Esports Betting / Esports Betting News / What Valorant Patch 4.03 Brings to Online and Competitive Play

What Valorant Patch 4.03 Brings to Online and Competitive Play

Sports Writer

Publish Date: 23/02/2022

Fact checked by: James Leeland

Player feedback is essential to up the overall quality of a game. These Valorant patch notes took this into account, as they made sure to take players' opinions at face value and implement some changes to the Valorant gameplay.

The most significant changes made this time round were to Deathmatch gameplay and the Brimstone ability. Brimstone's ultimate ability has always been a popular favorite by many gamers. But Valorant developers have taken several steps to improve and update how the ability operates. There have also been several changes made to AFK detection and the farming of XP to balance out everything.

What Valorant Patch 4.03 Brings to Online and Competitive Play

The Patch

The biggest change that comes with these Valorant patch notes is heavily revamping Deathmatch play. After taking players' feedback into account, particularly when it comes to spawning and spawn locations.

Spawning has drastically been improved, where you no longer spawn in a dangerous area, and you also won’t respawn close to where you were killed. The respawn times have also been reduced from 3s to 1.5s.

Another major issue that was fixed was in regards to Brimstone's ultimate ability. Now, when you activate the ultimate, other players will no longer be able to see your position on the mini-map. Abilities that require lines of sight will also be disabled with this ultimate.

A major performance boost, aptly named ‘Global Invalidation’ was also implemented in these Valorant patch notes.

It will offer ‘up to 15% improvement to baseline performance for CPU-bound players.’ CPU-bound players are those running off mid to high-level spec machines. The functionality of sprays has been changed up this patch too. Sprays now last fifteen seconds, rather than thirty.

You also have a five-second cooldown before you can respray, and some spray colors have been removed completely from the game. Several more minor miscellaneous issues and bugs were also fixed in these Valorant patch notes.

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Tournament/Pro Scene Relevance

The reaction to Brimstone's ultimate update has been received well.

ProGuides Valorant, a YouTuber who works closely with many Valorant pros, has commented that this update cleans up Brimstone's ultimate, and gives it the shine it needed.

“It fixes some of the logistical issues with his ult.” Pro Guides remarked. “Nothing game-changing to bring him up in the meta, just a couple of changes to make sure his ult works how it’s supposed to.”

The Deathmatch fixes did not go over quite as well among many users. In fact, instead of improved aim and spawn locations, it seems these Valorant patch notes caused more harm than good in regards to Valorant play.

Many pros have been critical of this change, noting that there have been several occasions where they have spawned directly in front of opponents.

Even the legendary Valorant pro TenZ remarked he was getting ‘killed from behind by players with a 60% invulnerability rate’. In a tweet, Valorant addressed the issues caused by these Valorant patch notes.

“We're reducing the number of players in Deathmatch from 14 to 12, immediately. This should mitigate these issues—and we'll keep an eye on the situation.”

The reduced number of players will certainly help matters, even if it is a temporary solution until permanent fixes are made.

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Impact on Betting

Speaking of TenZ, this new update may harm him, and his team of the Sentinels. The Sentinels are one of the best Valorant championship teams out there right now, dominating the competitive scene with a variety of tournament wins in the Valorant Championship Tour.

If players are reduced in Deathmatch, it may negatively affect their overall performance, due to the current Sentinels team being such a tight-knit, and dominant unit. As a result, it’s no surprise the odds for the Sentinels have gone up in the Valorant Championship Tour 2022.

For example, in their game against OpTic, the odds of them getting the win are now 1.55. While they’re still the favorites against the 2.3 OpTic side, we have noticed a slight increase in their odds as a result of this.

The smart money could be to take advantage of these raised odds, and hope that Sentinels can keep their dominance going through these Valorant patch notes.

Conclusion

These changes have been very hit and miss Valorant patch notes. There have been some great changes made to Valorant competitive play.

Tightening up Brimstone's ultimate was needed for a long time, and the Global Invalidation should help smooth out the overall performance of Valorant.

However, the Deathmatch updates were a clear failure, with all the promises that were noted in the Valorant patch notes not coming through at all.

Valorant has taken some good cautionary measures to prevent deathmatch play from getting worse, but this is an issue that needs to be addressed properly in the next batch of Valorant patch notes.

Need to refresh your gaming knowledge? We've put together a handy guide to the Valorant ranking system. We also cover a broad range of esports games, helping you find everything from the best HOTS betting sites to the latest CoD betting tips.

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