Valorant Update: Patch Notes 2.04 are out

Valorant Episode 2 has already surprised many gamers and is one of the favorite patch notes amongst all. The last patch notes, 2.01, is a little shocking because it has many disappointing updates that the community didn’t think about. Mainly in Patch 2.01, the updates have a deal with Jett’s Smoke, wherein its duration has now been dropped from 7 seconds to 4.5 seconds to help the developers to continue maintaining the Controller Agent role. They fix many glitches, like the most popular known to be a bug that would cause either a Radiant icon or an error message to show during the End of the Game screen instead of the correct rank details, which is fixed in the last patch.

Valorant Patch Notes 2.04 are out now, and Riot Games have posted an official article on their blog website.

You know Act II brings Astra and a new Battlepass. Patch Notes 2.04 lays out the rest, including extensive Competitive matchmaking updates and more Agent VO to help with call outs.

See them here: https://t.co/n7eqaz2Z9f pic.twitter.com/mFA4Z1ZvZo

— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) March 2, 2021

Valorant 2.04 patch notes

AGENT UPDATES

Astra goes live! You can view her abilities on our dedicated article.

MODE UPDATES

Escalation

• Bind Teleporter exit doors are now permanently jammed open—if you want to camp it, get ready to fight for it!
• There was a frustrating strategy going around where a team would gain mid-TP control and then…never leave. The opposite team couldn’t reliably contest it without doing a highly coordinated “5-person YOLO TP” or by getting lucky and advancing to nade level and blasting away. We like the focus in this area (you’ll always find a fight here!), but it can feel unfair if you’re not the team inside the TP. With this change, we’re looking to give you an avenue to contest the teleporter by preventing others from being able to stall a game.
• Bind’s pick rate is again evenly weighted.
• During Patch 2.03, we reduced Bind’s pick rate for Escalation. We’re returning it to normal levels, but if Bind continues to be frustrating to play, we’ll look into changing its pick rate again and go back to the drawing board.

COMPETITIVE UPDATES

This patch marks the start of Competitive Episode 2: Act 2!

Placements have changed for the start of an Act. Now, if you have already placed this Episode, then:

• Your rank will no longer be lowered at the start of an Act.
• If you were Radiant or Immortal rank, you would keep your position on the leaderboard, but your Rank Rating(RR) will be reduced by 90%, and all Radiant players will be bumped down to Immortal because you will need to prove again that you are the best of the best in the new Act.
• Achieving Radiant now requires both being in the top 500 players in your region and having a minimum amount of RR (See below for details).
• You must finish your placement game to display on the Leaderboard again for the new Act.
• You’re only required to play 1 placement match to display your rank.
• Your RR (and potentially rank) may change based on how you perform in your placement game, but the maximum change will be based solely on that game.
• Players who have not previously placed in Competitive this Episode will still need to play 5 placement games to earn their initial rank.
  Radiant will be more challenging to earn. It would help if you achieved a certain level of RR before being able to ascend to Radiant. This is adjusted per region based on rank population size and RR distribution.
• Regional requirements for Radiant cut off:
  LATAM & KR: 100 RR
  BR: 200 Rank Rating
  NA & APAC: 300 RR
  EU: 400 RR
• The web leaderboard will be disabled briefly for maintenance at the start of this patch; expect it to be re-enabled within 24–48 hours.
• Later this patch, we’ll reduce the total amount of average RR per win/loss by 5
• This focuses on reducing how often a player’s Rank gets above their MMR and leads to inconsistent RR games and a wider delta between their displayed rank and MMR. These small math tweaks will be common as we try to find the correct balance for RR based on issues we see in the community.
• We will change the demotion logic for players to start at 70RR(Previously 80RR) during this patch.
• Ranks will no longer be displayed in Agent select or in-game. You will still be able to see ranks on the end of the game screen.
• You can now queue with a wider group of friends and teammates if you are at the lower ranks (see below image)
• We have a huge number of you in our matchmaking pool at the lower ranks, so we’re confident we can make balanced matches. As you rank up, you’ll find a tighter disparity to ensure we continue to maintain balanced matches and protect the higher ranks’ competitive integrity.
• We also hope this helps combat smurfing by reducing the incentive to make a new account to play with lower rank friends.

QUALITY OF LIFE

Added Tactical Voice Over

• We’ve added more context to some of the automated Agent VO lines that play during the round in service of improving team coordination and information sharing.
• Agent lines like “Spike spotted” or “Enemies spotted” will also say a map “Super Region” afterward. (e.g., “Spike spotted C” or “Enemies spotted B”).
• We hope to provide richer information to the player with these changes. Tactical VO is not meant to be a full replacement for voice comms, so callouts will be ducked in volume when a teammate speaks over VOIP.
• Overall, we hope this helps improve the quality of information that teams not heavily using voice comms can expect. We also believe this will improve the experience for those players who have muted another player for any reason.
• Additionally, we’ve added an option to place Tactical VO messaging into the Chat window.
• The toggle for this option is available under Accessibility options. With this enabled, when Tac VO lines are triggered, a Chat message will be sent relaying the information. The text lines are modified to communicate best who said what. For example, instead of Sova verbally saying “Enemy spotted B,” the chat message will read “Sova spotted an ENEMY in B.”

Tactical VO FAQ

• Tactical VO will not be enabled in modes.
• Tactical VO can be disabled via toggle.
• Tactical VO being ducked by VOIP can be disabled via toggle.
• Tactical VO Chat messages can be enabled via toggle.
• Improved Client framerate by 3% on average for medium to high spec machines in 10-player games by optimizing inventory management.