Here are all the Patch 4.01 Notes, an update that aims to stop this Ares madness.
Patch 4.0 was one of the most significant milestones for Valorant, but you have to admit that there were a few shortcomings. So, that's why Riot has prepared Patch 4.01, to make the game a little more enjoyable. Honestly, if you're tired of Ares, and it bothers you that you can't make any Melee kills using your flashy and expensive skins, you might be in seventh heaven. Let's dive into all the official changes of Patch 4.01!
Social Updates
Before we get to weapon updates, let's look into a big social change for the game, especially in terms of minimizing toxicity – the addition of a muted word list. This feature was already supposed to be added in December 2021, but it was a little buggy at first, so Riot waited before implementing it.
- Muted Word List is a new section you will find in your settings where you can type in variations of words/phrases that you, personally, would not like to see appear in-game.
We admit that some players are often smarter than our automated bad word detection system and continually find creative ways to type things we don’t want to in chat. This is why we need your help to make our detections better! Help us, help you :)For example: Let’s say “Riot” is a bad word (scary, I know). Our detection may catch the word “Riot” as one that should be blocked and penalized, but there’s a variety of different ways to spell Riot that we may not be catching: R!ot, R!0t, Ri0t, etc. (source)
Weapon Updates
And the biggest highlight of this update – Ares nerfs and Melee buffs. That's right, from now on, you won't be able to buy Vandal for half price. But will these changes actually do something in the long run?
Ares
The Patch 4.0 changes to the Ares made the weapon noticeably stronger, and we were happy to see it show up more in-game. However, it's overall tuning made it too easy to control and the lack of spin up removed some of what made the weapon unique. We love the benefits that the adjusted fire rate provided in terms of how the Ares felt to use, so we want to keep that. However, the adjustments below should make the weapon more difficult to control and bring back some of the weapon’s character by including a more prominent inverse accuracy.
- Price increased from 1550 to 1600.
- Pitch recoil increased.
- Spread changed from 8 to 7 after 10 bullets / from 1 to 7 after 13 bullets.
- Crouch benefits spread and recoil reduced from 40% to 25%.
Melee
The melee’s been too tricky to aim with, making it tough to rely on. So we’ve updated both left and right click melee attacks for more reliable Agent-whacking action.
- Right click hitboxes are now 1.5x larger.
- Left click hitboxes are now larger than a right click and have a slightly longer range as well.
- Targets closer to the center of your knife attacks will get hit first, so you still have precision if you need it.
- Knifing walls now have instant feedback when slicing up walls.
Bugs
And lastly, as always, a couple of bug fixes.
Weapons
- Fixed a bug where the Origin collection idle Animations weren’t playing for some levels and variants in Spectator mode.
Esports Features
- Fixed an issue where observer player hotkeys would change after side-swap.
Performance
- Fixed an issue where performance charts that require NVIDIA Reflex were displayed and could not be hidden