Valorant patch 1.11 is now upon us and has brought with it the highly anticipated new agent Skye, along with changes to other agents, game modes, and much more. In this patch, all of Valorant’s Sentinels and Initiators are getting role and ability-specific tuning with the upcoming First Strike qualifiers in mind.
The introduction of Skye comes just in time for her to enter tournament rotation before the First Strike qualifiers on November 9, meaning you may see her in play during the upcoming tournament. Patch 1.11 also pulls the Icebox map out of unrated and into competitive map rotation, though it won’t be available for tournament use until November 24.
A left-handed view model that allows your agent to swap from right to left-handed in first-person play has also come with the new patch. This feature has been highly requested by fans for some time now to help make the game more accessible to a broader audience.
Here are the full notes for patch 1.11:
Agent updates
Skye
- Skye will be available for use in official esports competition (e.g., First Strike) after two weeks in Competitive queue (November 9, barring any issues)
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
- Full flash time increased from 1.75 to 2 seconds
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
- Trapwire
- Disabled and revealed upon death
- Spy Camera
- Disabled and revealed upon death
Killjoy
- Deactivation Range
- Alarmbot and Turret now deactivate if she is more than 40m away from them—reentering the 40m range reactivates her little friends.
- Turret
- Cooldown after pickup reduced from 20 seconds >>> 10 seconds
- Alarmbot
- Range at which Alarmbot can be detected decreased from 9m >>> 7m
- Cooldown after pickup reduced from 20 seconds >>> 7 seconds
- Nanoswarm
- Range at which Nanoswarm can be detected decreased from 5m >>> 3.5m
- Damage increased from 40/s >>> 45/s
- Damage now ticks smoother and faster while in Nanoswarm, instead of in chunks of 10 every ¼ of a second
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
Play Out All Rounds makes it easier to run practice sessions. When enabled the game will no longer end when a team reaches 13 wins; instead the match will continue until both teams have played a full half of 12 rounds on each side. After 24 rounds the team with more rounds will win. In the case of a tie the game will proceed to overtime (dependent on the Overtime option selected in the lobby screen).
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
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.