VALORANT: Update 4.01, all the details of the update

A week after the arrival of Episode 4, Riot Games is deploying a small update, in order to apply some fixes and balancing. The Ares, considered too powerful since its buff, is modified, in particular with a higher price and an increase in recoil. Melee weapons are also affected, as last week’s changes had not been applied.

You can find the VALORANT 4.01 patch notes below.

VALORANT Update 4.01

SOCIAL UPDATES

Hidden words list added in settings

• You’ll find the new Hidden Words List section in your settings. Here you can type variations of words/phrases that you (and only you) don’t want to see in the chat while playing.
  • Some players are smart enough to bypass our spam detection system and regularly find creative ways to write things we don’t want to see in chat. So we need your help to improve detections! Help us help you. 🙂
  • Example : Let’s imagine that “Riot” is a dirty word. Our detection system understands that the word “Riot” should be blocked and its use sanctioned, but there are different variants of the word “Riot” that it may not understand: R!ot, R!0t, Ri0t, etc. .
  • And, no, you won’t be able to ban “League of Legends” from the chat.
  • We hope we can use the lists you create to make chatting less toxic. By comparing lists from different regions and relying on the collected data, we will try to improve our spam word detection system. Thank you in advance to those who will lend us a hand. Let’s make VALORANT a more welcoming environment for everyone!

WEAPON UPDATES

ARES

Changes to the Ares in patch 4.0 made this weapon significantly more powerful; it became more used and that was a good thing. That said, she’s now too easy to control, and the lack of initial spin removed some of what made her unique. We like the new feel that adjusting the rate of fire has provided, so we’d like to keep that. However, with the following tweaks, the Ares should be harder to control and should regain some of its identity in terms of accuracy.

• Price increase: 1550 >>> 1600
• Increased vertical recoil.
• Dispersion changed from 0.8 >>> 0.7 after 10 bullets to 1 >>> 0.7 after 13 bullets
• Reduced crouch benefit on spread and knockback: 40% >>> 25%

MELEE

(for real this time)

Melee attacks are hard to rely on, as their accuracy leaves something to be desired. So we updated melee attacks with left and right clicks so you can hit hard with your agents.

• The right-click hitbox is 1.5 times larger. The left-click hitbox is now larger than the right-click hitbox, and its range has been slightly increased.
• The target closest to the center of your knife attacks will be hit first, allowing for timely accuracy.
• Bonus: stabbing a wall will now instantly spawn traces there (predicted on client side).

BUGS

WEAPONS

• Fixed a bug where idleness animations from Origins skins were not playing with some levels and variants in spectator mode.

E-SPORTS FEATURES

• Fixed an issue where hotkeys for spectating players would change after teams changed sides.

PERFORMANCE

• Fixed an issue where performance graphs that require NVIDIA Reflex were showing and could not be hidden.
  • Thanks to TowerofShadow for reporting this issue!