• Valorant 1.03 patch notes released.
  • Major changes include a slight guardian rate-of-fire nerf with 200 price reduction, but increased penetration, a two round win-requirement instead of sudden death in ranked, and a few little map tweaks. 

Quick update as it’s a small patch. The biggest change here is some alterations to the guardian, as the dev team continue to make little tweaks and give every gun a clearly defined role. The guardian price has been reduced from 2700 to 2500, with the fire rate being reduced to 4.75 from the original 6.5. Penetration has also been increased from medium to high.

To me, this makes a lot of sense. Previously, the guardian was sitting in a sort of no man’s land, between the Vandal and Phantom and pretty much every other gun (excluding snipers and MGs). It was only marginally less expensive than the Vandal and Phantom, but came with the significant drawbacks of smaller mags (12 compared to 25 and 30) and just over half the rate of fire. Lowering the price gives it its own middle-of-the-road price point, and reducing fire power and increasing penetration carves out a distinct role as a long-range precision weapon. I.e. If your aim is good enough and you’ve got the game sense to position correctly you can easily get the job done.

Surrender, Overtime and Bug Fixes

Aside from the guardian, the only other major changes of note are to surrendering in unranked, overtime, and a few bug fixes on certain maps. It now only takes four players to surrender in unranked mode (as opposed to the previous 5). It’s still the standard 5 in ranked. You’ll also able to surrender from round 5 instead of round 8.

There’s now also a new overtime structure in ranked where teams will take turns playing offence and defence until one team is ahead by two rounds. At the start of each round every player gets 5000 to spend and will be 4 points off their ultimate. This doesn’t apply to unranked which remains sudden death.

Finally, there’ve been lots of little bug fixes and map alterations to stop all the silly things we’ve seen like the spike and weapons being unretrievable and things/people going through walls and objects where they shouldn’t. All in all, a neat little patch with some positive changes.

  • Competitive matches have a new win-by-two overtime format with automated votes on whether the game should continue or end in a draw.
    • Instead of playing a single sudden death round, teams will alternate playing rounds on attack and defense until a team claims victory by being up by 2 rounds.
    • Each round will have a full reset, setting all players at 5000 credits and 4 points short of their ultimate.
    • After every two rounds of overtime, an automated vote will trigger to determine if the match should continue or end in a draw
      • The threshold for continuing the match will become stricter as more rounds have been played:
        • First vote: 6 players needed to end match in a draw
        • Second vote: 3 players needed to end match in a draw
        • Third vote and on: 1 player needed to end match in a draw
      • If the vote fails, the match will end in a draw.
      • Players might gain rank off a draw but will never lose rank