Valorant patch notes 4.01: Ares, Melee balance changes, social updates and more

Riot has released the patch 4.01 notes, including the complete details regarding the balance changes, optimizations, bug fixes etc. The most important update has been brought to Ares as its price has been increased, and along with this, a bunch of balance changes has been made to the gun after it was highly buffed in patch 4.0.

In addition to this, a brand new Muted Words List feature has also been added that can filter words you don't want to see in Valorant. Apart from this, both left and right Melee attacks have been updated to make it a more reliable attacking option. Here are the complete notes of Valorant patch 4.01.

Valorant patch notes 4.01

Social updates

• Muted Words List added to the settings
  • 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 systemand 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.
  • And no, you won't get "League of Legends" banned from chat

We’re hoping that we can leverage the lists that you and others create to make the chat less toxic by comparing them across regions, and using the data we collect to improve our own detections of bad words. Thanks in advance for all that are willing to lend a hand. Let’s make VALORANT a better place for everyone!

Weapon updates

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 >>> 1600
• Pitch recoil increased
• Spread changed from .8 >>> .7 after 10 bullets to 1.0 >>> .7 after 13 bullets
• Crouch benefits spread and recoil reduced from 40% >>> 25%

Melee (but for real this time)

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 too.
• Targets closer to the center of your knife attacks will get hit first, so you still have precision if you need it.
• Bonus: Knifing walls now have instant feedback when slicing up walls (predicted on the client side)

Bugs

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.

Featured image courtesy of Riot Games.