Riot Games has released VALORANT Patch 4.04 today, with major changes to all the Controller agents, the long-discussed Yoru rework officially going live, and changes to the Icebox map. The new patch comes with the launch of today's Episode 4, Act 2, which also adds the Gaia's Vengeance bundle to the game's store.
Astra and Viper, who have been dominating VALORANT's competitive meta, have each received overwhelming nerfs. For Astra, her max stars has been reduced to four, and the cooldown for retrieving Stars has significantly increased. The cooldown for each of Astra's abilities has increased as well, and the Gravity Well radius has decreased. Both Gravity Well and Nova Pulse no longer affect anyone fully underneath them.
Viper's cooldown on activating both Toxic Screen and Poison Cloud have been increased, and her fuel drains 50 percent faster when both are active. Her Snake Bite duration has decreased a bit. In addition, her fuel bar now turns red when she does not have enough fuel to activate her abilities.
Meanwhile, the two other Controller agents, Omen and Brimstone, get buffs. Omen's cooldown for Dark Cover has decreased, and it reaches its target destination faster, however it now costs 150 credits instead of 100. The cost of Shrouding Step has decreased, and the delay prior to teleporting has also decreased.
As for Brimstone, the deploy time for his Sky Smoke has been decreased by a second, and the deploy radius increased. Stim Beacon also gets a 15 percent speed boost.
The highly-anticipated changes to Yoru outlined in the previous "State of the Agents" post have finally been applied. Fakeout is now a fully running clone of Yoru that turns towards an enemy that damages it and explodes in a flash, damanging enemies in a cone in front of it, but it now only has one charge instead of two.
Yoru's Gatecrash also gets buffed with its activation time and in-game audio level reduced, while its speed has been increased. The ability can also be faked, and players get two charges instead of one. His ultimate ability, Dimensional Drift, now lasts longer and lets his use all of his other abilities while active.
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In addition to these major changes to VALORANT agents, Icebox also gets a major rework to improve the gameplay in this map. You can read the full patch notes in the game's official website.
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