Valorant patch 4.0 official notes: Neon goes live, ranked changes, map updates, and more

Valorant patch 4.0 will be dropping in a couple of hours. It will bring with it the new Duelist Agent, Neon, along with a significant amount of updates to weapons, maps and the Competitive mode.

While today’s update promises to be a rather chunky one, it won't feature any Agent balance changes. Riot Games will be holding off on that until the next patch.

Fans looking for a detailed description of the patch can look up Riot’s official website.

However, for a brief overview, here are all the major highlights.

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Valorant patch 4.0 official notes

1) Agent

• New Agent Neon goes live

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2) Weapon Updates

Melee

• 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)

Spectre

• Firing error occurs at earlier bullet stages
• Increased pitch and yaw (vertical and horizontal) recoil multipliers when running/jumping/on ascender from 1.25 >>> 1.5
• Protected bullet count from yaw (horizontal) switching while spraying, decreased 8 >>> 5 bullets
• Lowering time to switch yaw from .24 >>> .18 seconds

Ares

• Removed spin up
• Firing rate increased from 10 >>> 13

Guardian

• Removed firing rate penalty on ADS (Aiming Down Sight)
• Added an extra bullet before it enters a recovery curve

Bulldog

• Hip fire rate increased 9.5 >>> 10
• Recovery on burst fire improved from .4 >>> .35

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3) Map Updates

Bind

• The double stack of cover at short A has been changed to remove a very powerful one-way smoke location that made the area a little too difficult for Attackers to approach.
• There’s also a small, new bench for a mix up when taking that first peek.

Breeze

• Increased the width of the A Main choke and removed 50/50s (where you must choose one of two locations an opponent may be located)
• Added a stack of two crates in cave.
• Adjusted cover on the back of A Site and extended the pool to the far wall
• Adjusted curved wall in mid
• Added cover to the pillar on B Site, blocked off the back site with a new wall, and added a stack of crates to B Wall
• The new stack of crates limits some angles from B Main, gives you new options when holding or retaking, and should break up some awkward fights that can occur on thin walls.
• Door on A can no longer be reactivated until it is finished opening or closing

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4) Competitive

• Starting with Patch 4.0, accounts that have yet to play in Ranked are required to reach account level 20 level before they are able to enter the Competitive queue
• For those that have not yet reached account level 20, but have already played in Competitive queue, you will still be able to play in ranked.

Reduced 5-stack Rank Rating penalty

• Diamond 2 and below players will see their RR penalty reduced by 25% compared to the current balance. This means the new minimum penalty is 25% reduced gains/losses compared to the previous 50%
• We only made this change for ranks not breaking into, or on, the leaderboard to help maintain leaderboard integrity.

Increased Map Randomization

• Increased our map weights, which should lead to an increase in map variety and reduction in map duplicates from match to match

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5) Bugs

Game Systems

• Fixed an issue where the Signature Kill Counter was not updating visually

Esports Features

• Coaches should no longer experience the issue where swapping targets with number keys + mouse clicks occasionally fails.