The start of VALORANT Episode Two has finally arrived and with it comes a new agent to the game’s growing roster of characters. Additionally, there are a few small changes headed to Brimstone and Omen that could shift their playtime as the patch rolls through.
Viper was also mentioned in the patch notes. Even though she didn’t receive any changes just yet, Riot did acknowledge that she’s underperforming, and will be a target for buffs in the new year.
There are even a few changes headed to the Classic’s alternate fire, as well as several significant updates to the game’s competitive mode. Lastly, there are a handful of bugs that have been addressed in this patch as well.
Here’s the full list of patch notes for VALORANT Patch 2.0.
Agent updates
Yoru
Yoru officially joins the VALORANT roster. Check out all his abilities and EsportsDoug’s in-depth look at the agent here.
Brimstone
Stim Beacon
- Stim Beacon will now quick cast (no equip time)
Molotov
- Cost reduced: $300 >>> $200
Sky Smokes
- Cast range increased: 4,200 >>> 5,000
- Smoke duration increased:14.25 >>> 19.25
Sound
- Brimstone no longer makes a sound that enemies can hear when confirming the location of his smokes.
Omen
Paranoia
- Cost increased $200 >>> $400
Dark Cover
- Projectile speed decreased: 4,000 >>> 2,800
Weapon updates
Classic (Alt. Fire)
- Jumping error increased: 0.4 >>> 1.0
- Increased input queue on right-click: 0.065 >>> 0.225
- Firing consecutively now jumps in error, starting at 1.9 for the first burst, 2.5 for the second, and then the third/fourth burst will be at a 6.0 Right-click now has a recovery curve starting at 0.1s
These changes are focused on putting “more finesse” into how effective players can be while spamming the burst fire on the pistol.
Competitive updates
- New Competitive regional leaderboards (Jan. 12)
- Rank system updated, including rank progress bar, numerical progress, and further distribution changes to make it easier to climb out of the lower ranks
- Immortal and Radiant ranks are now capped at a premade size of two
- New ranked rewards for Episode 1 (pair of Gun Buddies based on your highest Act Rank achieved during Episode 1)
Bugs
- Fixed an issue where Omen could sometimes teleport past the buy phase barriers
- Fixed an issue where Omen could plant the Spike while elevated on a Sage wall
- Fixed an issue where players on the opposing team could be seen on the minimap long after leaving line of sight
- Fixed an issue where the desktop resolution was not restored after alt-tabbing from the game when playing in fullscreen mode, at lower-than-native resolution.
- Fixed an issue introduced in the 1.14 patch that incorrectly calculated client ping by including client frametime in the calculation
