help their teams break onto sites. To this end, we are slightly increasing the duration of debuffs from some Initiator abilities (mostly flashes). Our goal here is to increase the opportunity window that Initiator’s teammates have to capitalize on their utility and further differentiate Initiators from Duelists.
BREACH
| Full flash time increased from 1.75 >>> 2 |
SENTINELS
Similar to some of the changes we made with Sage, we want to increase the depth of decision making when playing Sentinels while also providing enemies with more counterplay to “trap” abilities. To reduce the total potential impact of these abilities, autonomous traps are now disabled when the deployer dies (e.g., Cypher’s Trapwire disables when Cypher dies). We want to encourage Sentinel players to play more thoughtfully and carefully around their traps while increasing the reward for taking out the Sentinel player.
CYPHER
| Trapwire Disabled and revealed upon death |
| Spy Camera Disabled and revealed upon death |
KILLJOY
Killjoy is most effective when locking down a single site. Killjoy has to stay near her Turret and Alarmbot for them to remain active. Her global recon should be hit pretty hard here but we have slightly boosted her stalling power to counterbalance that nerf. All in all, we hope to keep Killjoy in a very similar place power wise but give her a stronger identity as the premiere on-site defender.
| Deactivation Range Alarmbot and Turret now deactivate if she is more than 40m away from them—reentering the 40m range reactivates her little friends. |
| Turret Cooldown after pickup reduced from 20 seconds >>> 10 seconds |
| Alarmbot Range at which Alarmbot can be detected decreased from 9m >>> 7m Cooldown after pickup reduced from 20 seconds >>> 7 seconds |
| Nanoswarm Range at which Nanoswarm can be detected decreased from 5m >>> 3.5m Damage increased from 40/s >>> 45/s Damage now ticks smoother and faster while in Nanoswarm, instead of in chunks of 10 every ¼ of a second |
As the first strike will be the biggest tournament in VALORANT backed by the developers, Riot’s balancing department wants to make sure everything checks out before starting off.
