VALORANT Patch 4.01 Nerfs the Ares and Improves Melee (For Real This Time)


The Ares in VALORANT is finally getting nerfed in today's update just a few days after it was buffed, but other minor changes have also been announced for the latest patch.

Riot Games has unveiled Patch Notes 4.01 for VALORANT today, and it looks like the developers have been listening to players' complaints about the Ares they buffered earlier this month. The buffs the Ares received in the last patch removed the machine gun's spin-up and increased its firing rate, which made it incredibly powerful for its cheap cost. Now, they're making major updates to fix the problem.

VALORANT Neon
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Credit: Riot Games
VALORANT Neon

In addition to the Ares update, today's update will also see melee improvements to help make it easier for players to use it. There are also social updates and bug fixes, which you can read below.

VALORANT Patch Notes 4.01

SOCIAL UPDATES

Muted Words List added to the settings

  • Muted Word List is a new section you will find in your settings where you can type in variations of words/phrases that you, personally, would not like to see appear in-game
  • We admit that some players are often smarter than our automated bad word detection system and continually find creative ways to type things we don’t want to in chat. This is why we need your help to make our detections better! Help us, help you :)
  • For example: Let’s say “Riot” is a bad word (scary, I know). Our detection may catch the word “Riot” as one that should be blocked and penalized, but there’s a variety of different ways to spell Riot that we may not be catching: R!ot, R!0t, Ri0t, etc.
  • And no, you won't get "League of Legends" banned from chat
  • We’re hoping that we can leverage the lists that you and others create to make the chat less toxic by comparing them across regions, and using the data we collect to improve our own detections of bad words. Thanks in advance for all that are willing to lend a hand. Let’s make VALORANT a better place for everyone!

WEAPON UPDATES

ARES

  • Price increased from 1550 >>> 1600
  • Pitch recoil increased
  • Spread changed from .8 >>> .7 after 10 bullets to 1.0 >>> .7 after 13 bullets
  • Crouch benefits spread and recoil reduced from 40% >>> 25%

MELEE (but for real this time)

The melee’s been too tricky to aim with, making it tough to rely on. So we’ve updated both left and right click melee attacks for more reliable Agent-whacking action.

  • Right click hitboxes are now 1.5x larger. Left click hitboxes are now larger than a right click and have a slightly longer range too.
  • Targets closer to the center of your knife attacks will get hit first, so you still have precision if you need it.
  • Bonus: Knifing walls now have instant feedback when slicing up walls (predicted on the client side)

BUGS

WEAPONS

  • Fixed a bug where the Origin collection idle animations weren’t playing for some levels and variants in Spectator mode

ESPORTS FEATURES

  • Fixed an issue where observer player hotkeys would change after side-swap.

PERFORMANCE

  • Fixed an issue where performance charts that require NVIDIA Reflex were displayed and could not be hidden

Related: VALORANT Episode 4, Act 1 Trailer Hypes Up New Agent and Battlepass

VALORANT Patch Notes 4.01 will go live today, Jan 19. To get notified with the latest updates, follow @ValorantSource on Twitter or the VALORANT Rocks My World Facebook page.

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