VALORANT Patch Notes 5.10: Cypher and Harbor Buff, Fade Nerf, Menus Update, & More

Nazmul Hassan
By Nazmul Hassan
8 Min Read
Credit: Riot Games

Riot Games released the 5.10 Patch Notes, and along with it, they are finally giving Cypher a long-awaited buff. Fade is also receiving a notable nerf in this patch.

VALORANT 5.10 Patch notes have been released, and the game update will be coming out shortly, along with many changes to the game. Players worldwide have been eagerly waiting for the patch notes as some recent updates from Riot Games have revealed that slight changes are coming to the game.

One of the members of the initial VALORANT roster, Cypher, will receive a long-awaited buff in the 5.10 update. His Trap Wire and Neural Theft abilities will receive significant upgrades in this patch. On the other hand, Fade’s Prowler and Nightfall abilities will undergo slight nerfs in the 5.10 patch.

Additionally, Harbor will also receive some love from the developers as he will receive an extra cascade charge as mentioned in the patch notes.

Like always, there’ll also be some bug fixes in the latest update. It looks like there have been some issues with Harbor, which will be fixed with the 5.10 patch. Other than that, Riot Games will improve the Menus and revert to some old functionality to make players’ experience smoother.

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VALORANT 5.10 Patch Notes

AGENT UPDATES

CYPHER

Dev Notes: As the game has evolved, we’ve seen Cypher’s presence and relative impact on the roster fall off. While we attribute part of this to Chamber coming to dominate the Sentinel slot more than we think is healthy, we also have found that overtime Cypher’s Trapwire setups have become too predictable and easy to counter and that his Ultimate has felt lacking both in restrictions required to pull it off and the reward for doing so. The increase in Trapwire distance should open up a lot of new potential setups for Cypher and allow him to mix up his play patterns in a way that forces his enemies to slow down and move carefully through the map if they want to spot them without being caught.

Removing the time restriction on enemy corpses should make his Ultimate more accessible than it has been in the past and allow for Cypher to feel more agency when he initiates Neural Theft, while adding a second ping should create a clearer period of time where Cypher is pulling the strings, taking in the information on the enemies initial location and setting up strategic moves based on the pressure of the second. We hope that these updates get Cypher mains out there coming up with new setups for their information webs and that, when paired with upcoming updates to Chamber, help him reclaim a compelling spot amongst his peers.

  • Trapwire
    • Maximum Trapwire length increased 1000 >>> 1500.
  • Neural Theft
    • Now reveals enemies two times. There is a four second delay between the reveals.
    • Time restriction to cast on enemy corpses has been removed.
    • Maximum cast distance increased 1200 >>> 1800.
  • Quality of Life
    • Updated the yellow silhouette used for Cypher’s reveal on Spycam and Neural Theft.
    • Yellow silhouette now disappears if the revealed enemy becomes visible to you to help reduce confusion of seeing two representations of the enemy in different places.
    • Yellow silhouette now starts dimmer and fades faster to make it more distinguishable from an actual enemy.
    • Cypher’s placed utility is no longer destroyed by allies’ AOE damage.

FADE

Dev Notes: Fade’s Prowlers have been a versatile and difficult-to-play-against ability that we’re looking to sharpen with these changes. The duration changes encourage Fade to be more deliberate in the areas that she chooses to sweep, while the other tweaks to the ability are meant to help enemies on the counterplay side of things.

The Nightfall cost is increasing in price, as we’ve found the baseline value of the Ultimate to be on the higher end compared to other Ultimates in the game.

  • Prowlers
    • Duration reduced from 3 >>> 2.5 seconds. (Time the prowler is alive without a trail).
    • Delay on bite after reaching target increased .4 >>> .6 seconds.
    • Hitbox improvements.
    • Nearsight duration on hit reduced 3.5 >>> 2.75 seconds.
    • Prowlers now fizzle out and no longer debuff instead of debuffing its target if they teleported away before it finished its animation.
  • Nightfall
    • Cost increased 7 >>> 8.

HARBOR

Dev Notes: Harbor abilities all make a healthy round impact, but we saw some players new to Harbor not using their abilities enough and feeling too constrained. We hope these changes make it easier for players to hit the ground running with Harbor and for skilled Harbor players to achieve more flexibility when controlling the map.

  • Cascade
    • Number of purchasable charges 1 >>> 2

GAMEPLAY SYSTEMS UPDATES

REAL TIME TEXT EVALUATION (NA ONLY TO START)

  • In addition to our existing interventions, we are launching a new feature to begin muting players in chat who send disruptive text messages in game. Interventions for disruptive text will now be applied sooner rather than later as we continue updating our systems to evaluate more types of text communication.
  • These improvements will be added to North America first and expanded to more regions in the near future.
    • With the implementation of more immediate text evaluation, we hope to detect and reduce disruptive situations while players are still in game and help you feel safer to engage in VALORANT.

SOCIAL UPDATES

  • Fixed an issue that caused the “Auto-Reject Friend Requests: On” notification to be misaligned in the Social Panel for some languages.

BUGS

AGENTS

ASTRA
  • Fixed a bug where Astra could cast a fake Nebula right at the start of a round before her Star charged up.
CHAMBER
  • Fixed a bug where Chamber would fail to equip a gun at the start of a new round.
HARBOR
  • Fixed Harbor’s Cascade being visible on Minimap for enemies with vision of it.
  • Fixed a bug where Harbor’s Cascade would sometimes spawn under the map.
  • Fixed a bug where Harbor’s Cascade targeter on the minimap would shorten when aiming up or down even though the Cascade would travel the same distance.
  • Fixed a bug where Harbor’s Cascade targeter on the minimap was slightly shorter than the actual distance it would travel.
NEON
  • Fixed a bug where Neon’s Slide could be used to boost upwards in specific map locations.

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By Nazmul Hassan FPS Editor
Nazmul is GameRiv's FPS editor. He is a marketing graduate with an immense passion for gaming. As an ex-professional CS:GO player, he holds a strong interest in other FPS titles like Apex Legends, VALORANT, and CoD. However, he also tries out other games when he is free.