Valorant v1.11 patch notes: Skye Agent, Economy changes, Icebox enters competitive

Valorant v1.11 brings with it a Skye, the newest Agent to the game, an interesting take on the healer class which looks like it could find its way into the highest ELO meta.

(Picture: Riot Games)

Icebox has also been added to the ranked playlist, the first time a new map has been added to the game since launch.

(Picture: Riot Games)

Both Icebox and Skye are expected to make their esport debuts at next month's First Strike series of tournaments.

Agent buffs and nerfs

Several agent classes have also been tweaked, most notably the Sentinels as we found out last night when part of the patch notes were leaked.

Essentially Sentinels ability to affect the game once dead has gone with all their utility deactivated as soon as they die.

Killjoy has also been made more stationary with her Alarm bot and Turret now forcing her to be within 40m or they deactive. If she leaves this zone and re-enters they will come back online.

To counter-act this nerf, the cooldown period after which she can pick up her abilities has been reduced.

Cypher has had similar changes regarding his post-death ability.

Flash bangs has also had their effective time increased with players flashed staying blinded for longer.

Valorant v1.11 patch notes

(Picture: Riot Games)

Agent Updates

SKYE JOINS THE VALORANT ROSTER!

—Max Grossman, Lead Character Designer

INITIATORS

Flash Tuning: The fade out of the flash debuff remains the same duration but now fades slower at the start

Initiators create concentrated windows of extremely high threat to help their teams break onto sites. To this end, we are slightly increasing the duration of debuffs from some Initiator abilities (mostly flashes). Our goal here is to increase the opportunity window that Initiator’s teammates have to capitalize on their utility and further differentiate Initiators from Duelists.

BREACH

SENTINELS

Similar to some of the changes we made with Sage, we want to increase the depth of decision making when playing Sentinels 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 deployer dies (e.g., Cypher’s Trapwire disables when Cypher dies). We want to encourage Sentinel players to play more thoughtfully and carefully around their traps while increasing the reward for taking out the Sentinel player.

CYPHER

KILLJOY

COMPETITIVE UPDATES

• Icebox enters the Competitive map rotation
  • Icebox will be available for use in official esports competition (e.g., First Strike) after four weeks in Competitive queue (November 29, barring any issues)
• Shorter Unrated queue times for the highest-rank players
  • We’ve taken steps to further solve issues for elite players experiencing long queue times for Unrated. We’re also further investigating improvements to reducing long queue times for all primary modes.
• Added location of the current gamepod to the loading screen for all modes
• Adjusted Combat Score to factor in non-damaging assists

GAME MODE UPDATES

• “Play Out All Rounds” option now available in custom game lobby options,

GAMES SYSTEMS

Updates to Economy Ruleset

• Attackers who lose but survive the entire round without planting the Spike receive a reduced number of credits (1,000)
• Defenders who lose but survive the entire round after the Spike has detonated also receive reduced credits (1,000)
• Dying to the Spike will no longer count as a death in KDA statistics
• Additional economic information added as a tooltip when hovering over the exclamation mark next to “Min Next Round” in the shop

Context: These changes are intended to increase richness in decision making regarding when it is worthwhile to save your gear vs. go for the round win. Additionally, this will allow teams that can secure round wins to more effectively chip away at the economy of opponents that opt to save out expensive weapons on a round loss.

Other Changes

• Minor improvements to observer flashed indicator
• New setting for observers: ‘Show Player Keybinds on Map’
• New Custom Game Option: ‘Play Out All Rounds’
  • Both teams play a full 12 rounds on both attacker & defender sides, followed by overtime/endgame (if applicable)

QUALITY OF LIFE

• Left-handed view model is now available for players. Players can swap their first person view-model to lefthanded by going to the settings menu and swapping their view model to “Left-Handed”. Changing this will also show all other players as left-handed when spectating.
• You can now send a direct message by clicking a friend's name in chat instead of having to type their name out
• Players that have been AFK or alt-tabbed for more than 5 minutes will now appear as 'Away' in the Social Panel
• Adjusted team colors to remain fixed for the full duration of a game for observers instead of having the Attacking side always appear as red, and the defending side always appear as green
  • The experience of having teams switch colors at the half from a viewer perspective was a bit confusing, and also led to some difficulties for broadcasters to match their overlays to this behavior. This change will allow the viewers and tournament organizers to have a more consistent experience for the entirety of a game.
• [BETA] Experimental Sharpening

BUG FIXES

• Fixed one source of combat hitches we’ve seen from player reports
  • We're continuing to investigate the combat hitches that players have been reporting in recent patches. This patch includes a fix for one of the most common hitches that we've seen during combat. While we hope that this will resolve the issue for many of you, we're still actively tracking down a couple other hitches that we've seen from your clips.
• Jett now can’t rope dash lel
• Fixed a bug where incoming Party invites would remain active in the Social Panel after being declined
• Players no longer see the spike location when reconnecting to a game
• Fixed issue where player corpses could cause collision issues
• Sage wall segments no longer breaks if a player dies on top of them
• Fixed a bug that would disable queueing for any mode if a player closed the client during the Match Found countdown.
• Fixed a bug that was displaying Act Rank badge on the MVP screen outside of Competitive Queue.