With the launch of Valorant Patch 1.11, players can finally try out Skye, the newest Legend, while the Icebox map is now available in Competitive. Of course, however, the patch also includes its fair share of updates and balancing changes for Valorant’s existing Agents.
Valorant Patch 1.11: Existing Agent Updates
This time around, Riot is focusing on three Agents in particular with Valorant Patch 1.11; while Skye is now on the roster, players may also want to experiment with Breach, Cypher, and Killjoy. According to Riot, Initiator-class Agents like Breach and meant to; “create concentrated windows of extremely high threat to help their teams break onto sites”. As such, they have opted to increase Breach’s full flash time from 1.75 to 2. The fade out remains the same, but this should allow Breach to create a slightly larger window of opportunity.
Cypher, a Sentinel-class Agent, is the next character to get attention in Patch 1.11. “We want to increase the depth of decision making when playing Sentinels,” explains Riot; “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 player dies”. Indeed, for Cypher, this means that both his Spy Camera and Tripwire will be both disabled and revealed upon his death. According to Riot, the aim is to encourage Sentinel players to be more thoughtful in their placement. Additionally, they want to increase the reward for taking out Sentinel players.
Finally, Patch 1.11 focuses on Killjoy for some major changes to her Alarmbot and Turret. Both of these devices will now deactivate if Killjoy moves more than 40m away from them. They will remain in place, but inactive, until she returns within 40m, at which point they will reactivate. This means that Killjoy will need to stay near her defences. However, she can now place them more frequently. The cooldown after pickup of the Turret has been halved from 20 seconds to 10, while the Alarmbot’s cooldown is down from 20 to 7. Additionally, the Alarmbot can now be armed at a 9m distance instead of 7m.
Killjoy also gets some buffs to her Nanoswarm ability in Patch 1.11. Firstly, players can now detect Nanoswarm from only 3.5m away, instead of from a 5m distance. The swarm’s damage has also gone up from 40/second to 45/second. Finally, the swarm’s damage will now tick up in a smoother and faster rate. (Instead of dealing damage in 10-point chunks every 0.25 seconds).